(Bloomberg) — Justice Department lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, carrying out an order that several other prosecutors had refused.
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The Friday filing in Manhattan federal court capped off a tumultuous week for the Justice Department, which began with Acting US Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordering Manhattan’s chief federal prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, to drop the Adams case.
Sassoon resigned rather than carry out the directive, and Justice Department officials asked to take over the case also stepped down. In a Wednesday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, she raised concerns that the decision to drop the case amounted to an improper quid pro quo to get Adams to support President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
US District Judge Dale Ho must now decide whether to grant the motion. Sassoon said in her letter that she thought it was likely that Ho would conduct a thorough investigation of the Justice Department’s handling of the case and that he might deny the motion as improper.
According to the motion, dismissal of the case against Adams was necessary because it risked interfering in the 2025 mayoral election and was interfering with his ability to govern New York, posing “unacceptable threats to public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”
It echoed Bove’s Monday directive to Sassoon, which was widely seen as a challenge to the traditional independence of the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, whose prosecutors handle the nation’s highest-profile white-collar crime and political corruption cases.
The lawyers who filed the motion Friday, Antoinette Bacon, a supervisory official in the Justice Department’s criminal division, and Edward Sullivan, a senior litigation counsel in its public integrity section, are both based in Washington.
After Sassoon resigned, Bove reassigned the case to the Justice Department in Washington, but the leaders and several members of the public integrity unit resigned as well. That set off a scramble to find another prosecutor to sign the motion to dismiss before Bacon and Sullivan took on the job.
Adams, 64, was charged in September with accepting illegal campaign donations and taking luxury travel upgrades in exchange for political favors to the Turkish government. The mayor, a Democrat, pleaded not guilty and has argued that he was targeted due to his criticisms of then-President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
