Mayor Eric Adams has said it again and again: The federal corruption charges brought against him last year were payback for his criticism of President Biden’s handling of the migrant crisis.
Until Wednesday, the prosecutors who brought the indictment against the mayor — charging him with bribery, fraud, conspiracy and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions — have not provided a detailed response.
In a court filing, they pointed to what they called the mayor’s “shifting attempts to suggest that he was indicted for any reason other than his crimes.”
“At the outset of the case,” they wrote, “Adams contended that his indictment resulted from a policy disagreement with the prior presidential administration arising in October 2022.”
That claim, the prosecutors said, “disintegrated” when material turned over to defense lawyers in advance of the trial “made clear that the investigation into Adams began more than a year earlier, based on concrete evidence that Adams had accepted illegal campaign contributions.”
A spokeswoman for one of the mayor’s lawyers, Alex Spiro, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The rejection of the mayor’s version of events came in a court filing in the case. It was the government’s response to Mr. Adams’s most recent argument in a long-running dispute over his unsubstantiated claims that prosecutors have leaked secret grand jury information to the media, and to The New York Times in particular.
The prosecutors’ filing came shortly before the judge in the case, Dale E. Ho, for a second time denied a request by Mr. Adams to hold a hearing to seek evidence of the alleged leaks and consider sanctions against the government, up to and including dismissing the indictment.
The mayor has hewed to his account during the course of what is widely viewed as his campaign for a pardon from the newly inaugurated President Trump, who has expressed kinship with Mr. Adams on the basis of what Mr. Trump has described as their shared abuse at the hands of the Justice Department.
Seeming to tear a page from Mr. Trump’s playbook, Mr. Adams has described himself as the victim of a vengeful administration and weaponized Justice Department. Without offering evidence, he and Mr. Trump have said that they are both innocent victims of the politics of lawfare.
Last week, an adviser to the mayor expressed hope that a pardon would come quickly, so that Mr. Adams would not have to endure weeks of negative news from a criminal trial in April, just months before the June primary, and has time to remind voters of his merit before they go to the polls.
Mr. Adams has taken pains to court the president, traveling to Palm Beach, Fla., to have lunch with him at Mr. Trump’s golf course, attending his inauguration, and refusing to publicly criticize any of the president’s more polarizing actions.
In their filing, the government also took issue with the mayor’s recent arguments that the judge, in weighing whether to hold a hearing on leaks, should consider an opinion piece by former U.S. attorney Damian Williams, who oversaw the case until he resigned last month. One of the mayor’s lawyers, Alex Spiro, contended the article violated a rule about public statements by people involved in the case and showed that the prosecution was politically motivated.
“Having offered one false theory about the origins of the case, Adams’s latest, self-publicized argument is simply an attempt to shift the focus away from the evidence of his guilt,” the prosecutors wrote. “Williams did not cause Adams to be investigated. The evidence of Adams’s crimes was uncovered by career law enforcement officers performing their duties, in an investigation that began before Williams took office,” they wrote, and continued after he left.
Mr. Adams, in a pretaped interview with the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson that aired Tuesday night, renewed his disputed theory of the case.
“When I heard of this investigation, I was like, ‘What?’” Mr. Adams told Mr. Carlson, who maintains a warm relationship with Mr. Trump. “And then when I read it, I was like, ‘Where are the bags of cash?’ ”
Mr. Adams argued that his complaints about the Biden administration, which he said had failed New York City, and his constant petitioning for more aid did not have the desired effect. Rather than receiving federal help for an influx that he says cost the city nearly $7 billion, he told Mr. Carlson, federal officials instead complained that he was not behaving like a “good Democrat.”
“You complained, and this indictment was punishment for complaining?” Mr. Carlson said.
“That is clearly my belief,” the mayor responded.
Later in the interview, Mr. Carlson suggested Mr. Adams’s predicament was not as uncommon as he might think.
“You hear that with a lot of people who’ve been successful,” Mr. Carlson said. “You know, you get to this place that you never thought you’d be and you realize you don’t have as much power as you thought you had. And when you disobey, you get crushed.”
“Right, right,” Mr. Adams said. “Just like that.”
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