A federal judge on Friday deferred ruling on the Justice Department’s request to drop the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, and appointed an outside lawyer to present independent arguments on the motion, which was otherwise unopposed.
The lawyer the judge appointed, Paul Clement, is a political conservative who was the U.S. solicitor general during President George W. Bush’s administration.
The judge, Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, also called for additional briefs from the parties and said he would hold an oral argument on March 14 if he felt it necessary.
Judge Ho’s decision, explained in a five-page ruling, will prolong a tumultuous episode that has led to political and legal upheavals, with federal prosecutors in New York and Washington resigning and several of Mr. Adams’s campaign opponents calling for him to step down.
The events have increased pressure on Gov. Kathy Hochul, who said on Thursday that she would seek to impose strict new guardrails on the mayor’s administration rather than try to force him out of office.
The judge noted that at a hearing this week, both lawyers for the mayor and a top official in President Trump’s Justice Department agreed that the case should end, and said that he needed to hear other arguments.
“Normally, courts are aided in their decision-making through our system of adversarial testing,” Judge Ho wrote, “which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in case of great public importance.”
He said that because the Justice Department and the mayor both want the charges dropped, “there has been no adversarial testing of the government’s position.”
The government’s request to Judge Ho to drop the Adams case had been signed by the Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, after the interim Manhattan U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, refused to obey the order and resigned.
Ms. Sassoon, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, sharply criticized what she said was a quid pro quo, in which the government had agreed to end the case against the mayor in exchange for his help with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Ms. Sassoon, in her letter, said that such an arrangement with Mr. Adams would set “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent.”
Mr. Bove, in ordering Ms. Sassoon to seek the dismissal of the case, said explicitly that the directive was not related to the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case was based. Instead, he said the pending prosecution was hindering Mr. Adams’s cooperation with the administration’s immigration plans.
Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, have both vigorously denied that any deal preceded the government’s motion to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams, who has pleaded not guilty.
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