New York – Federal agents who investigated the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, were still taking phones and requesting guarantees of the search days before the leaders of the Department of Justice ordered the prosecutors to leave the case of corruption, according to the documents published on Friday.
The treasure of the judicial records, which had been sealed, opens a window to the criminal case and shows that even when Washington officials moved away from the Prosecutor’s Office, the investigators in Manhattan advanced.
The documents also confirm something that prosecutors revealed previously: that a federal investigation into whether Adams took incorrect contributions of the campaign began in August 2021, when the Democrat was still in his former work of the president of the Brooklyn County, but he was expected to win the career of the mayor that fall.
Adams has repeatedly said that he believed he was prosecuted because, much later, as mayor, he criticized the immigration policies of former President Joe Biden.
The investigation was extended for the first time to Public View in November 2023, when FBI agents confiscated Adams phones and iPad when it left an event in Manhattan. They charged him 10 months after accepting free trips and illegal campaign contributions from people looking to buy their influence, including a Turkish diplomat.
But on February 10, weeks after President Donald Trump assumed the position, the new leadership of the Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors in New York to withdraw the charges, arguing that the case was hindering the mayor’s ability to help the republican administration’s repression repression.
The extraordinary directive attacked the offices of federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington. Instead of implementing the order, multiple prosecutors resigned, including the main federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon. A judge finally said that he legally had no choice but to dismiss the case at the request of the senior officials of the Department of Justice.
Prosecutors continued to dig in Adams in the weeks before the case was stopped, and Sassoon said they were about to present additional charges against him for obstruction of justice.
On February 7, a judge signed a request to search on a telephone that an unidentified subject of the investigation had delivered in response to a citation. Weeks before, a judge had signed an order to search in a house in Middletown, New York, in relation to an investigation of alleged straw donations made to the Adams campaign in 2020. Around the same time, prosecutors requested an order to access the location data for a mobile phone in that investigation. On December 4, a judge had approved a request from federal investigators to search in a house in Queens.
Searches and seizures
The American district judge Dale E. Ho ordered the records revealed at the request of the New York Times and, later, The New York Post. The Times argued in the judicial documents that there was a “particularly convincing” case to make them public because there would be no trial. Neither Adams’ lawyers nor prosecutors opposed the request.
The documents offer a look behind the scene of how the researchers rebuilt their case through electronics searches and physical locations around New York and beyond.
The UNSELED documents also revealed that in May 2024, a magistrate judge signed a search order to search the Fort Lee Condominiums, New Jersey, of the mayor’s romantic partner, Tracey Collins, who previously served as a senior official in the city’s department of education.
The application of order does not directly name Collins, but identifies it as Adams’s companion and says that the mayor also sometimes uses the home. The agents wanted to search for five iPhones while analyzing whether an official connected to the Türkiye Consulate was looking for help for a child to admit to a much requested public high school.
The September 2024 application was also included for an order to search for Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor in Manhattan, providing photos of the building from multiple angles.
An affidavit of an FBI agent indicates that the location data for one of the ADAMS phones suggest that the “night hours” spends Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at residence “and occasionally also does so in other days.”
Adams meets Trump
He asked to comment on the new documents, Adams’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, criticized the final prosecution.
“This case, the first case of ‘corruption’ to update the airline of its kind airline, should never have been presented first and now has ended,” Spiro said.
Adams has promoted the dismissal of the case as a claim, while denied that he reached an agreement with Trump in exchange for clemency. But he has maintained a warm relationship with the president after his case was dismissed. The two leaders met in Washington on Friday, and Trump then told reporters that “I think he really came to thank me.”
The Adams office issued a statement that said they discussed “critical infrastructure projects, as well as the preservation of essential social services, among other issues.”
Even with criminal charges behind him, Adams faces an uncertain political future. He recently announced that he would jump the Democratic primaries in June and, on the other hand, would apply as independent in the November general elections.
