Mayor Eric Adams may possibly face additional criminal charges on top of his historic indictment on federal bribery, soliciting foreign campaign donations and wire fraud charges, prosecutors said at a Wednesday court hearing in Manhattan.
Hagan Scotten, an assistant US Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), said during the Oct. 2 conference before Judge Dale Ho that other co-conspirators connected to the Adams indictment, who have yet to be named, are likely also to face criminal charges.
“We think that is quite likely … that additional defendants will be charged in connection with this scheme,” Scotten responded when Judge Ho asked him if other co-conspirators would face charges.
The mayor is accused of running a nearly decade-long scheme in which he received undisclosed travel benefits and illegal campaign donations from foreign nationals in exchange for doing favors on their behalf.
Throughout the roughly 90-minute conference, which marked Adams’ first official court appearance, Adams sat silently beside his attorney Alex Spiro, facing forward.
Spiro, who filed two motions this week — one aimed at dismissing the bribery charge against Adams and another asking the court to sanction SDNY for allegedly leaking grand jury evidence to the press — spent much of the conference pushing for a speedy trial.
Specifically, he urged judge Ho to schedule the trial to wrap before the end of the petitioning period for getting on the 2025 mayoral Democratic primary ballot early next March in order to avoid having the trial interfere with the mayor being able to garner petition signatures.
He declined to set a trial date during the conference, saying he would take Spiro’s argument “under advisement” and render a decision later.
In a statement following the hearing, Spiro suggested that Scotten’s revelation that his office could bring additional charges proves his argument that the government has no case against the mayor.
“The prosecution is desperately now saying they ‘could’ bring a new case because they are suddenly facing dismissal of their actual, flawed case and sanctions for misconduct,” Spiro said in the statement. “This is the sort of nonsense that prosecutors say when they don’t have a real case. If they had a real case, they would have brought it.”
Material against the mayor
The conference mostly consisted of Judge Ho working out a calendar for the coming court proceedings between the prosecution and the mayor’s defense. That includes setting dates by which federal prosecutors must respond to the motions Spiro has already filed, Oct. 18, and the date when Spiro must answer back, Oct. 25. Ho also scheduled an Oct. 30 hearing to discuss those motions and the prosecution’s responses.
On top of that, the judge set a Dec. 4 deadline by which SDNY prosecutors must turn over all of their evidence, known as discovery, to Adams’ defense team.
Scotten explained that the prosecution has a mountain of material supporting the historic 5-count indictment.
The discovery material includes written communications, text messages, Signal app messages, calendar entries, voice memos from Turkish nationals, conversations between Mayor Adams and co-conspirators, business records from Turkish Airlines, and forms that Adams submitted to the city’s Campaign Finance Bureau. Scotten said multiple witnesses are willing to testify about the alleged illegal contributions.
Additional material could be found on a phone federal agents seized from Adams last November, but has yet to be unlocked before the mayor changed the passcode just before it was taken, Scotten noted.
The mayor surrendered to federal authorities on Friday and pleaded not guilty to all five criminal counts in federal court.
Adams offered no statements throughout the conference and departed Manhattan Federal Court with Spiro just before noon on Oct. 2 without speaking to a scrum of reporters gathered outside.
Several protesters were also outside the courthouse calling for the mayor to resign, with one holding up a sign calling Adams the “Black Donald Trump.”
