New York City politics was rocked this week when the Department of Justice instructed Danielle Sassoon, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop its criminal case against Mayor Eric Adams, indicted last September on charges of bribery and wire fraud. The DOJ explained that the former U.S. Attorney appeared to have brought charges as part of a political prosecution by the Biden White House to punish Mayor Adams for having “criticized the prior Administration’s immigration policies before the charges were filed.”
It is certainly true that Mayor Adams, alone among prominent elected Democrats around the country, was openly critical of then-president Joe Biden for opening the nation’s borders, effectively inviting millions of people to move here. “Let me tell you something New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to—I don’t see an ending to this,” the mayor announced at a Manhattan town hall event almost one year before he was indicted. “This issue will destroy New York City,” he continued, explaining that the municipality was running a deficit of many billions that would affect “every community” in New York. “We’re getting no support on this national crisis,” Adams added, in a direct dig at the Biden White House.
New York City was particularly vulnerable to the migrant crisis because of certain covenants the state made with legal activists nearly 50 years ago. These agreements, collectively referred to as Callahan, obligate the city to provide shelter to anyone who demands it. What began in the late 1970s as a minor concession to provide beds and showers to a few hundred homeless men has grown into a multibillion-dollar annual program that houses 60,000 people, mostly single mothers and their children.
The arrival of more than 120,000 migrants from around the world to New York, while only a fraction of the human flood, became an urgent matter because of the city’s self-imposed yet legally binding commitment to shelter-on-demand. The city went into crisis mode, renting thousands of hotel rooms and spending billions of dollars to house and feed “our newest neighbors,” in the words of activists and city council members. In classic Tammany Hall-style municipal politics, millions of dollars of no-bid contracts were awarded to politically connected social service providers, and stories of waste, abuse, and ingratitude were legion.
But Adams spoke up for New York City in a manner that embarrassed the White House, which hoped to keep the negative consequences of mass migration off the front pages during an election season. Given Biden’s demonstrated use of “lawfare” to attack his political enemies—Donald Trump himself being Exhibit #1—it is not implausible that the indictment of Adams was a political hit job.
The case against him was faintly absurd. The core of the charges was that Adams, while still Brooklyn borough president, had asked the fire commissioner to consider a request from the Turkish delegation to the U.N. to expedite certain permits concerning the opening of the new Turkish consulate. In exchange for this favor, the Biden DOJ proffered, Adams received business-class upgrades on Turkish Airlines, and “free or steeply discounted stays in a luxury hotel” in Istanbul. It is unethical and unbecoming of a mayor of the nation’s greatest city to receive baksheesh of this sort —but is it worthy of federal prosecution? Probably not, especially given the high bar for establishing public corruption set by the Supreme Court in McDonnell (2016) and more recently in Snyder (2024), cases that distinguished between “bribes” and “gratuities” that an elected official may receive.
The dismissal of charges against Adams will remove the specter of a federal trial in April as the mayor engages in his reelection campaign. It could also free up millions of dollars in public financing that the city’s Campaign Finance Board refused to release to the Adams campaign in December, citing charges of fraudulent fundraising in the indictment. And it will dismay the crowded field that has lined up to challenge the mayor for the Democrat nomination. Fighting from the Left, firmly avowed and less avowed socialist candidates have denounced Adams for what they brand his kowtowing to Trump, and his refusal to take the fight from City Hall to the White House in defense of immigrants, trans people, and New York City’s many other oppressed classes.
Adams was elected mayor in 2021 at the height of the “defund the police” mania, which he, a former police captain, refused to back. His approach to governing has been transactional and non-ideological, which positions him well in the current electoral climate. Adams can push back against claims that he has cozied up to President Trump by responding—correctly, as it happens—that the city needs federal assistance, the White House is currently riding high, and it benefits New York to have a mayor who knows where the city’s bread is buttered.
Adams is by no means the ideal leader for New York City. The bribery allegations were not dismissed because they lacked merit, and sex scandals in the NYPD resulted in a personnel shakeup that embroiled Adams’s allies. But Trump’s DOJ was right to move the question of Eric Adams’s character out of federal court and back into the voting booth, where various hypothetical matchups, according to a new Manhattan Institute poll, suggest an uphill climb, at best, for the mayor. Let Adams make his case to the electorate without the threat of prison hanging over his head.
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