The Department of Justice’s decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams is one of the most corrupt acts by the federal law enforcement agency in its history.
Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York indicted Adams on multiple corruption charges in 2024 related to his dealings with Turkey as both mayor and when he served as Brooklyn Borough president from 2014 to 2021. On Monday, the Trump administration announced that it would drop the charges without prejudice, providing a litany of political reasons for doing so. One included the desire for Adams to help the administration enforce its mass deportation policies.
Adams is a made-man now. An unpaid informant. A forced collaborator. New York City is now a rotten borough, effectively taken over by President Donald Trump through this corrupt deal, and its residents are deprived of independent leadership.
This corruption was made plain in acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s letter ordering the charges against Adams to be dropped. Bove’s letter falsely states that the prosecution was initiated by the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden as retaliation for Adams’ criticism of that administration’s immigration policies. That isn’t true.
The agency began investigating Adams in 2021 when he was still Brooklyn Borough president. This was years before immigration became a hot-button issue in the city and pre-dated Adams’ criticisms of Biden in 2023, following a surge in asylum seekers settling in the city.
After this false allegation, Bove directly connects the dismissal to Adams’ cooperation with the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
“[T]he pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration,” Bove wrote. “We are particularly concerned about the impact of the prosecution on Mayor Adams’ ability to support critical, ongoing federal efforts ‘to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement,’ as described in Executive Order 14165.”
That statement is appended with a footnote protesting that the agency “is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement.”
Despite these too-much protestations, the implication is clear: this is a quid pro quo deal. Whether or not Adams supports removing some asylum seekers from the city or the country on his own belief is beside the point. He now has no choice but to comply.
The agency’s decision to dismiss the charges without prejudice is key to this deal.
“The Justice Department has reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based, which are issues on which we defer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office at this time,” Bove’s letter states.
This means the agency could bring the charges against Adams again at any moment. They hold a sword over Adams’ head if he steps out of line.
This is how prosecutors and law enforcement create informants to coerce people arrested for committing crimes to collaborate with law enforcement to help ensnare and arrest those higher up in criminal enterprises.
Trump is using this strategy to coerce an elected and indicted mayor not to turn on his criminal collaborators but to turn on his constituents to enforce policies as Trump orders. This dependence is textbook classical corruption.
“A citizen who took bribes from men in power was not only corrupt in the common sense of the word, but corrupt in the classical; he was liable to become dependent on that source of supply and, like the soldiers of the late Roman Republic, to degenerate from a citizen into a client,” historian J.G.A. Pocock wrote in his essay on Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Thought.
Adams was already corrupt, as the now-dropped charges alleged, but he is now stuck in a vice of corruption. For the rest of his time in office, he will remain dependent on Trump’s Department of Justice for dropping the charges and to keep the agency from reviving them.
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The only recourse at the moment is for Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to remove Adams from office. But, for now, Adams is Trump’s mayor of New York City.