As she fought a losing battle with her superiors over their effort to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan put forward a tantalizing piece of information about the case.
The prosecutor, Danielle R. Sassoon, wrote in a letter to the U.S. attorney general earlier this month that her office had proposed adding a charge of conspiracy to obstruct justice to the five-count indictment the mayor already faced.
The new charge, she wrote, would be “based on evidence that Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the F.B.I.”
Ms. Sassoon provided no details about how Mr. Adams might have tried to obstruct justice. But earlier court filings suggest that the proposed charge related at least in part to an episode in which Mr. Adams met with an aide who, hours later, told a businessman to lie to the F.B.I. about illegal contributions to the mayor’s campaign.
The plan to add a new charge had not been publicly known until Ms. Sassoon’s letter was circulated earlier this month. And it has been largely overlooked in the furor over the Trump administration’s move to dismiss the case, which will most likely render the existing charges of bribery, fraud and illegal foreign campaign contributions moot, along with any possible new accusations.
The motion to dismiss the indictment, filed by Justice Department officials from Washington after Ms. Sassoon refused to do so, was based on the Trump administration’s contention that the case prevented Mr. Adams from assisting with the president’s immigration crackdown. The judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, has yet to rule on the motion, which Ms. Sassoon cast as a quid pro quo, calling it “improper” and “a breathtaking and dangerous precedent.”
With a dismissal likely, Mr. Adams can now run for re-election unencumbered by a pending criminal trial, which had been scheduled for April 21. But the brief mention of the possible new charges — just two sentences in the middle of Ms. Sassoon’s eight-page letter — nonetheless underscores another instance of possible criminal conduct by a mayor whose administration has been wracked by corruption investigations, scandals and resignations.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the case against Mr. Adams, referred questions about it to the Justice Department in Washington. A spokesman there, Chad Gilmartin, did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Adams’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, cited the release of Ms. Sassoon’s letter in a filing Wednesday asking the judge to dismiss the case on the grounds of prosecutorial misconduct. Mr. Spiro wrote that the letter and its release, which he called a leak, were “the last acts of desperation in defense of a meritless case that never should have been pursued in the first place.”
He cited no evidence, however, that the letter had been made public by the government, and he did not specify whether he thought it had been leaked by the federal prosecutors in Manhattan who brought the Adams case, by the Justice Department officials in Washington who are seeking to dismiss it or by someone else. Judge Ho has rejected Mr. Spiro’s previous requests to explore his unproven accusations about government leaks in the case.
Regarding the possible obstruction of justice count, Mr. Spiro noted that the initial indictment contained “facts surrounding this purported charge” but did not include the charge itself.
The potential obstruction conspiracy charge mentioned by Ms. Sassoon appeared to relate at least in part to Mohamed Bahi, Mr. Adams’s former liaison to the city’s Muslim community.
Mr. Bahi was charged in October with witness tampering and destruction of evidence related to the mayor’s case. The charges were based on what prosecutors said were his attempts to thwart the investigation of straw donations — those made by one person in the name of another — to Mr. Adams’s 2021 mayoral campaign.
The criminal complaint against Mr. Bahi and the indictment of Mr. Adams described two meetings in which, prosecutors said, the aide — while in close communication with the mayor — urged a businessman and four of his employees to lie about their participation in the straw donor scheme when they were interviewed by F.B.I. agents.
The first meeting, on June 13 of last year, occurred after the businessman called Mr. Bahi to say the F.B.I. had searched his home, according to the complaint. That afternoon, Mr. Bahi went to the man’s office, where he said he had just spoken with Mr. Adams.
The businessman told Mr. Bahi that he had lied to the F.B.I. about making donations in the names of four employees, the complaint said. Mr. Bahi urged him and the employees to keep lying, and he photographed the grand jury subpoenas the agents had given them.
A section of the indictment charging Mr. Adams also describes some of the same conduct by Mr. Bahi, including another visit the next day during which Mr. Bahi told the businessman that he had met with Mr. Adams that morning, “and that they had left their cellphones outside the room in which they met so that it would be ‘safe’ to talk.” Mr. Bahi said “that although Adams was upset” about the F.B.I. visit, he believed the businessman “would not cooperate with law enforcement,” according to the indictment.
It is unclear whether Mr. Bahi told prosecutors in Manhattan anything about Mr. Adams’s involvement in those events, or whether he might have testified against the mayor if the case had gone to trial. The businessman later admitted to the straw donor scheme in an interview with investigators, the complaint said.
In early February, prosecutors said in a court filing that Mr. Bahi had agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of conspiracy related to the campaign finance scheme. But now, with the dismissal of the charges against the mayor likely, it is unclear how Mr. Bahi’s case will be resolved.
Mr. Bahi’s lawyer, Derek Adams, declined to comment.
The indictment of Mr. Adams and the complaint against Mr. Bahi also described what the authorities said were efforts by the mayor and his staff to cover up other possible crimes — though it was unclear whether that conduct rose to the level of a crime.
The indictment of the mayor accused him of “creating fake paper trails” and instructing others to do so to make it appear as if he had paid for travel benefits that he had received for free from Turkish Airlines, which is controlled by the Turkish government. The charges also accused him of abusing his office in exchange for the travel and illegal campaign contributions.
The mayor used Signal, an encrypted messaging app that allows users to set messages to automatically disappear, and encouraged others to follow his lead, the complaint against Mr. Bahi said. Mr. Bahi used the app to communicate with the mayor, and he deleted it from his phone in the hours before it was seized by federal agents, according to the complaint.
Another former Adams staff member, Rana Abbasova, also deleted encrypted messaging apps she had used to communicate with Mr. Adams and others when F.B.I. agents came to search her home in late 2023, according to the indictment. Ms. Abbasova, referred to in the indictment as “the Adams Staffer,” excused herself to a bathroom while she was talking to the agents and removed the apps from her phone, the indictment said.
Ms. Abbasova later began cooperating with the investigation. The indictment of the mayor described a text conversation that prosecutors said Ms. Abbasova had with Mr. Adams as she helped to arrange discounted flights given to him by Turkish Airlines.
To be on the safe side, she wrote, “please delete all messages you send me,” according to the indictment.
Mr. Adams replied: “Always do.”
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