DOJ Asks Judge to Dismiss Charges Against NYC Mayor Adams

The filing came after some prosecutors resigned rather than file the motion.
DOJ Asks Judge to Dismiss Charges Against NYC Mayor Adams
Mayor Eric Adams speaks during State of the City address in New York on Jan. 9, 2025. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Zachary Stieber
Updated:
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The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Feb. 14 formally asked a judge to dismiss federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Federal prosecutors in a filing with the federal court in southern New York said that the DOJ is requesting that the court enter an order of nolle prosequi, or dismissal of the charges.

U.S. District Judge Dale Ho still must sign off on the request.

Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove, the DOJ’s second-in-command, and DOJ officials Antoinette T. Bacon and Edward Sullivan signed the filing.

The filing pointed to how Bove recently directed prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams, including accepting illegal campaign contributions.

Bove said the timing of the charges, brought in late 2024, and statements made by prosecutors “have threatened the integrity of the proceedings, including by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity.”

Continuing to prosecute Adams, Bove said, would restrict the mayor’s ability to help the administration of President Donald Trump combat illegal immigration and crime in the city.

Bove is a former lawyer of the president and worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York until 2021.

Then-interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon responded in a letter on Wednesday, saying she would not follow Bove’s order.

“Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations,” Sassoon wrote to Bove.

Sassoon then resigned.

John Keller, acting head of the DOJ’s public corruption unit, and Kevin Driscoll, a senior official in the DOJ’s criminal division, also stepped down, according to the DOJ.

The DOJ did not provide a reason for the two resignations. Keller declined to comment. Driscoll could not be reached.

Hagan Scotten, a New York-based prosecutor who worked on the case, stepped down on Friday, telling Bove in a missive that there was no valid reason to justify dismissing the charges and that he would never comply with the order to do so.

In his resignation letter, Scotten suggested the dismissal of charges against Adams was a deal dangled to get him to cooperate with the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

“No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” Scotten wrote.

Scotten added that he was following “a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake.”

In her resignation letter, Sassoon alleged that, during a Jan. 31 meeting, Adams’s attorneys “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo” arrangement whereby the mayor would assist with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities “only if the indictment were dismissed.”
Adams has denied any quid pro quo deal, saying he’s “solely beholden to the 8.3 million New Yorkers that I represent and I will always put this city first.”

Sassoon also said in her letter to Bove that prosecutors were prepared to seek a new indictment accusing Adams of destroying evidence and directing others to do so.

Adams’s lawyer Alex Spiro said via email that if the prosecutor’s office “had any proof whatsoever that the mayor destroyed evidence, they would have brought those charges—as they continually threatened to do, but didn’t, over months and months.”

When asked about the resignations on Friday, President Donald Trump said he was not involved in the resignations or the push to dismiss the case.

The president said the prosecutors objecting to the dismissal are “mostly people from the previous administration, you understand, so they weren’t going to be there anyway. They were all going to be gone or dismissed.”

“I know nothing about the individual case,” Trump said, adding that senior Justice Department officials “didn’t feel it was much of a case.”

Jacob Burg and Reuters contributed to this report.
Zachary Stieber
Zachary Stieber
Senior Reporter
Zachary Stieber is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times based in Maryland. He covers U.S. and world news. Contact Zachary at [email protected]
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