Editor’s note: This story is part of Governing’s ongoing Q&A series “In the Weeds.” The series features experts whose knowledge can provide new insights and solutions for state and local government officials across the country. Have an expert you think should be featured? Email Web Editor Natalie Delgadillo at ndelgadillo@governing.com.Everyone is resigning except Eric Adams. New York’s mayor is facing increasing calls to step down amid a bribery scandal that has shaken City Hall, with Gov. Kathy Hochul exploring the possibility of removing him from office.
Four deputy mayors and top aides to Adams submitted their resignations on Monday. This followed the decision from the Justice Department to drop bribery and fraud charges against Adams last week. Adams had been charged in September and was scheduled to face trial in April. The embattled mayor, who is seeking re-election this year, insists he is going nowhere.
Seven federal prosecutors stepped down in protest over an order from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove to drop the charges against Adams. The Trump administration has made it clear that the decision not to prosecute Adams was not based on legal flaws with the case but was instead a policy move, with Adams agreeing to cooperate with efforts to apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants.
“It’s certainly extraordinary for a criminal prosecution to be used as a bargaining chip to force a public official to pursue administration priorities,” says Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School.
Adams appeared on Fox News last week alongside Tom Homan, President Trump’s "border czar," and denied there was any quid pro quo. But Homan said, “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City and we won’t be sitting on the couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying, ‘Where the hell is this agreement we came to?’”
Bove and other Justice Department officials signed a motion on Friday asking a judge to dismiss the case against Adams. Governing spoke with Richman about the case, as well as the broader landscape of public corruption cases after a series of Supreme Court cases have set new limits on prosecutors.
Richman has written extensively about public corruption cases. He has served as an adviser to (and is a friend of) James Comey, who Trump fired as FBI director early in his first term. Edited excerpts from our interview follow:
Governing: We’ve seen seven prosecutors resign rather than being the ones to drop charges against Adams, or ask a judge to drop charges. How unusual is that?
Richman: It's extremely unusual. I think at this point, we're now seeing it as an effort by Bove and others at the Justice Department to use this prosecution as a loyalty test — to force out those who won't swear allegiance. Passing this buck on to others is just a means of pushing them to the wall and seeing what will happen.
Adams obviously hasn’t had a day in court yet, and now probably won't, but how strong did the case look against him?
I can't comment on the strength of the case, because I only know what's in the indictment, but certainly the indictment lays out a range of evidence that suggests a strong case. I also note that in her resignation letter, Danielle Sassoon [the interim U.S. attorney in New York] noted that they were about to seek a superseding indictment against him with obstruction counts and usually obstruction counts only strengthen the underlying case, because they really provide excellent proof of consciousness of guilt.
Let’s talk about where we are with public corruption cases generally right now. President Biden was obviously worried about prosecution of Trump critics, pardoning some of them before he left office, as well as his own family members. How concerned are you about prosecutions being used as a political weapon?
I'm concerned. I think the Biden pre-emptive pardons were not necessarily the right thing to do, particularly since it wasn't at all clear that any of those people had any conceivable exposure.
If the issue is, do I worry that this Justice Department will, having baselessly accused the prior administration of allegedly weaponizing criminal prosecutions, do precisely what they accuse others of — yes, I am worried. Certainly these actions so far suggest an insouciance about the criminal process and a readiness to make it a part and parcel of administration political initiatives.
I think that the place that I fear we'll get to, is where any elected official who is pursued will not focus on his legal or factual arguments, but focus on the claim that were he a friend of Donald Trump, he wouldn't be pursued. And that's a claim that might well be true. I mean, Sen. [Bob] Menendez can fairly say that, were he a Republican, he would probably have his conviction removed.
There have been several Supreme Court decisions in recent years that have clipped the wings of prosecutors, including one in June that seemed to make bribes OK if they were given later as “tips.” How difficult is it at this point to make a federal public corruption case?
I think it's become more difficult. It's not become prohibitively difficult. To pursue cases right now, the Supreme Court really is looking for clarity with respect to a corrupt deal that sometimes is hard to prove up, even when it's there. Certainly, the broader theories that the court struck down often gave some assistance to the government where they didn't necessarily have someone able to swear in court that a bag of cash was handed over in exchange for a particular favor.
But I suspect that had it been allowed to go forward, the Adams case wouldn't have met any legal impediments.
