Amid Furor Over Adams Case, a Glimpse of a Charge Never Brought
The New York Times
Federal prosecutors said they had proposed a new charge against Mayor Eric Adams. Court filings suggest it related to the conduct of an aide who was charged with witness tampering.
As she fought a losing battle with her superiors over their effort to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan put forward a tantalizing piece of information about the case.
The prosecutor, Danielle R. Sassoon, wrote in a letter to the U.S. attorney general earlier this month that her office had proposed adding a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice to the five-count indictment the mayor already faced.
The new charge, she wrote, would be “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I.”
Ms. Sassoon provided no details about how Mr. Adams might have tried to obstruct justice. But earlier court filings suggest that the proposed charge related at least in part to an episode in which Mr. Adams met with an aide who, hours later, told a businessman to lie to the F.B.I. about illegal contributions to the mayor’s campaign.
The plan to add a new charge had not been publicly known until Ms. Sassoon’s letter was circulated earlier this month. And it has been largely overlooked in the furor over the Trump administration’s move to dismiss the case, which will most likely render the existing charges of bribery, fraud and illegal foreign campaign contributions moot, along with any possible new accusations.
The motion to dismiss the indictment, filed by Justice Department officials from Washington after Ms. Sassoon refused to do so, was based on the Trump administration’s contention that the case prevented Mr. Adams from assisting with the president’s immigration crackdown. The judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, has yet to rule on the motion, which Ms. Sassoon cast as a quid pro quo, calling it “improper” and “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent.”
