Since being sworn into office again, President Trump has granted clemency to the rioters who attacked the Capitol four years ago in his name and sought to purge the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of those who prosecuted them, and him.
Trump appointees at the department dropped campaign finance charges against a Republican member of Congress and stepped back from investigating another Republican lawmaker who introduced legislation that would allow Mr. Trump to serve a third term. Fulfilling a campaign promise to libertarians, the president pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who ran Silk Road, an online marketplace where illegal drugs were peddled.
Mr. Trump has long viewed the justice system as a battleground on which power is deployed for transactional political or personal ends. During his first term and more pointedly during his four years out of office, he saw himself on the receiving end of that dynamic. And now that he is back in office, he is using his authority to reward allies and punish enemies.
The demand by his appointees at the Justice Department for the dismissal of corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York over the objection of career prosecutors is just the most visible and consequential expression so far of the transactional nature of his approach to the justice system.
In doing so, Mr. Trump’s team precipitated a serious crisis inside the department’s besieged unit responsible for investigating and prosecuting political corruption, and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office. The astonishing move also drew Mr. Adams, who had begun to cultivate a close relationship to Mr. Trump, closer to the White House — at a time when the president is trying to assert dominance over big-city Democrats who might resist his push for immigration enforcement.
On Friday, hours before department officials signed off on a motion seeking the Adams dismissal, the mayor appeared on “Fox and Friends” with Mr. Trump’s border czar, Thomas Homan, to say he was not “standing in the way” of deportation efforts, unlike many of his fellow Democrats.
“I’m collaborating,” Mr. Adams said.
Mr. Trump, speaking from the Oval Office, told reporters he had not asked for the case against Mr. Adams to be dropped and knew nothing about it. But after the indictment landed in September, he criticized it at length, and in December, after his own election, he mused about being open to a pardon for Mr. Adams. Last month, the pair had a well-publicized meeting at his golf club in Palm Beach.
Emil Bove III, the Trump criminal defense lawyer turned top Justice Department official who demanded the dismissal, has said that the decision was based, in part, on restoring Mr. Adams’s security clearances so he could assist in immigration enforcement.
It is one “of the important priorities President Trump has laid out for us to make America safe again,” he wrote in a memo, which asserted that the request had nothing to do with a legal assessment of the case. Another key reason for the decision, Mr. Bove said, was the case’s timing. He claimed the indictment’s arrival, eight months before the June 2025 Democratic mayor primary, gave “appearances” of election interference.
Danielle R. Sassoon, elevated by the administration as the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, quit rather than execute that order, saying the deal shattered prosecutorial norms and suggesting the move was a quid pro quo.
“Rather than be rewarded, Adams’s advocacy should be called out for what it is: an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case,” she wrote in a blistering letter to the new U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi.
“The nature of the bargain,” she added, was “laid bare.”
Mr. Adams’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, has vehemently denied that there was any quid pro quo arranged. Mr. Bove has accused a Biden-appointed prosecutor in Manhattan of engaging in a witch hunt against Mr. Adams for personal political gain — without providing any proof and without contesting the validity of the evidence that led to the mayor’s indictment.
Seeking to drop the Adams case gave the Trump administration a valuable chit within the nation’s largest city, said James Davidson, a former agent who leads a group called the F.B.I. Integrity Project, which aims to reform and protect the bureau.
“In this case, they are closing a worthy investigation against a nominal political opponent, in order to make him a political friend,” he said. “Mayor Adams’s political capital is valuable to them, and it’s essentially an I.O.U., either implicitly or explicitly.”
While the alliance between Mr. Trump and Mr. Adams is new, its origins are rooted in the defiant and transactional credo of Mr. Trump’s legal and political mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn: Never admit weakness or fault, wear down your enemies, make any alliance needed to dodge a disaster or seal a deal — and use whatever leverage you have to maximum advantage.
Mr. Adams is a centrist, law-and-order Democrat who once said he felt like the “Biden of Brooklyn.” But he is a former Republican who interacted with a different version of the Brooklyn political machine that Mr. Trump did, one built on an emerging Black power base. And Mr. Adams, too, seems to be playing by Mr. Cohn’s rules.
Despite the mayor’s recent shift closer to Mr. Trump, including a pre-inauguration meeting near Mar-a-Lago, the two men were not allies at the outset of the federal investigation that resulted in charges against him last September.
Mr. Trump has used the apparatus of the justice system to transform Mr. Adams into one. His administration appears to have wielded the case against Mr. Adams as leverage to extract cooperation on immigration enforcement, which is among Mr. Trump’s highest political priorities.
The president is hardly shy about conveying what he thinks “should” happen in various situations. And for decades, he has surrounded himself with people who do not need to be explicitly directed to do his bidding.
In Mr. Bove, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Mr. Trump has found an enforcer who will translate his whims into action and serve as a heat shield for the White House and for Ms. Bondi, who in public has mostly kept her distance from the Adams firestorm.
Mr. Trump has long regarded the legal system as a tool to be leveraged to his advantage — even over the past several years when it appeared to be the possible instrument of his destruction.
He was indicted four times and has strong views about how the system works. He has argued, without offering evidence, that the cases against him were conceived at the very top of the federal government: coordinated by his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In fact, in many federal prosecutors’ offices, including that in Manhattan, cases are often built from the bottom up, with line prosecutors eventually getting sign-off on their investigations from top officials.
Ms. Sassoon, who clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, noted in her letter that this was true of the Adams case, explaining that the previous U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, had been less involved in it than even she had assumed.
“The investigation began before Mr. Williams took office,” she wrote, adding that he had not managed it day to day and that, once charges were recommended, they were approved by a host of lower-level prosecutors before he eventually ratified the decision.
Still, Justice Department leaders can urge that cases be brought. In their dueling letters, Ms. Sassoon and Mr. Bove both quoted a famous 1940 speech from Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, a meditation on prosecutorial power.
The prosecutor “can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations,” Mr. Jackson noted. He warned, “While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
In short, prosecutorial power is an extraordinary weapon — one which is now being wielded by officials who understand Mr. Trump’s desires, and are prepared to act on them.
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