Mayor Eric Adams will go to trial in his federal corruption case on April 21 of next year, right in the thick of the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
U.S. District Court Judge Dale Ho set the trial date in the mayor’s corruption case — brought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in late September — during a Nov. 1 court conference inside the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. The judge also heard oral arguments over Adams’ attorney’s motion to dismiss a bribery charge against him and said he intends to rule on it “shortly.”
“That is the earliest date we can realistically shoot for here,” Judge Ho said.
The judge said he anticipates the trial will last roughly six weeks, which means it would last until just a few weeks before the June 24 Democratic primary.
Adams has pleaded not guilty to a 5-count criminal indictment that includes charges of bribery, soliciting foreign campaign donations and wire fraud. He stands accused of accepting luxury travel benefits and illegal foreign campaign donations from Turkish nationals in exchange for speeding up approvals for a Turkish consulate building in 2021 that had not passed a required fire safety inspection.
The mayor sat silently, facing forward, throughout the nearly two-hour proceeding. He left the courthouse without addressing a throng of reporters standing outside, but briefly spoke with a handful of his supporters gathered accross the street.
The judge’s decision bucked a request from Adams’ lead attorney, Alex Spiro, to hold the trial at an earlier date, so that it ends no later than early April and doesn’t interfere with the mayor’s campaign for reelection in the June primary. Spiro argued that the longer the mayor remains under indictment, the more it will negatively affect his ability to run for reelection — including fundraising and campaigning.
“By the time they are all on the ballot, if he still has this hanging over his head, that affects the election, period,” Spiro said in pushing for an earlier trial date.
Spiro even said he was willing to wave the defense’s right to discovery material that could be classified in order to secure an earlier trial date. But in the end those arguments did not appear to move Judge Ho.
Federal prosecutors have until Dec. 4 to give all of their discovery material to Spiro. While going through the discovery that still needs to be turned over, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten revealed that prosecutors have still been unable to break into the one of the cell phones they seized from the mayor last November.
He could not answer if they would be able to crack the device by the Dec. 4 deadline.
Scotten also revealed that the status of a possible superceding indictment of the mayor, which he mentioned during an Oct. 2 court conference, “remains unchanged.”
When it came to Adams’ motion to dismiss the bribery charge, his attorneys mostly rehashed their written argument that the indictment did not specify allegations that meet the federal standard for bribery. John Bash, one of Adams’ attorneys, charged that the allegations in the indictment are “insufficiently specific.”
Bash argued that the indictment does not include a clear quid-pro-quo that shows Adams agreeing to an unnamed Turkish official’s request to speed up approvals for the Turkish consulate in exchange for the luxury travel benefits.
Additionally, Judge Ho pointed out that Adams did not actually have the power to pressure the FDNY to expedite the fire approvals at the time, because he was still Brooklyn borough president in summer 2021 and had not yet been elected mayor — although he had already secured the Democratic nomination. That is an argument Adams’ attorney’s have made in the past but did not highlight as much on Friday.
In response, Scotten argued the quid-pro-quo described in the indictment was “clear as day.” He said that the actual quid-pro-quo took place before September of 2021 — while not giving a specific date — when the Turkish official asked Adams to intervene with the FDNY in order to hasten the opening of the consulate building.
But he also noted that the indictment should be taken as a whole and that when Adams began accepting travel benefits from Turkish nationals in 2016, he entered into a transactional relationship with them that would ultimately lead to the quid-pro-quo in 2021.
Scotten also insisted that although Adams was Brooklyn borough president, his status as the Democratic nominee gave him power to pressure the FDNY. The prosecutor added that while Adams did not have any jurisdiction over a building in Manhattan, his status as the Democratic mayoral nominee gave him enough power to push the Fire Department into action.
While Judge Ho did not rule on the motion Wednesday, he did comment that if he were to toss the motion, he would be the “first judge to dismiss a motion under McDonnell in the country” — referring to the precedent set by the 2016 US Supreme Court decision McDonnell v. United States.
Prior to the hearing, Judge Ho had already rejected a separate motion from Spiro to hold an evidentiary hearing and sanction federal prosecutors over allegations that they leaked information about the case to the press before formally indicting the mayor. Spiro claimed in a legal motion filed last month that the government leaked to the press, which allegedly shaped a public perception that the mayor was guilty prior to being charged.
However, Judge Ho ruled that Spiro failed to prove the only parties who could have leaked details of the case were the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who were investigating the mayor.
“The Court takes seriously Mayor Adams’s allegations, but ultimately concludes that he has failed to make a prima facie showing that the Government was the source of these disclosures,” Ho said in his ruling, referring to a legal standard of proof. “Mayor Adams has failed to show that Government attorneys or their agents, as opposed to other individuals, were the source of information in the articles.”
