Judge Dale E. Ho refused to let the government leave open the prospect of reinstating charges against the mayor. But he acknowledged the president’s power to determine the fate of prosecutions.
A judge on Wednesday dismissed corruption charges against Eric Adams, ending the first criminal case against a New York City mayor in modern history and underscoring how President Trump’s Justice Department is using prosecutorial power to advance his agenda.
The judge, Dale E. Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, refused to let the government retain the option of reinstating the case, as Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had sought.
The department had argued that the bribery and fraud charges should be dropped for three reasons: They were brought too close to the mayoral election; the U.S. attorney who brought the case had created “appearances of impropriety”; and, most importantly, the prosecution was hindering the mayor’s cooperation with Mr. Trump’s immigration plans.
Judge Ho roundly rejected all three arguments.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain: Dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” the judge wrote in his 78-page decision. He suggested that the arguments about impropriety and timing were misleading and insincere.
Even so, his decision to let the Justice Department abruptly end the case, which had originally been set for trial this month, underscored the remarkable power that Mr. Trump’s administration has to terminate prosecutions, regardless of rationale.
In his second term, President Trump has taken tight control over the department, eviscerating its public corruption efforts and turning its focus toward the administration’s signature issue: the immigration crackdown. The dismissal of the case against Mayor Adams — who had curried favor with Mr. Trump for months — epitomized the department’s new ethos, where politics and access take precedence over all else.
Judge Ho wrote that the law had left him with little recourse in the face of the Trump administration’s abandonment of the case. Still, he criticized the Department of Justice’s reasoning, calling it “unprecedented and breathtaking in its sweep.”
He noted that the department had failed to offer any examples of charges being dismissed against an elected official in order to fulfill federal policy goals.
Mayor Adams, in midday remarks at Gracie Mansion, reiterated his longstanding position that the case “should have never been brought, and I did nothing wrong.”
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“I’m running for re-election, and you know what, I’m going to win,” Mr. Adams said as he concluded his first public comments on the dismissal. He also brandished a book by Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, “Government Gangsters,” and encouraged every New Yorker to read it.
One of his lawyers, Alex Spiro, said in a statement that “justice for Eric Adams and New Yorkers has prevailed.”
The Justice Department said in a statement that “this case was an example of political weaponization and a waste of resources. We are focused on arresting and prosecuting terrorists while returning the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe.”
Judge Ho’s ruling marked the finale of an extraordinary and bitter clash between the federal prosecutors in Manhattan who indicted Mr. Adams and the Justice Department officials who worked to kill the case. That fight, in which both sides accused each other of ethical misconduct, left Mr. Adams deeply damaged as he faces a steep uphill climb for re-election this year.
Judge Ho in his opinion discounted the Justice Department’s claims that the case had been brought for political reasons by the Manhattan federal prosecutors. “There is no evidence — zero — that they had any improper motives,” he wrote.
The judge made clear that his ruling did not address the merits of the case or whether a trial should have occurred. He said that Mr. Adams was, as ever, presumed innocent until proven guilty.
But while Mr. Adams no longer faces the prospect of a heavily publicized trial weeks before the Democratic primary, his political fortunes remain deeply uncertain.
If he runs as a Democrat, he could face as many as nine competitors vying for voters who disdain the Trump administration. If he runs as an independent, he would compete with the candidate who emerges triumphant from the Democratic primary, in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.
The Justice Department had moved to dismiss the charges against the mayor after the prosecutors who brought the indictment refused. One of the department’s highest-ranking officials, Emil Bove III, offered the justification that the case was compromising Mr. Adams’s cooperation with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Judge Ho wrote that “the record does not show that this case has impaired Mayor Adams in his immigration enforcement efforts.” Instead, he said, after Justice Department officials sought dismissal of the case, the mayor took at least one new immigration action in line with the administration’s polices.
The judge said that granting the government’s request to dismiss the charges without prejudice, which would have allowed it to bring them again, “would create the unavoidable perception that the mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents.”
Judge Ho’s ruling was in line with a recommendation by a court-appointed legal expert, Paul D. Clement, a conservative lawyer who had argued that the mayor’s case should be ended with prejudice, meaning it could not be revived.
“A dismissal without prejudice creates a palpable sense that the prosecution outlined in the indictment and approved by a grand jury could be renewed, a prospect that hangs like the proverbial sword of Damocles over the accused,” Mr. Clement wrote in a March 7 court filing.
Judge Ho had also considered legal briefs urging him to deny the motion to dismiss the charges because of evidence of a corrupt quid pro quo. Judge Ho said doing so would be impractical because he could not force the government to prosecute, nor would a denial fulfill his obligation to protect the defendant, Mr. Adams.
The mayor was indicted last year on five counts, including bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Prosecutors accused him of soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations and accepting thousands of dollars in travel benefits in exchange for helping Turkish officials open a new consulate building.
He had pleaded not guilty and consistently has denied wrongdoing.
Once the indictment was returned in September, the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan pursued the prosecution aggressively. But after the change in presidential administrations, the Trump Justice Department reversed course, ordering prosecutors to seek the charges’ dismissal.
Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney, refused to obey the order and resigned, and a spate of resignations in New York and Washington followed. Justice Department officials, including Mr. Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, ended up filing the motion themselves and opened an investigation into the Manhattan prosecutors.
But Judge Ho said in his ruling that the record in the case indicated that the former Manhattan prosecutors had “followed all appropriate Justice Department guidelines.”
Throughout the opinion, the judge made it clear that he was personally unconvinced by arguments of Trump administration officials. He repeatedly asserted that while he had little power to defy them, his view was less important than that of American voters.
“Because the decision to discontinue a prosecution belongs primarily to a political branch of government,” he wrote, “it is the public’s judgment, and not this court’s, that truly matters.”
In a February hearing in Judge Ho’s courtroom, Mr. Bove had argued that Justice Department officials had “virtually unreviewable” discretion to end cases.
The judge seized on that phrase in his opinion, calling it “disturbing in its breadth.”
Mr. Bove’s argument, Judge Ho wrote, suggested that public officials “may receive special dispensation if they are compliant with the incumbent administration’s policy priorities. That suggestion is fundamentally incompatible with the basic promise of equal justice under law.”
