Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the continuing fallout from the Justice Department’s order to drop federal corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams. We’ll also get details on a plea deal for the longtime Trump adviser Stephen Bannon.
Mayor Eric Adams made it sound as if the federal corruption case against him had already been dismissed.
It has not. Danielle Sassoon, the acting head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, still must decide whether to carry out an order from the No. 2 official in the Justice Department to drop the charges “as soon as is practicable.” That would involve filing a motion with Judge Dale Ho, who is overseeing the case in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and would have only limited power to reject it.
But Adams, in a six-minute speech from City Hall, sought to move past the charges that had clouded his administration for months. “I am no longer facing legal questions,” he said at one point, adding that he had been “dragged through this unfortunate prosecution.”
The order to drop the charges did not clear Adams of wrongdoing. Emil Bove III, the Justice Department official who sent the memo to Sassoon, noted that he had not assessed the evidence. He said his concern was that the case could interfere with the Democratic primary for mayor in June and the general election in November.
Bove also said that Adams could be distracted from focusing on helping President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
My colleague Emma G. Fitzsimmons writes that Adams did not discuss whether the potential resolution of the case would put him in Trump’s debt. Adams has gone to considerable lengths to cultivate a relationship with the president, visiting him in Florida and attending his inauguration in Washington last month. On Monday, before the memo about the charges became public, Adams urged high-ranking city officials to refrain from criticizing the Trump administration publicly, expressing concern that doing so could put federal funding for the city’s priorities at risk.
For his part, Trump has said that he and Adams were both “persecuted” by prosecutors in the Biden administration and that he would consider pardoning Adams.
The directive to drop the charges is not the only way that the Trump administration appears to be using presidential power to shape New York City’s future. He has threatened to “kill” the month-old congestion pricing program, calling it “really horrible” and “destructive to New York.” He said he was prepared to sue to challenge its sanctuary city laws. And, in an interview with The New York Post, he complained about bike lanes and e-bikes that he said were “whacking people.”
My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that even his critics concede that Trump has emerged as a full-fledged political force who can reshape some of the city’s most significant policy debates.
“I think he sees opportunities today in a way that he didn’t eight years ago,” said Howard Wolfson, a Democratic operative and former deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg. Wolfson added that an “unprecedentedly weak mayor and governor” had left an “enormous power vacuum.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove Adams, was asked repeatedly at an unrelated news conference on Tuesday whether he was compromised and could be trusted to make decisions that put New Yorkers’ best interests first.
“I truly do not know,” she said, adding that he needed to take steps to “make sure that people have confidence” in him. But she said she would not oust him because overriding the will of voters who sent him to City Hall “does not feel like something that’s very democratic.”
Weather
Expect cloudy conditions with a chance of snow early and temperatures in the high 30s. Tonight, a chance of snow and sleet and then rain, with temperatures remaining in the 30s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended. (Lincoln’s Birthday)
The latest New York news
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A coveted endorsement: Representative Dan Goldman of Brooklyn endorsed State Senator Zellnor Myrie, who is running in the Democratic mayoral primary. Goldman’s endorsement could help Myrie emerge from a pack of progressive Democrats seeking to replace Adams.
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FEMA official is fired: The Trump administration fired the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s chief financial officer and three others after Elon Musk misleadingly claimed that the agency had used disaster-relief funds for migrant services in New York City.
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“I was dying”: The author Salman Rushdie testified about the moment when an assailant stabbed him as he was about to begin a lecture in 2022. The man on trial for the attack, Hadi Matar, largely avoided looking at Rushdie.
Other news
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Keeping the show moving: For 25 years, Ruthlyn Salomons’s job has been to oversee the people and puppets of “The Lion King” on Broadway. “Everything in the show moves,” says Salomons, the show’s resident dance supervisor.
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Best in Show in Manhattan: The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show has returned to Midtown after two years in Tarrytown, N.Y., and two years at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens. Of the 2,500 dogs competing, only one will be best in show.
Bannon pleads guilty to fraud but won’t go to jail
Judge April Newbauer asked the defendant if he understood the terms of what he was agreeing to. “Yes, your honor,” replied the defendant, Stephen Bannon, a longtime adviser to President Trump.
Bannon was pleading guilty to a single count of defrauding donors who gave money they believed would go toward building a wall at the southern border. He will not serve jail time. His plea deal said that he was being given a three-year conditional discharge, meaning that he will be sent to prison only if he commits another offense.
Bannon — wearing his usual brown zippered jacket and a black shirt — was less circumspect outside the courthouse than in Judge Newbauer’s courtroom. He said that the “existential threat to President Trump’s administration” was in New York City. He said that Attorney General Pam Bondi should open a criminal investigation into the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who had brought the case against him and also won a felony conviction against Trump.
Bannon also attacked the state attorney general, Letitia James, whose office brought the civil fraud case that led to a $454 million judgment against Trump.
Bondi said last month that Bragg was a target of a working group aimed at rooting out “abuses of the criminal justice process.” There is no indication that any of the group’s targets had violated the law.
In the border wall case, prosecutors said than Bannon had funneled more than $100,000 to the president of We Build the Wall, the nonprofit group that raised more than $25 million for a barrier between the United States and Mexico. But prosecutors said that We Build the Wall’s officers conspired to channel money to themselves, even though Bannon had told a fund-raising event in 2019, “Remember, all the money you give goes to building the wall.”
Bannon, who as recently as last month had called the case a “political prosecution,” had been scheduled to go on trial on March 4. He was facing five felony counts, including money laundering and conspiracy charges, and faced a maximum sentence of five to 15 years on the most serious charge.
Trump pardoned Bannon in a similar federal case in 2021. The prosecutors in Manhattan filed their case a year later. If their case had gone to trial, they probably would have needed to depend on documents gathered for the federal case and the evidence that federal prosecutors had presented to a separate grand jury in Manhattan.
But those officials now answer to Bondi. Bragg, in a statement, did not address the question of relying on federal law enforcement officials who might no longer be permitted to cooperate. Bragg said the plea deal had achieved “our primary goal: to protect New York’s charities and New Yorkers’ charitable giving from fraud.”
Bannon’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, celebrated the deal. He said that he would have been hard pressed to win an acquittal before a Manhattan jury if the case had gone to trial. Bannon’s co-defendants in the federal case were sentenced to years behind bars.
METROPOLITAN diary
Coming and Going
Dear Diary:
It was 5:30 a.m., and I was cycling up First Avenue to meet my bike group in Central Park. The city’s early shift was clocking in: doormen hosing down sidewalks, food vendors setting up their carts, doctors in scrubs streaming into the N.Y.U. hospital.
At a red light in Kips Bay, I pulled up beside a college-age man in jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt. He was swaying slightly.
“Hey,” he called out, squinting at my bike shorts and helmet. “Are you just starting your day or ending it?”
“Starting,” I said. “You?”
He grinned and raised an empty hand in a phantom toast.
“Ending,” he said. “But I think we’re both crazy.”
The light turned green, and we parted ways: he toward his bed, and I toward my morning ride.
— Casey Fenster
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Adams Seeks to Move Past Charges as Questions Remain About Trump’s Sway appeared first on New York Times.
