Adams Gets a Reprieve From Trump

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at the Justice Department’s order to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan to drop charges against Eric Adams. We’ll also get details on a guilty plea by a Brooklyn man who was accused of carrying ancient Egyptian relics in suitcases he had checked on a flight to Kennedy International Airport.

Last year Eric Adams made history as the first mayor in modern New York to be indicted on criminal charges.

Now there is a footnote to that history: On Monday the Justice Department ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to drop the corruption charges against Adams.

The order came in a letter from Emil Bove III, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department. Adams, a Democrat running for re-election, had made repeated overtures to President Trump, who had said he would consider pardoning the mayor. Adams met with Trump near his Mar-a-Lago estate last month and attended Trump’s inauguration a few days later. He later told reporters that he would not publicly criticize the president.

It was not clear how Danielle Sassoon, the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, would respond to the directive to drop the case. A spokesman for Sassoon’s office declined to comment. Any motion to dismiss charges must be filed in court and reviewed by the judge overseeing the case.

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

Bove, in his letter, said the issue was timing, an unusual reason to ask for a dismissal. He said that the indictment, unsealed in September, had come too close to the 2025 mayoral primary in June. Adams’s trial had been scheduled to begin in late April, barely two months before the primary. The Justice Department has generally been reluctant to bring charges against elected officials before elections, but Adams’s indictment came nine months before the primary and more than a year before the general election.

Bove also indicated that the indictment had limited Adams’s ability to cooperate in President Trump’s immigration crackdown. The mayor has been adamant that he has not been distracted by the indictment. “I can do my job,” Adams said on Bloomberg TV in December. “My legal team is going to handle the case.”

Bove explicitly said that the Justice Department had made the decision without assessing the merits of the case. A former prosecutor in the same office that has been prosecuting the mayor, he said there was to be “no further targeting of Mayor Adams or additional investigative steps” until after the November mayoral election, when the case would be re-evaluated.

Adams was indicted in September on five counts of bribery conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. He was accused of helping to fast-track the approval of a new Turkish Consulate in Manhattan despite safety concerns, in exchange for unlawful donations and free and heavily discounted luxury travel. Prosecutors sought records relating to his dealings with five other countries and suggested that the case could have expanded.

When news broke about his case Monday evening, Adams was having dinner with John Catsimatidis, a Republican billionaire with ties to Trump, at a Manhattan restaurant. Adams had no immediate substantive comment.

His lawyer, Alex Spiro, said that from the beginning of the case he had said the mayor was innocent and would prevail. Spiro added in a statement: “Today he has. The Department of Justice has re-evaluated this case and determined it should not go forward.”

Spiro also said that the mayor and the city could “put this unfortunate and misguided prosecution behind them.”

But Adams’s political opponents appeared unlikely to do that. State Senator Jessica Ramos said that “Eric Adams sold out New Yorkers to buy his own freedom,” and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani said that the mayor had “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.”

What about the continuing investigations involving Adams’s close associates? Many of the cases have been thrown into uncertainty, and the next steps will largely be decided by prosecutors. Legal experts told my colleague Nicole Hong that prosecutors could decide to drop charges against people in the mayor’s orbit who have been cooperating against him in hopes of reducing their own criminal exposure. Dropping the charges would avoid any claims of unfair treatment.

Weather

Expect mostly cloudy conditions and mild wind, with a high in the mid-30s and snow potentially starting in the afternoon. In the evening, it will be cloudy with snow likely and a low around 29 degrees.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

Suspended for snow removal.

Ashraf Omar Eldarir checked three suitcases for the flight to Kennedy International Airport in January 2020. Inside, prosecutors said, were nearly 600 Egyptian artifacts that he had not declared. Among them were amulets and a sculpture of a king from the Ptolemaic dynasty more than 2,000 years ago.

When Customs and Border Protection officers opened the suitcases, dirt and sand spilled out. The artifacts smelled of damp earth — an indication, prosecutors said, that the carefully wrapped items had recently been excavated.

The amulets and the sculpture were not all the prosecutors said Eldarir was carrying. They said that there also were wooden tomb model figures with linen garments that dated to 1900 B.C. and other ancient artifacts. They said that Eldarir did not have documentation from Egypt authorizing him to export them.

Eldarir was charged with one count of smuggling arising from this incident, and one count involving an earlier trip in which he smuggled an ancient Egyptian polychrome relief, prosecutors said. He said that the items belonged to his family and that he intended to use them in furnishing his apartment in Brooklyn.

My colleague Santul Nerkar writes that on Monday, Eldarir pleaded guilty to smuggling the artifacts.

He had lost a bid in 2023 to suppress evidence taken from his iPhone during a search. Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall of federal court in Brooklyn ruled that using biometrics to unlock the phone had not violated his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

Dear Diary:

It was a Thursday afternoon, and I had decided I wanted to spend some time outside after work.

Typically, I designate weekends for recreational activity. But having been inside all day and with the sun still out, I embarked on the 20-minute walk to Prospect Park.

I thought about sitting on a bench facing the pond, but decided that was too easy. I kept looking until I found a grassy spot, partially covered by the shade of a tree with overarching branches.

The reeds at the water’s edge split to form what seemed like a man-made fishing alcove, letting rays of sunshine through and offering a view of geese floating by.

As I put down the blanket I was carrying and got settled, I saw that the tree had a yellow heart painted on it. It must be someone’s special spot, I realized.