Mayor of New York City Eric Adams leaves federal court on September 27, 2024 in Lower Manhattan, New York City after pleading not guilty to corruption charges of bribery and wire fraud in connection with alleged illegal contributions he received during his 2021 mayoral campaign (zz/Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx).
Eric Adams (D) and his criminal defense team have taken their first steps in challenging the NYC mayor’s bombshell federal bribery indictment by calling attention to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case involving another mayor.
Adams, who stands accused of bribery, wire fraud, and illegally soliciting foreign donations from “secret patrons” in Turkey for his 2021 mayoral campaign, specifically took aim at the bribery count on Monday by asserting that the DOJ and federal prosecutors weren’t listening when SCOTUS drew a distinction between “gratuities” and “bribes” in the case of James Snyder, a mayor who received a $13,000 check from a trucking company a year after he awarded the company contracts. Though Snyder was convicted by a federal jury, the high court reversed the conviction in a 6-3 decision led by the conservative majority.
“Section 666 proscribes bribes to state and local officials but does not make it a crime for those officials to accept gratuities for their past acts,” SCOTUS held.
For defense lawyer Alex Spiro and Adams, the prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York are once again going down the same walled-off path.
“The indictment in this case alleges a ‘bribery’ scheme that does not meet the definition of bribery and indeed does not amount to a federal crime at all,” the Monday motion to dismiss said. “Just three months ago, the Supreme Court rebuked the Justice Department for adopting an ‘unfathomable’ interpretation of the federal-program bribery statute, 18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(B), that ‘would leave state and local officials entirely at sea to guess about what gifts they are allowed to accept under federal law, with the threat of up to 10 years in federal prison if they happen to guess wrong.’ Snyder v. United States, 144 S. Ct. 1947, 1958 (2024). As the Court admonished prosecutors, ‘[t]hat is not how federal criminal law works.””
“Yet here goes the Department again,” Spiro wrote. “It appears that after years of casting about for something, anything, to support a federal charge against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, prosecutors had settled on a theory that depended on the Department’s longstanding view that Section 666 criminalizes gratuities, including gifts meant to curry favor with governmental officials but not linked to any specific question or matter. When the Supreme Court rejected that interpretation in June, prosecutors simply added a few vague allegations and called their theory bribery—’a far more serious offense than gratuities[.]’”
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While prosecutors have claimed that Adams “sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the defense is making the case that the government has failed to “allege a crime” of bribery under the relevant statute.
Before Adams was even sworn in to office as mayor, he allegedly worked behind the scenes in 2021 on behalf of his Turkish benefactors to lean on the FDNY to “permit the Turkish Consulate to occupy a skyscraper” — the Turkish House — “that had not passed a fire safety inspection” in exchange for “luxury travel benefits,” but the defense argues there was no real pressure campaign and no official acts.
“Without any basis to assert that Adams actually pressured anyone at FDNY to issue the [temporary certificate of occupancy] TCO, the indictment essentially suggests that officials might have felt pressure because Adams was likely to be elected Mayor, even if Adams did nothing to engender that feeling,” the defense said. “But that is legally insufficient for liability under Section 666. It goes almost without saying that a bribery defendant must intend to perform an official act.”
Adams himself has called the charges “entirely false” and “based on lies.”
“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be targeted. And a target I became,” said Adams, the first sitting NYC mayor to face federal criminal charges.
Read the motion to dismiss here.
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