Former Adams Aide to Plead Guilty to Conspiracy in Straw Donations Case
The New York Times
The aide, Mohamed Bahi, had been accused of telling a witness to lie to federal agents investigating illegal contributions to the mayor’s campaign.
A former City Hall aide charged last year with witness tampering tied to the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York has agreed to plead guilty and prosecutors on Friday identified him in court papers as a co-conspirator in the case against the mayor.
It was not clear from the court papers whether the aide, Mohamed Bahi, who had served as the mayor’s liaison to the Muslim community, was cooperating with the prosecutors against the mayor.
But in a letter to the judge presiding over the mayor’s bribery and fraud case, the prosecutors asked the court to join the cases of Mr. Bahi and another man to the case against the mayor. The other man, a Turkish American businessman who had been charged separately, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit fraud related to straw donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case against Mayor Adams, declined to comment. Mr. Bahi’s lawyer, Derek Adams, could not be immediately reached for comment.
A lawyer for the mayor, Alex Spiro, also could not immediately be reached for comment.
The disclosure of Mr. Bahi’s guilty plea would seem to further cloud the situation surrounding the prosecution of Mr. Adams himself. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Adams’s legal team met with U.S. Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors from Manhattan about the possibility of dropping the case against him. That meeting followed statements by President Trump suggesting that the mayor had been charged for political reasons under the Biden administration. Mr. Adams has said he was indicted because he criticized the former administration’s response to the migrant crisis.
