New York (AP) – Federal agents investigating the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, still seized the phones and asked for search mandates a few days before the leaders of the Ministry of Justice ordered prosecutors to delete the case of corruption, according to documents published on Friday.
The mine of judicial archives, which had been sealed, opens a window on the criminal affair and shows that even when Washington officials withdrew from the accusation, Manhattan investigators were going forward.
The documents also confirm something that the prosecutors have revealed previously: that a federal survey on the question of whether Adams took inappropriate campaign contributions began in August 2021, when the Democrat was still in his former post as president of the Brooklyn district, but it was largely planned to win the mayor’s race this fall.
Adams said on several occasions that he thought he had been prosecuted because, much later, as mayor, he had criticized the immigration policies of former president Joe Biden.
The investigation first Overturned in the audience view In November 2023, when FBI agents entered Adams and the iPad’s phones when he left an event in Manhattan. He was charge 10 months later with the acceptance of free contributions from travel and illegal campaigns of people seeking to buy his influence, including a Turkish diplomat.
But on February 10, weeks after President Donald Trump took office, the new Directorate of the Ministry of Justice Federal prosecutors ordered the abolition of accusationsarguing that the case had the mayor’s ability to help the repression of immigration from the republican administration.
The extraordinary directive enabled the offices of federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Washington. Rather than implementing the order, several prosecutors have resigned, including the main federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon. A judge finally declared that he had no choice but to reject the case at the request of the senior officials of the Ministry of Justice.
Prosecutors continued to dig in Adams in the weeks preceding the case, and Sassoon said they were about to bring additional accusations against him for justice.
On February 7, a judge had signed a request for a telephone research that an unidentified subject of the investigation had been returned in response to a summons. A few weeks earlier, a judge had signed a mandate to search a house in Middletown, New York, as part of an alleged straw donation survey made in the Adams campaign in 2020. At the same time, prosecutors asked for a mandate to access the location of a mobile phone in this investigation. On December 4, a judge had approved a request from the federal investigators to search a house in Queens.
Research and convulsions
The American district judge Dale E. Ho ordered the unfrozoned files at the request of the New York Times and, later, the New York Post. The Times argued in court documents that there was a “particularly convincing” affair to make them public because there would be no trial. Neither Adams lawyers nor prosecutors have opposed the request.
The documents offer a background overview of how investigators have reconstructed their case thanks to research on electronics and physical locations around New York and beyond.
Unclogged documents also revealed that in May 2024, a magistrate judge had signed a mandate to search the Fort Lee home, New Jersey, in co -ownership of the mayor’s long -standing romantic partner, Tracey Collins, who was formerly high -end of the City Ministry of Education.
The mandate request does not name Collins directly but identifies it as the partner of Adams and says that the mayor also sometimes uses the house. The agents wanted to do the research to access five iPhones while they were looking for if a civil servant was linked to the Turkish consulate asked for help from the admission of a child in a highly sought -after public intermediary school.
The request for September 2024 of September 2024 also consumed Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor in Manhattan, providing photos of the building from several angles.
An affidavit of an FBI agent notes that the location data for one of the Adams phones suggest that he spends the “night hours” on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at the residence “and sometimes also the other days”.
Adams Meet Trump
Asked about the new documents, Adams lawyer Alex Spiro criticized the prosecution now over.
“This case – the first in the case of the” corruption “of the upgrade of airlines – should never have been brought in the first place and is now over,” said Spiro.
Adams praised the rejection of the case as a justification, while denying that he concluded an agreement with Trump in exchange for Clemence. But he maintained a warm relationship with the president after the dismissal of his case. Friday, the two leaders met in Washington, with Trump later telling journalists that “I think he came to thank me.”
The Adams Office published a statement which said that it had discussed “critical infrastructure projects, as well as the preservation of essential social services, among other subjects”.
Even with the criminal charges behind him, Adams faces an uncertain political future. It recently announcement that he would jump the Democratic primary in June and present himself as independent in the general elections of November.
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The writers of the Associated Press Jennifer Peltz, Anthony Izaguirre, Ruth Brown, Philip Marcelo, David B. Caruso and Larry Neumeister contributed to this report.
