In Adams Indictment, Legal Experts See Strengths, Potential Pitfalls – DNyuz

For nearly a year, federal prosecutors have closed in on Mayor Eric Adams of New York, seizing his phones and searching the homes of his aides in moves that suggested they might take the extraordinary step of charging him while he still held office.

Last week they followed through, unveiling a 57-page indictment that accused Mr. Adams of bribery, conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations from the Turkish government.

It is in some ways a simple case that draws on what appears to be solid evidence. But it also contains potential pitfalls that make it seem likely that prosecutors will seek to bring additional charges in the weeks or months to come, according to interviews with a dozen former federal prosecutors, defense lawyers and law professors who reviewed the indictment.

Mr. Adams, 64, has strenuously denied any wrongdoing and said he would fight the charges “with every ounce of my strength, and my spirit.” On Friday, he pleaded not guilty in Federal District Court.

Perhaps the strongest part of the case against Mr. Adams — brought by the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York — involves the charges related to the foreign donations, the experts said.

Those appear to be supported by years of communications between Mr. Adams and others, as well as documentation of what the prosecutors called a straw donor scheme, in which Turkish government officials and businesspeople arranged to reimburse donors for contributions to Mr. Adams’s campaign.

The prosecutors’ argument that Mr. Adams went to lengths to conceal the alleged schemes by using encrypted messages, deleting messages and creating a false paper trail was also compelling, said Jessica Roth, a law professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former prosecutor at the Southern District focused on securities law and violent crime.

One of the “most shocking” accusations, Ms. Roth and others said, involved Mr. Adams’s failure to turn over his phone when approached by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and his subsequent claims that he could not remember the passcode to unlock it.

“I wouldn’t want to be the defense lawyer trying to say that with a straight face,” said Erin Murphy, a professor at New York University School of Law, adding: “There is a lot that puts Adams in the hot seat.”

The prosecutors might have a harder time proving the bribery charges, the experts said. The dollar amounts of the bribes that Mr. Adams is accused of taking — $100,000 and illegal campaign contributions — may appear paltry compared with other cases of public corruption, they said.

Much of the case for bribery will also likely have to rely on the accounts of subordinates to establish the bribery connections, leaving an opening for defense lawyers to argue that those subordinates were acting on their own accord and without Mr. Adams’s knowledge.

Rana Abbasova, Mr. Adams’ liaison to the Turkish community, appears to be pivotal to establishing that relationship. After her home was searched by the FBI last November, Ms. Abbasova turned against Mr. Adams and began cooperating with the authorities, and several portions of the indictment reference communication between Ms. Abbasova and others as they negotiated free or discounted plane tickets for Mr. Adams.

But if those portions of the case rely on her testimony alone, it could prove challenging for prosecutors, said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former Manhattan chief assistant district attorney and a partner at Agnifilo Law Group.

“If it all comes down to a ‘he said, she said,’” Ms. Friedman Agnifilo said, “that is a little dicey.”

Still another challenge stems from a recent decision by the United States Supreme Court that narrowed the instances in which the bribery statute applies to acts by public officials, a ruling that makes the crime more difficult to prove if the government cannot show that payoffs were made with the attempt to reap a quid pro quo.

Mr. Adams is accused of accepting luxury travel over a period of years before becoming the Democratic nominee for mayor and pressing the Fire Department to sign off on the opening of a new high-rise consulate building for the Turkish government.

Mr. Adams’s defense team will likely challenge the allegation based on the limitations the Supreme Court placed on “official acts,” said Mark D. Chutkow, a former federal prosecutor who led the racketeering case that resulted in the conviction of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

“They’ll argue he wasn’t mayor, or even mayor-elect, when he contacted the Fire Commissioner regarding the Turkish consulate, and he wasn’t directing the Fire Commissioner regarding projects in Manhattan,” he said. “But rather was gathering information on what could be done regarding the Consulate to ‘manage expectations’ of the Turkish officials.”

For these reasons, and based on other recent high-profile prosecutions brought by the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, it was likely that prosecutors would bring additional charges in one or more so-called superseding indictments, the legal experts said.

It would be a “mistake to assume that this is all the government is going to charge,” said Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia Law School professor who worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“One of the things that government counts on an initial indictment doing is shaking loose a whole lot of information from people who will now rightfully start to be concerned that they’ll be in the government’s sights,” Mr. Richman said.

He noted that federal prosecutors are said to be conducting at least three other investigations involving Mr. Adams’s former police commissioner, his first deputy mayor, his former schools chancellor, his deputy mayor for public safety, and others, and said that the indictment of Mr. Adams last week might increase the pressure on anyone involved in those inquiries to come forward as well.

During his recent prosecution of former Senator Robert Menendez, the Democrat from New Jersey, the US attorney’s office in Manhattan initially charged Mr. Menendez with taking bribes in a three-count indictment before adding more than a dozen new charges against him six months later. He was convicted in July on all 16 counts he faced.

“The Southern District of New York continues to investigate up to, and even sometimes during, trial,” said Carrie H. Cohen, a former federal public corruption prosecutor in Manhattan and a former chief of the public integrity unit of the New York attorney general’s office. “It appears, from what we know in the public record, that there are many different branches of the investigation. So time will tell. But the Southern District of New York never stops investigating.”

Bringing charges does not mean prosecutors will win at trial, or even make it that far.

In April 2022, prosecutors with the same office that would indict Mr. Adams accused the former lieutenant governor of New York, Brian Benjamin, of planning to funnel $50,000 in state money to a developer in exchange for campaign contributions. But that December, a federal judge in Manhattan threw out the case, saying that the government had a higher burden when accusing politicians of exchanging favors for political donations, rather than for personal benefit. The dismissal was reversed by an appeals court this year.

Still, accusations of public officials abusing the public trust, especially where public money is involved, are the sorts of cases that can outrage jurors enough that they vote for conviction, said Bennett Capers, a former prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and a professor at the Fordham University School of Law.

“Everybody obviously is innocent until proven guilty,” Mr. Capers said. “But it is hard to read the indictment and not think Eric Adams is cooked.”

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