Push to Drop Adams Charges Reveals a Justice Dept. Under Trump’s Sway

The Justice Department on Monday ordered federal prosecutors to drop the corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, a remarkable incursion into a continuing criminal case that raises questions about the fair administration of justice during President Trump’s second term.

The order was sent in a letter from the department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, to Manhattan prosecutors who brought the charges against the mayor last year.

Mr. Bove justified the decision to ask for the dismissal by saying that the mayor’s indictment had limited Mr. Adams’s ability to cooperate in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. He also suggested that the indictment, which was handed up in September, threatened to interfere with the June 2025 mayoral primary, despite the nine-month interval between the two events.

Mr. Bove explicitly said that the Justice Department had made its decision without assessing the strength of the evidence against Mr. Adams or the legal theories undergirding the case. Instead, his letter criticized the U.S. attorney who brought it and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He offered expressly political arguments for dropping the charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions from foreign nationals and bribery, asserting the urgency of Mr. Trump’s immigration objectives.

It will now fall to the acting head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, whether to heed Mr. Bove’s order to dismiss the charges “as soon as is practicable” by filing a motion with the judge. A spokesman for Ms. Sassoon’s office declined to comment.

The letter was a remarkable intervention in a high-profile public corruption prosecution, one that cast the independence of federal prosecutors into doubt given the way Mr. Adams has curried favor with Mr. Trump. Mr. Bove directed that the charges against Mr. Adams be dismissed without prejudice, suggesting that the case could be revived if merited — or if it pleased the president.

As with Mr. Trump’s decision to issue clemency to everyone charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Mr. Bove’s letter appeared to represent a new assertion of the administration’s prerogatives when it comes to prosecution: What Mr. Trump wants, his Justice Department will seek to accomplish.

“The Department of Justice is making decisions that are not based on the facts or the law,” said Carrie H. Cohen, a former federal public corruption prosecutor in Manhattan. “The memo explicitly says this is not about the facts or the law, but it’s about other considerations entirely.”

As news broke about his case Monday evening, Mayor Adams, a Democrat, was dining with John Catsimatidis, a Republican billionaire with ties to Mr. Trump, at Gallaghers Steakhouse on West 52nd Street. Mr. Adams had no substantive comment, but his lawyer, Alex Spiro, provided a statement.

“As I said from the outset, the mayor is innocent — and he would prevail,” Mr. Spiro said. “Today he has. The Department of Justice has re-evaluated this case and determined it should not go forward.” He did not note the Justice Department’s acknowledgment that it refrained from evaluating the evidence.

Mr. Spiro added: “Now, thankfully, the mayor and New York can put this unfortunate and misguided prosecution behind them.”

The response of Mr. Adams’s opponents in the mayor’s race suggested that New York was unlikely to do so. “This should outrage every single New Yorker,” said State Senator Zellnor Myrie. His fellow senator, Jessica Ramos, said, “Eric Adams sold out New Yorkers to buy his own freedom,” and Zohran Mamdani, an assemblyman, said, “Eric Adams has narrowed the focus of city government to a singular goal: keeping himself out of prison.”

“Instead of standing up for New Yorkers, Adams is standing up for precisely one person,” said Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller and another of the mayor’s election rivals. “New Yorkers deserve better.”

Mr. Adams’s critics have accused him of cozying up to Mr. Trump in hopes of obtaining a pardon from him or having his charges dismissed. And they have said he might agree to greater cooperation on deportations as part of a mutually beneficial thaw with the Republican president.

The mayor has been adamant that the indictment has not distracted him from his duties. He routinely uses media availabilities and news releases to trumpet drops in some categories of crime and the declining population in the city’s migrant shelters.

“I can do my job. My legal team is going to handle the case,” the mayor said in December on Bloomberg TV. He added: “People said it was going to be a distraction. I’m moving forward, and I’m going to continue to deliver for the people of the City of New York.”

Mr. Bove’s letter argued the opposite: It said that the case had “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior administration,” referring to President Biden.

Mr. Bove, who represented President Trump in three of his criminal cases, directed that there must be “no further targeting of Mayor Adams or additional investigative steps” until after the election, when the case would be re-examined, presumably by Mr. Trump’s choice to permanently lead the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, Jay Clayton.

The office’s investigation into the mayor began in the middle of 2021, and the conduct described in the indictment reaches back into Mr. Adams’s tenure as Brooklyn borough president.

Prosecutors accused him of accepting more than $100,000 in flight upgrade and airline tickets; pressuring the New York Fire Department to speed up approval of a new Turkish consulate; and receiving foreign contributions from wealthy foreigners who were not legally permitted to give to his campaign. By soliciting those illegal donations, Mr. Adams fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in public matching funds for his campaign, prosecutors said.

The mayor pleaded not guilty, but just weeks ago, prosecutors said they had uncovered “additional criminal conduct” by Mr. Adams.

But Mr. Bove did not acknowledge the length of the investigation or the seriousness of the accusations. Instead, he said that the timing of the charges “and the more recent public actions” of the U.S. attorney who brought the case, Damian Williams, had threatened its integrity, creating “appearances of impropriety.”

Mr. Bove appeared to be referring to a website Mr. Williams created and an article he wrote last month in which he said that the city was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”

Lawyers for Mr. Adams had argued to the judge in the case that Mr. Williams’s article, which did not name Mr. Adams, would prejudice the jury pool and was evidence that Mr. Williams had been acting to boost his own career. Mr. Williams had no comment Monday evening on Mr. Bove’s letter.

Mr. Bove said that the removal of Mr. Adams’s security clearance, a result of the indictment, had hindered consultations with Trump administration officials about immigration enforcement in the nation’s largest city. He directed the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan to do all it could to restore it. Mr. Trump has the authority to restore the clearance himself.

Mr. Adams met with Mr. Trump near his Mar-a-Lago estate last month in an unusual display of political, and perhaps personal, outreach. Days later, he attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration in Washington. Mr. Adams has said that he would not publicly criticize Mr. Trump, even as many other Democrats have assailed the president’s agenda and his calls for mass deportations.

For his part, Mr. Trump said that he would consider pardoning Mr. Adams and characterized the mayor as the victim of politics. The president likewise claimed, without providing evidence, that he was himself politically persecuted by the federal and state prosecutors who brought four indictments against him.

Mr. Bove’s letter does not set a deadline by which prosecutors must file a motion with the court seeking dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

If prosecutors in Manhattan do move forward with a motion to drop the case, the judge overseeing it, Dale E. Ho of U.S. District Court in Manhattan, may question the decision. But under legal precedent, he has limited power to refuse the request.

Like the criminal cases against Mr. Trump himself, the prosecution of Mr. Adams has attracted the type of media attention that befits corruption charges against a mayor of the country’s financial and cultural capital. But Mr. Bove cited that coverage as another reason not to go forward, saying “increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity” risked contaminating the jury pool and affecting witnesses.

The language was familiar. Mr. Bove and Mr. Trump’s other defense lawyers sought to delay the president’s 2024 criminal trial by arguing that “exceptionally prejudicial pretrial publicity” was “substantial, ongoing, and likely to increase.”

Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Jeffery C. Mays, Hurubie Meko, Benjamin Weiser and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.