The federal corruption investigation into Mayor Eric Adams that began in 2023, resulted in his indictment in late 2024, and felled a huge swath of his top leadership seems to be coming to an end with a whimper. Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove III — once one of Donald Trump’s personal attorneys — issued a memo on Monday to Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon directing her to drop the prosecution “as soon as is practicable.”
Adams took a victory lap Tuesday, saying he was eager to leave “this cruel episode behind us.” Yet it’s not as simple as that: the case isn’t dead, just dormant, and for what seem like rather sinister reasons.
It’s not often that the decision to order the drop of a prosecution comes with instructions to the defendant attached, but that’s effectively what Bove did in his memo when he asserted that the federal government needed Adams “to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime… we are particularly concerned about the impact of the prosecution on Mayor Adams’ ability to support critical, ongoing federal efforts [on immigration enforcement].”
This is ostensibly written to Sassoon, but we all know that it was really written to Adams, with not only a clear directive — play ball on immigration — but a built-in enforcement mechanism, as Bove directs the office to revisit the matter “following the November 2025 mayoral election, based on consideration of all relevant factors… There shall be no further targeting of Mayor Adams or additional investigative steps prior to that review.”
By the way, I keep saying Bove ordered or directed this to happen and not that it happened, because technically it hasn’t yet. After a few days of relative silence, Sassoon resigned as the acting U.S. Attorney today; she didn’t give a specific reason, but it’s clear that it came as a result of her disagreement with Bove’s politicized order. At about the same time, two top officials with the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section also tendered their resignations. Trump’s pick to run the office, Jay Clayton, is awaiting Senate confirmation, and it’s unclear who will take over the office upon Sassoon’s departure.
Returning to the memo, these “relevant factors,” under normal circumstances, would be things like the evidentiary record and the strength of the case, but here it’s pretty clear that the main factor is Adams’ level of compliance and favor with the president, who’s quickly moved to set up the type of patronage systems that undergird competitive authoritarian governments like that of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Earlier speculation had honed in on the potential for a Trump pardon or a dismissal of the charges with prejudice, but that would have left Trump without something he wanted: leverage.
Bove specifically references immigration in the memo, and it wasn’t lost on most observers that it came mere hours after Adams reportedly gathered top city staff, including agency commissioners, at an early-morning meeting to instruct them to avoid criticizing Trump or the federal government and to not interfere with federal immigration enforcement. This followed a flurry of concern after Hell Gate first reported on a memo that the city had sent out last month, which instructed city staff at shelters and elsewhere to let ICE agents enter city property if they “reasonably feel threatened.”
Around the time of the meeting, City Hall issued an updated guidance that, while it did instruct city workers to not let ICE in without a warrant signed by a judge, it also, confusingly, told them not to “interfere with a law enforcement officer’s actions.” Then it finally gave instructions to remove interference language. Still, the impact of any particular guidance is blunted if the mayor himself is effectively giving conflicting instructions. We shouldn’t forget that even before the inauguration, Adams met with Trump “border czar” Thomas Homan, describing the two as having “the same desire.”
On Wednesday, three days after Bove directed the prosecution dropped, Adams is meeting with Homan again, with Homan saying he is “hoping we come to an agreement where his officers can help my officers in removing these public safety threats.” For all the propagandizing about these operations being a public safety matter, according to ICE’s own public statistics, in fiscal year 2024, which ended last September, of the over 4,600 people ICE’s New York field office detained, over 80% had neither pending charges nor criminal convictions.
The Trump administration has kept touting arrest numbers but resisted publicly acknowledging the extent to which they are detaining people with records; data obtained by NBC News late last month showed that about half of people arrested on a recent day had no criminal convictions, and among those that did, it’s likely a number were directly related to their immigration status. Instead, the administration has relied on the insinuation that arrestees are gang members, which is both rank racism and often false, as was the case with a recent Venezuelan asylum seeker and barber reportedly sent to Guantanamo Bay on suspicions of gang membership simply because he had a few tattoos.
The immigration sphere is the most explicit avenue for Trump to seek Adams’ cooperation under effective duress, but it’s by no means the only area where a NYC mayor might prove useful. Trump is reportedly pondering ways to kill the congestion pricing toll, and while the mayor wouldn’t necessarily have a direct role in that effort, their word would carry weight in related litigation. Adams could also intervene in a number of Trump’s pet culture war issues, like the obsession with so-called DEI.
In the aftermath of Bove’s memo, some have called on other prosecutors to take up the mantle, most notably Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, who successfully prosecuted Trump in the so-called hush-money case that resulted in Trump’s felony convictions. This is a tall order for a number of reasons, most acutely the fact that Bove orders SDNY to take no “additional investigative steps,” which means federal prosecutors are very unlikely to hand over their investigative materials and the case they’ve spent years building, leaving Bragg to start from scratch.
In theory, presiding federal Judge Dale Ho could refuse to accept a dismissal of charges and appoint a special prosecutor — this was urged in a letter to the judge by Adams primary rival State Sen. Zellnor Myrie — but this is rare and legally fraught. It seems like, for now, Adams will emerge from the cloud of prosecutorial scrutiny that he’s been under, but with the warning that Trump could bring it back.
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It’s clear that Adam’s sold out NEW YORK .
What can we do now to protect our immigrate population?