A lawyer who was asked to offer independent arguments on the U.S. Justice Department’s motion to dismiss corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York told a judge on Friday that he should end the prosecution.
But the lawyer, Paul D. Clement, said the judge should not allow the Trump administration to hold the threat of criminal charges over Mr. Adams’s head. He recommended that the case be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the charges could not be brought again.
“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 his filing.
Mr. Clement’s brief could spell the end of the long-running case against the mayor, the first to be indicted in modern New York history. Though the judge, Dale E. Ho, is not legally bound to accept Mr. Clement’s recommendation, his guidance is likely to be influential given that the judge requested his input.
If Judge Ho follows it, the result could be the best possible outcome for Mr. Adams, whose administration has been in turmoil since his indictment in September. But the legal wrangling over the government’s effort to abandon the case has left the mayor, who is facing re-election this year, even more politically damaged than he was before the process began.
On Friday evening, Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, reacted on social media with a New York City amen to Mr. Clement’s recommendation that the charges be permanently dismissed: To quote the mayor, he said, “‘Yeah, duh.’”
Mr. Adams’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, said, “We have said all along this was a political hit job masquerading as a prosecution.”
The Justice Department submitted its own brief to the judge, arguing that its motion to dismiss the indictment should be granted without delay. And the brief said that if Judge Ho wanted to dig deeper into prosecutors’ motivations, “that record reveals additional troubling conduct at the U. S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York,” which originally brought the case against Mr. Adams.
High-ranking officials in President Trump’s Justice Department had asked Judge Ho to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning that the charges could be brought again. The officials did not argue that the case was weak, but rather that it was hindering Mr. Adams’s cooperation with the White House’s immigration agenda.
Their efforts to abandon the case caused an uproar and led to the resignations of at least eight prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington. Mr. Adams’s campaign opponents and critics throughout New York suggested that the arrangement would keep the mayor beholden to the president rather than to New Yorkers.
Mr. Clement appeared to agree, writing in his filing that “the prospect of re-indictment could create the appearance, if not the reality, that the actions of a public official are being driven by concerns about staying in the good graces of the federal executive, rather than the best interests of his constituents.”
If the charges are permanently dismissed, the legal threat to the mayor would disappear, along with a cudgel that Mr. Trump could wield against him to ensure his support for the White House program of mass deportations.
Mr. Clement, a political conservative, was the U.S. solicitor general during President George W. Bush’s administration and has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court. He became involved in the Adams case after the Justice Department officials asked Judge Ho to dismiss it.
The judge appointed Mr. Clement to provide an adversarial perspective, given that the prosecution and the defense were united in requesting that the charges be dismissed without prejudice. Mr. Clement wrote that he had reached his 33-page conclusion in the face of the extraordinary circumstances of the government’s motion.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat, pleaded not guilty last year after he was charged with bribery, fraud and other counts. The U.S. attorney’s office pursued the case aggressively, even convening a new grand jury to hear evidence about a potential additional charge of obstruction of justice.
But after the change in administrations, the Justice Department shifted positions, and one of its top officials, Emil Bove III, ordered Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District, to seek its dismissal.
She refused and, before resigning, wrote a letter accusing Mr. Adams’s defense lawyers of seeking to trade his cooperation with President Trump’s immigration agenda for the dismissal of the charges. Mr. Spiro denied that any such arrangement had been made. But her allegation caused a political crisis in New York, as a number of public officials and Mr. Adams’s campaign opponents called for him to step down.
Others asked that Gov. Kathy Hochul remove him from office, and while she declined to do so, she announced an intention to place guardrails on his control of the city.
A poll released this week showed that just 20 percent of New Yorkers approved of the mayor’s job performance and that a majority believed he should step down. He faces nine opponents so far in the June Democratic primary, and the poll showed him running a distant second to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
And while Mr. Adams’s legal fortunes were looking up, he remained in limbo.
When Mr. Bove ultimately filed the dismissal motion himself, with support from Mr. Adams’s lawyers, Judge Ho did not throw out the charges. Instead, he appointed Mr. Clement.
The judge asked Mr. Clement a number of questions, including whether, in issuing his ruling, he could consider materials other than the dismissal motion itself — potentially referring to Ms. Sassoon’s letter. Mr. Clement wrote that it seemed clear that Judge Ho could.
“There is no basis for ignoring publicly available materials in the unusual case where materials shedding light on prosecutorial decision-making have become public,” Mr. Clement said. “Needless to say, this is the unusual case.”
He noted that the government’s own filings claimed that the prosecution of Mr. Adams had been initiated in bad faith, an apparent reference to a letter Mr. Bove sent to Ms. Sassoon accusing her of continuing “a politically motivated prosecution.”
But Mr. Clement said other public information suggested it was in fact Mr. Bove’s order to dismiss the indictment that was “undertaken in bad faith,” a clear reference to allegations Ms. Sassoon made in her letter.
Mr. Clement said that it would be unnecessary for Judge Ho to settle that dispute. “Under either view,” Mr. Clement wrote, there was little justification for allowing a potential re-indictment of the mayor as the government had sought.
Mr. Clement also advised against an extensive judicial investigation into the Justice Department’s actions, which could keep the precise circumstances that led officials there to abandon the case under wraps.
“When the publicly available information is sufficient to inform judicial decision-making, there are sound reasons to avoid further inquiries,” he wrote.
The Justice Department submitted a brief to Judge Ho on Friday evening, signed by Mr. Bove and the newly confirmed deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche.
The brief quoted from several internal documents from the Southern District to argue that the Adams prosecution, led by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney when the indictment was returned, was political. The full context of the quotations was unclear; the brief said the documents containing them were sealed.
The brief says the recently resigned Ms. Sassoon sent herself a draft letter in which she said she was “personally disappointed” in what she called Mr. Williams’s “self-serving actions” after he left office. She was apparently referring to an essay Mr. Williams wrote in January, a few days after stepping down, in which he said New York City was “being led with a broken ethical compass.”
The brief also said the lead prosecutor in the Adams case, Hagan Scotten, wrote in a message “that he hoped to ‘distance’ the S.D.N.Y. prosecution team” from Mr. Williams, enough that Judge Ho and Mr. Trump “will know we don’t approve of what he did, but not so much that we magnify the scandal.”
Mr. Williams declined to comment Friday evening; Ms. Sassoon could not be reached for comment, and Mr. Scotten, who also resigned, did not immediately return a request for comment.
William K. Rashbaum, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
