The Mayor and New York City Held Hostage

We are, as any schoolchild knows, a nation of laws. But we sure aren’t acting like it these days. Or rather, the president and his men — and the mayor and his lawyer — sure aren’t acting like it. What's going on is personal, not business — political, not legal — and particularly suited to the personalities and whims of the two players: A president who would be king, and a mayor who has, from the beginning, played at “governing” when he was, in fact, just bartering. The difference? In one, public officials act in the interests of the people. In the other, public officials act in their self-interest, the line between what’s theirs and what’s the people’s utterly evaporated.

We are living in a Superman bizarro world: The Justice Department no longer even pretends that its mission is about the law. The memo directing the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York to dismiss the criminal case against Eric Adams baldly states: “The Justice Department has reached this conclusion [to dismiss the case] without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which it is based….” (emphasis mine).  

Instead, this dismissal is part of a diabolical bargain that holds the mayor and thus New Yorkers as hostages to the president and his whims. The mayor may be an enthusiastic hostage, trading his independence in making policy for his freedom from prosecution. But New Yorkers are the chumps who will have to live with, and pay the price, for the mayor’s cynical trade. 

Look at what the Justice Department’s direction to dismiss the case without prejudice means: The case is essentially suspended and the United States Attorney can reactivate it at any time. Or, as the memo makes clear, at any time that is politically convenient to the president, after the mayoral election is concluded in November 2025.  

Reduced to Kremlinology, parsing who’s standing next to whom on the reviewing stand, one could ask why the November date was chosen when the election of New York City mayors has typically been decided in the Democratic primary (now in June). Here’s one possible reason: Perhaps Adams will run as a Republican? Perhaps his strategy for dealing with his lack of campaign money, now that he has been shut out of public matching funds, is to find a Trump crypto bro to underwrite his campaign? 

If there was any doubt that the legal part of the case has long since been left behind, the Justice Department memo clears that up immediately. It rests on the canard that the mayor himself has been bruiting about: that somehow an investigation begun years before the migrant crisis was the motivating force behind last September’s indictment. And it does not even try to hide that the “quo” in this quid pro quo is Adams’ obeisance to presidential wishes. You dismiss the indictment, and Adams will “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime.” You’ve heard about “saying the quiet part out loud”? This is writing the quiet part in a formal Justice Department memorandum.

This may be what brass knuckle politics are fairly about: mobilizing power to get your way. But it is emphatically not what federal prosecutions are about. They are supposed to leave politics at the door and be based on the law and evidence alone. Indeed, in what now seems a more quaint time, when I worked as a federal prosecutor and then as a top official in the city’s anti-corruption agency, commissioners who had city agencies to run would complain, with good reason, that while we put together the case, the target continued to engage in the illegal activity that was destabilizing their agency.

The decision to suspend the prosecution is of a piece with what each of the men at the center of this drama are all about. Eric Adams has demonstrated from the start that he did not see a line between what was his and what was the City’s. He has a well-known tic for overusing the possessive — “my city,” “my commissioners,” “my City Council,” and even, when referring to his fellow mayors around the country, “my mayors.”  

Adams was quick to shatter the norms of fair-dealing in his eyebrow-raising appointments, tapping his friend who was twice named as an unindicted co-conspirator in federal corruption indictments as the deputy mayor for public safety, and stocking the government with other dubious individuals. This included the unsuccessful attempt to place his “parking supervisor” brother as a top police official with a quarter of a million dollar paycheck. Then there were the successful attempts to place an old friend who worked as a $60,000-a-year 911 operator at the highest levels of the Police Department, and to put the mayor’s girlfriend in a $225,000 job, reported as a no-show gig, in the Department of Education, which was headed by the public safety deputy mayor’s brother.

By Adams’ midterm, he had run through three police commissioners (two of whom resigned after FBI raids), one first deputy mayor, one deputy mayor, one schools chancellor and one senior advisor — all stepping down after court-ordered searches.

It did not seem that Adams and his crowd saw the rules and were violating them. Rather, they simply did not operate with the same norms, rules or laws as everyone else. As his chief advisor Ingrid Lewis Martin said in an interview following a search that preceded her indictment for taking for herself money and things that belonged to the City, “we have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the DAs office to investigate us.” 

Here’s a sketch of what the norm-breaking added up to:

For his part, Donald Trump has made it a specialty to bend and distort the norms of decency and democracy. It doesn’t even happen gradually, then all of a sudden — it’s just all of a sudden, all of the time. His week one blitzkrieg of pronouncements and executive orders blasted through any idea of the constraints of law or norms. We have a Constitution, but it’s just a piece of paper if the president who has the troops says citizenship does not belong to those on whom the Constitution has conferred it. We have a civil service, but the damage is done in the action itself: Firing thousands working in federal agencies — whether the FBI or USAID or elsewhere — fully aware of the direct violation of civil service laws. People are laid off, their futures are uncertain, the government is paused, while the law mobilizes, if it does, to remind the president of the rules.  

Those judges who do their jobs and underscore the clarity of the law — like Judge Paul Engelmeyer in granting a preliminary injunction that would bar non-governmental employees from accessing the federal fisc — are subject to the most vile (and dangerous) abuse. What should be the quotidian act of judging has now become a frontline act of courage and sacrifice.  

So, what happens now? The United States Attorney (an interim appointee) could comply with the Justice Department’s direction. But that would result in irreparable damage to the reputation and effectiveness of the “sovereign district,” including the resignation of many of the prosecutors. 

The interim United States Attorney could resign. But that will not change the outcome, as the Department of Justice itself can file for dismissal.  

The judge in the case could deny the motion to dismiss (officially a “nolle prosequi”) in the interests of justice. But there is a real question, not yet settled by the Supreme Court, of whether he has that power — an issue almost tested in the case of former Trump national security official Michael Flynn but mooted by Trump’s pardon of him.  

A special prosecutor could be appointed but that appointment would be by the Attorney General and the person would report to the Department of Justice, as those creating these rules never contemplated the notion that the chain of command would be corrupt from the top.

The state — meaning a District Attorney — could take over the charges. Some, indeed, have noted that some of the charges are more suited to local than to federal laws.

Mainly, it is a time when each person, each lawyer needs to be sharp about what the law can fairly do. And be mindful that it is an unfair contest, because on the other side we have a president and a mayor who don’t play by the rules or abide by norms. In fact, their very m.o. is to smash those up. We are living in a time when fiction becomes reality, and in that spirit, I offer the famous coda from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, “The Great Gatsby,” that could apply equally to the president and his hostage, as to the fictional characters in the book:

“They were careless people…they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”