Former Adams Aide to Plead Guilty to Conspiracy in Straw Donations Case
A former City Hall aide charged last year with witness tampering tied to the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York has agreed to plead guilty and prosecutors on Friday identified him in court papers as a co-conspirator in the case against the mayor.
It was not clear from the court papers whether the aide, Mohamed Bahi, who had served as the mayor’s liaison to the Muslim community, was cooperating with the prosecutors against the mayor.
But in a letter to the judge presiding over the mayor’s bribery and fraud case, the prosecutors asked the court to join the cases of Mr. Bahi and another man to the case against the mayor. The other man, a Turkish American businessman who had been charged separately, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit fraud related to straw donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case against Mayor Adams, declined to comment. Mr. Bahi’s lawyer, Derek Adams, could not be immediately reached for comment.
A lawyer for the mayor, Alex Spiro, also could not immediately be reached for comment.
The disclosure of Mr. Bahi’s guilty plea would seem to further cloud the situation surrounding the prosecution of Mr. Adams himself. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Adams’s legal team met with U.S. Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors from Manhattan about the possibility of dropping the case against him. That meeting followed statements by President Trump suggesting that the mayor had been charged for political reasons under the Biden administration. Mr. Adams has said he was indicted because he criticized the former administration’s response to the migrant crisis.
Manhattan federal prosecutors have said in court filings that such claims are unfounded.
It would be unusual, if Mr. Adams’s case were dropped, for prosecutors to move forward with cases against other defendants, such as Mr. Bahi, who were charged with participating in the same criminal activities as the mayor — especially when, as with Mr. Bahi, prosecutors had said the scheme was primarily intended to benefit Mr. Adams.
The case against Mr. Bahi, who was charged less than two weeks after Mr. Adams was indicted, appeared at the time to strengthen the case against the mayor. In the complaint against Mr. Bahi, prosecutors revealed that an Uzbek businessman who they said had made straw donations to Mr. Adams was cooperating with their investigation. And the case also raised the possibility that Mr. Bahi could testify against Mr. Adams himself.
Mr. Bahi was accused of acting as a liaison between Mr. Adams and the businessman, Tolib Mansurov, who prosecutors said later sought and received help from the mayor in resolving problems that his construction company was having with the city’s Buildings Department.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Bahi coached Mr. Mansurov and his employees to lie to federal investigators about the contributions, and that he photographed grand jury subpoenas the employees had been given. The F.B.I. executed search warrants at the homes of Mr. Mansurov and Mr. Bahi last year, prosecutors have said in court filings.
The prosecutors, in their letter to the judge, Dale E. Ho, said that Mr. Bahi would plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy, as did the Turkish American businessman, Erden Arkan.
The object of the conspiracies charged against both men was “committing wire fraud through the collection of campaign contributions made under the name of someone other than the true contributor,” the prosecutors wrote, and the subsequent request for public matching funds “based on the misrepresentation that those contributions originated from the named contributor.”
Benjamin Weiser contributed reporting.
