Records Offer Glimpses Inside the Doomed Prosecution of Eric Adams

Months after federal prosecutors in Manhattan secured a five-count corruption indictment against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, federal authorities were still forging ahead with their investigation into his dealings.

They obtained a new warrant authorizing them to search the phone of a person they believed had evidence of fraud and federal program bribery related to Mr. Adams’s 2021 and 2025 mayoral campaigns.

Three days later, on Feb. 10, the Trump administration ordered them to abandon the case.

The warrant, one of dozens signed by federal judges during the nearly four-year bribery and fraud inquiry into Mr. Adams, was included among some 1,700 pages of records released late Friday in response to a request by The New York Times and The New York Post.

Judge Dale E. Ho granted the government’s request to dismiss the charges against Mr. Adams last month. Critics said Mr. Adams and the Trump administration engaged in a corrupt quid pro quo, trading dismissal of the case for help cracking down on illegal immigration. Mr. Adams maintains he did nothing wrong and has suggested that God used the Trump administration to correct a grievous injustice.

In a statement on Friday, his lawyer, Alex Spiro, said the case “should never have been brought in the first place and is now over.” A spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.

The documents generated during the lengthy investigation of Mr. Adams, including search warrants, sworn statements by F.B.I. agents and other materials, shed light on key moments in the run-up to the first indictment of a sitting mayor in modern New York City history, even if they represent just a fraction of the warrants and other materials generated by the case.

They offered a rough sketch of an investigation that began in August 2021 focused on the mayor’s fund-raising and his connections to the government of Turkey. Most of the names of people ensnared in the inquiry were redacted, including that of the person whose phone was searched in February, and much of what was in the documents had already been publicly disclosed.

Still, some of the records contained details that had not previously been known.

One affidavit suggested that federal agents had considered trying to seize the mayor’s electronic devices at the finish line of the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5, 2023. Instead, they approached him the next night outside an event in Greenwich Village and seized the devices after telling his security detail to step aside.

But after they did so, an F.B.I. agent wrote in a different affidavit, it appeared that Mr. Adams — whose chief fund-raiser’s home had been searched only days earlier — tried to obstruct their efforts to obtain his personal cellphone.

Mr. Adams did not have the device with him when the agents came for it. He said that he had changed the password to prevent aides from accessing it after the inquiry burst into public view with the search of the fund-raiser’s home, and that he had then forgotten the new number.

Mr. Adams said that after locking himself out, he had wanted an aide to bring his phone to an Apple Store and then left it at City Hall, but location data indicated it was actually moving uptown, the agent wrote.

Asking for a warrant for more data, the agent wrote that if proven, the mayor’s “obstructive conduct and false statements would be strong evidence of Adams’s consciousness of guilt.”

(A subsequent filing said Mr. Adams’s lawyers later revised his account, saying an aide had taken the phone out of City Hall without his knowledge.)

Another filing said the mayor was being investigated for witness tampering, a crime with which he was never charged. That related to an episode in which an aide to the mayor urged an Uzbek businessman and his employees to lie to the F.B.I. about an alleged straw donor scheme that benefited Mr. Adams, according to documents in the case.

In the filing, an F.B.I. agent said the Uzbek businessman reported that Mr. Adams had told his aide that the businessman was “tight” — clenching a fist for emphasis — and would not talk to the authorities. The businessman did ultimately cooperate.

Mr. Adams was indicted in September by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud and solicitation of illegal foreign donations.

In the days that followed, prosecutors outlined some of the evidence they had turned over to his defense lawyers, citing nearly 40 search warrants executed during the course of the investigation. They also cited data from 21 communication devices and accounts, noting that was just a third of the total of 60 to 70 devices and accounts, which would be turned over later.

They also turned over 300,000 pages of documents investigators obtained through subpoenas and 4,000 records from City Hall. Taken together, the materials amounted to 1.6 terabytes of data.

The indictment, and an accompanying flurry of unrelated investigations into Mr. Adams’s inner circle, upended his administration and weakened his already anemic poll numbers.

All the while, Mr. Adams maintained his innocence and began a monthslong courtship of Donald J. Trump.

In February, the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, directed the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan to seek the case’s dismissal, arguing that the indictment was interfering with the mayor’s ability to cooperate with President Trump’s deportation agenda and risked interfering with the upcoming election.

The interim U.S. attorney, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than carry out an order that, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, she called an apparent “quid pro quo.” Several other department officials, in both Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, resigned as well.

When Judge Ho ultimately dismissed the charges against Mr. Adams, he wrote in his decision that he did so not because he believed they lacked merit, but because the Constitution vests the power to prosecute federal criminal cases — or not to — in executive branch officials at the Justice Department, and that as a judge he had limited power over a decision to drop a case.

Still, he criticized the administration’s apparent motive: extracting Mr. Adams’s assistance in advancing Mr. Trump’s campaign against illegal immigrants.

“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” Judge Ho wrote.

Mr. Adams visited the president at the White House before the documents were released on Friday, ostensibly to discuss New York City issues.

Afterward, Mr. Trump told reporters that he thought Mr. Adams had come “to thank me,” apparently referring to the dismissal of the case, and that they had discussed “almost nothing.”