In both real life and on film, New York City has often been a city linked with public scandals, corruption and high drama.
But even Hollywood scriptwriters, so often keen on using the Big Apple as a backdrop, would have been hard-pushed to describe the astonishing events that have played out around the mayor, Eric Adams, in recent days.
Last week, the US Department of Justice moved to drop criminal charges against Adams, in what many see as a blatant quid pro quo for getting Adams onboard as a political ally to a Donald Trump administration seemingly intent on launching a radical remaking of American government.
It was a move that raised alarm among many residents of the city and legal experts about what many see as Trump – and Adams – undermining the integrity of the US judicial system and American democracy.
Earlier this week, a top official at the justice department ordered the acting US attorney in the southern district of New York to stop prosecuting Adams for allegedly accepting bribes and illegal campaign contributions from foreign sources.
The move was the latest stop in a dramatic term for America’s highest-profile mayor, which has seen the former cop elected as a Democrat but then drift rightwards, especially after Trump was elected and Adams faced prosecution. In heavily Democratic New York, Adams is now seen as an ally to Trump and has even reportedly flirted with the idea of becoming a Republican.
Since being indicted in September, Adams has made regular overtures to Trump, including visiting him at his resort in Florida and skipping scheduled Martin Luther King Jr Day events in the city to attend Trump’s inauguration.
Some observers said Adams was trying to obtain a pardon from Trump and ignoring his responsibilities as mayor. Adams claimed he has not discussed his legal case with Trump and that he had been talking with the president to help the city.
Whatever Adams’s intentions were, Trump now appears to have helped him and, in doing so, added to the perception he will ignore the rule of law when it benefits him politically.
“We have an administration that is willing to use its power to benefit favorite people, to the extent it’s able to do so without controversy – or even with controversy,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law. “It’s a truly aggressive decision on the part of DoJ and an indefensible decision.”
Adams was elected mayor in November 2021. Before the indictment, he already faced criticism because of the criminal histories of people in his inner circle, his frequent participation in the city’s nightlife and allegations that he did not actually live in the city, among other complaints from residents.
“You would see him partying at clubs that my peers were at, and he seemed to fit there very well, more so than the office he was holding,” said Maedot Yidenk, a 27-year-old neuroscientist from Seattle who now lives in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.
After his indictment, Adams said the Biden administration had targeted him for prosecution because he had criticized its immigration policies. Prosecutors countered that the investigation had begun before Adams started attacking the federal government over its response to the number of immigrants entering the country.
However, Trump agreed with Adams’s assessment and said he would consider pardoning the Democrat.
But the justice department instead now wants to dismiss the charges. According to the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, federal prosecutors behind the case “threatened the integrity of the proceedings, including by increasing prejudicial pretrial publicity” and “unduly restricted” the mayor’s ability to “devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that has escalated under the policies of the prior Administration”.
Bove’s justification – that the prosecutor had been keeping Adams from doing his job – is “ridiculous”, according to Gillers.
“It would immunize office holders, certainly mayors and governors, from criminal investigation and criminal charges, so long as they were named in that position,” Gillers said. “The real explanation, I think, is that Trump wanted to dismiss the indictment as a favor to Adams, for whatever reason, but to do it in the most neutral way.”
Still, Bove has encountered resistance from prosecutors, which has plunged the city’s legal community into turmoil.
On Thursday, the interim US attorney for the southern district, Danielle Sassoon, a Republican, resigned and accused the justice department of letting the defendant off in exchange for his help with Trump’s immigration policy. Five other officials in the justice department also resigned.
“I remain baffled by the rushed and superficial process by which this decision was reached, in seeming collaboration with Adams’s counsel and without my direct input on the ultimate stated rationales for dismissal,” Sassoon wrote to the attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Bove responded in a letter to Sassoon, stating that she had been “pursuing a politically motivated prosecution despite an express instruction to dismiss the case. You lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice.”
Trump said he had not asked prosecutors to drop the case. But in his letter, Bove wrote that Sassoon was “disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President”.
But the scandal did not stop there. Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York city council, on Monday called on the mayor to resign. Her demand came just hours after four of Adams’s eight deputy mayors announced they would leave his administration – another crippling blow to his ever more disastrous reputation.
Trump could have avoided the legal wrangling by just pardoning Adams, as some predicted he would.
“If he does go that route, I think it raises the question why he wouldn’t have done it in the first place,” said Thomas Frampton, an associate law professor at the University of Virginia. “I think the answer is because he wanted to test to see how compliant the [southern district] would be.”
Even in a liberal city like New York, there are people who both don’t like Trump – or his efforts to exert control over the justice department – and aren’t sure prosecutors should have filed charges against Adams.
Stanley Brezenoff, who once chaired the city’s housing authority and board of correction, argued that the allegations that Adams pressured the fire department to open the Turkish consulate despite safety concerns were “not pretty, but I’m not sure that in and of itself warranted the extent of the criminal justice response”.
“I can understand him trying to figure out ways to avoid the retribution,” said Brezenoff, who did not vote for Adams in the last election and has not decided who he will support in the Democratic primary in June: “I may not like that, but you wouldn’t say: ‘Impeach Adams’ because he’s currying favor with Washington, with Trump.”
Kelly Johnson, a mechanical engineer and marine veteran, used to encounter Adams, then a police officer, walking around Brooklyn and through mutual friends. Johnson said he felt that Adams “worked a lot with the community … I didn’t necessarily have anything really bad to say about him”.
Johnson, who is Black, appreciates that Adams filled his administration with people of color and thinks that serving as only the city’s second Black mayor is especially difficult.
“Everyone is going to make sure that if you’re not all the way clean, the slightest of things that you may do wrong – hell, you could buy a pack of cigarettes off of some government funding – you’ll get impeached,” said Johnson, 52, who lives in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and would consider voting for Adams.
There is a long list of candidates in the Democratic primary, and the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is reportedly considering entering the race. Meanwhile, Adams has recently explored running in the Republican primary, the New York Times reported.
In the 2021 election, Laurie Levinson, a retiree who lives in the East Village of Manhattan, voted for Maya Wiley, a former lawyer for Mayor Bill de Blasio who has not entered the new race.
“There were people who were really, really qualified, like Maya Wiley,” said Levinson, who has not decided whom she will support this time. Like Trump, she said, “Adams is another moron … I can’t wait till the next mayoral races.”
Patrick Canfield, a 31-year-old who works in publishing, sees Adams as corrupt and also dislikes his policies, such as increasing the police presence on the city’s subways.
“I think we’re witnessing the crumbling of American institutions,” said Canfield, who also lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Adams is just a microcosm of that.”
