Mayor Eric Adams has launched a forceful pair of challenges to his indictment on bribery, wire fraud and illegal campaign donation charges, hanging a request to dismiss parts of the case on a recent Supreme Court ruling that dilutes what prosecutors can consider public corruption.
The dismissal motions could be discussed on Wednesday when the mayor makes his first court appearance in front of U.S. District Judge Dale Ho, who will be overseeing the case in Manhattan federal court.
Adams – the first New York mayor in modern history to be indicted while serving – pleaded not guilty last week. He adamantly maintains that he is innocent and has resisted calls to step down from his position. (In 1872, Mayor A. Oakey Hall was charged with neglecting his official duties, the New York Times reported Saturday.)
Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Adams, argued in court papers and at a news conference Monday that a strict “quid pro quo” is necessary to bring a bribery charge, and said the indictment against the mayor failed to allege such an exchange. His motion cites the Supreme Court’s ruling that former Portage, Ind., mayor James Snyder was wrongly convicted because he received a gift after – not before – carrying out an official government action.
The decision in Snyder v. United States has potentially changed the landscape in public corruption investigations, giving rise to defenses that previously would not have had much of a chance, said attorney Kyle Clark, who heads the white-collar and corporate investigations practice at the law firm Baker Botts.
“It’s a pretty good argument on [the bribery count] because of the Snyder decision,” he said. “Prior to Snyder, I don’t think they had a chance.”
Nikos Passas, a criminology and criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who specializes in public corruption, said the Snyder case “does create thorny problems for prosecutions of state and local officials,” and makes it harder to prosecute cases where alleged corruption is less direct.
Adams is accused of accepting perks from Turkish businessmen and at least one government official, and years later using his position to push through a favor on Turkey’s behalf: pushing through the fire inspection of the new Turkish consular building in Manhattan.
Prosecutors said that in 2021 and 2022, Adams accepted free travel and travel-related freebies from his Turkish contacts as a payoff for passing through the inspection.
Adams’s legal team says a quid pro quo did not exist between Adams and Turkish officials and would have been necessary to establish legal elements of bribery.
“Gratuities are not federal crimes,” Spiro said at the news conference. “Congressmen get upgrades, they get corner suites, they get better tables at restaurants, they get free appetizers. … That’s just the truth.”
In a filing on Tuesday, Spiro also accused prosecutors of illegally leaking details from the grand jury investigation to media outlets, which he argued was unfairly prejudicial to Adams. He suggested to the judge that dismissing the whole case would be an appropriate remedy.
Clark and Passas both said that claim had a low chance of success, noting that the motion does not identify any direct evidence of a member of the prosecution team leaking information.
Passas said it defied logic that only prosecutors were aware of certain details of the investigation and were therefore the only possible sources. “When you have a long-term investigation with raids taking place, with subpoenas being served, with witnesses being questioned, every single one of them can be the source,” the professor said.
Adams largely deflected questions about his case at his weekly media availability Tuesday, while defending his relationship with Turkish representatives while he was Brooklyn’s borough president.
“Brooklyn had one of the largest Turkish population, definitely the largest Turkish population in the city,” Adams said, noting that he also had dealings with representatives from Mexico and Peru.
In the weeks before the indictment was unsealed, there was an exodus of top Adams administration officials, including the police commissioner and City Hall’s general counsel. A number of current and recently departed city officials are also being looked at by prosecutors in connection to Adams’s case and other ongoing probes.
(c) Washington Post