(AFP) – A US judge on Friday indefinitely delayed the corruption trial of New York Mayor Eric Adams but declined to immediately grant the Trump Justice Department’s extraordinary request to dismiss the charges. District Judge Dale Ho also said he had selected an outside attorney to make the case for why the charges against Adams should not be dropped.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove asked federal prosecutors in New York last week to drop the bribery and fraud charges against Adams, an unusual move that triggered a wave of protest resignations in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and in Washington. Bove said the prosecution was restricting the Democratic mayor’s “ability to devote full attention and resources to illegal immigration and violent crime,” an argument that he repeated during a court hearing held by Ho on Wednesday.
Bove’s bid to drop the charges prompted allegations that it was a quid pro quo in exchange for Adams agreeing to enforce Republican President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown — a claim denied by the mayor. Adams had been scheduled to go on trial on April 21 but Ho vacated the court date. The judge appointed Paul Clement, who served as solicitor general under former president George W. Bush, to present arguments for why the Adams indictment should not be quashed.
“Normally, courts are aided in their decision-making through our system of adversarial testing, which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in cases of great public importance,” Ho said. In this case, “there has been no adversarial testing of the government’s position,” the judge said. Ho ordered Clement and the Justice Department to submit briefs in the case by March 7 and scheduled oral arguments for March 14.
Adams has been under growing pressure to resign but has resisted calls to step aside and announced plans to run again for mayor of the largest US city in November’s election. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has said she is “deeply troubled” by the corruption charges against Adams but has so far declined to use her powers to remove him from office.
The acting US attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, and Hagan Scotten, the lead prosecutor on the Adams case, both dramatically resigned last week after being asked by the Trump Justice Department in Washington to drop the charges against the mayor. Scotten told Bove in a blistering letter that only a “fool” or a “coward” would comply with the department’s demand. Bove’s stunning incursion into an ongoing anti-corruption case involving a public official has rattled the legal community and a Justice Department that has seen a number of top officials fired, demoted, or reassigned since Trump took office.
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