Mayor Eric Adams’s former chief Muslim community liaison, who was charged with instructing witnesses to lie to F.B.I. agents conducting a sweeping corruption investigation into the mayor, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to commit wire fraud.
The liaison, Mohamed Bahi, was arrested in October, one month after the same investigation led to the mayor’s indictment. The Trump Justice Department abandoned the case against Mr. Adams in April over the objections of Manhattan prosecutors, but the case against Mr. Bahi, identified as one of several co-conspirators, has languished for the 10 months since he was charged.
Mr. Bahi was not the first person to plead guilty in the case. A Turkish American businessman, Erden Arkan, was separately charged by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District for his involvement in the scheme with Mr. Adams. He pleaded guilty to the same charge of wire fraud conspiracy earlier this year.
Prosecutors said the charges against Mr. Bahi and Mr. Arkan stemmed from their involvement with illegal contributions to Mr. Adams’s 2021 campaign for mayor. In the plea hearing on Tuesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Mr. Bahi told Judge Dale E. Ho that he knew that his actions were wrong.
Mr. Bahi helped organize a fund-raising event in December 2020 for a construction company in which the employees were “reimbursed by the owners for their campaign contributions,” he told the judge.
“I understood the Adams campaign would then seek matching funds for their contributions,” he said.
Mr. Bahi’s sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 18, and he faces a possible sentence of probation to six months behind bars and agreed to a $32,000 restitution payment.
While Mr. Bahi and Mr. Arkan admitted to the scheme, the charges that Mr. Adams faced — bribery, fraud and conspiring with Turkish officials to solicit and accept illegal foreign campaign donations — were dismissed following months during which he curried favor with Mr. Trump.
Top Justice Department officials’ request to dismiss the mayor’s case led to accusations that they were ignoring corruption in order to advance the president’s agenda. In arguing for the dismissal, a top Justice Department official, Emil Bove III, said that the case was compromising Mr. Adams’s ability to cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Judge Ho, who also presided over Adams’s case, rejected the justifications, though he allowed federal prosecutors to abandon the charges.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Judge Ho wrote.
After Mr. Adams’s prosecution was dropped, some of his closest allies were left with their cases grinding through the court system.
Mr. Bahi, who was initially charged with witness tampering and destruction of evidence, is one of several people in the mayor’s orbit swept up in federal investigations into Mr. Adams and his dealings. The numerous investigations, by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn, engulfed City Hall in chaos as a cascade of Mr. Adams’s closest allies and aides resigned last year.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Bahi connected the mayor with an Uzbek businessman, Tolib Mansurov, who they said made illegal donations to Mr. Adams. Mr. Mansurov, in return, received help from the mayor in resolving problems that his construction company was having with the city’s Buildings Department, prosecutors said. No charges against Mr. Mansurov, who cooperated with the investigation, have been made public.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Bahi coached Mr. Mansurov and his employees to lie to federal investigators about the contributions. He photographed grand jury subpoenas the employees had been given, according to prosecutors.
Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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