A federal judge canceled New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption trial on Friday and appointed counsel to advise the court on the Justice Department’s contentious request–at Trump’s behest–to drop charges against the Democratic mayor.
According to Time Magazine, the order from Ho means that he will not decide whether or not to dismiss the case until the middle of March.
The judge appointed Paul Clement, a former U.S. Solicitor General in George W. Bush’s administration, to present arguments regarding the United States government’s request to drop the charges.
As Ho writes in his order, courts are typically “aided in their decision-making through our system of adversarial testing, which can be particularly helpful in cases presenting unusual fact patterns or in cases of great public importance.”
Since there was no presentation of an adversarial position to the Justice Department during a hearing on Feb. 19, the absence of such a position made it necessary to appoint Clement to help the judge reach an appropriate decision regarding the case, which is of great public interest.
According to Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove, the request to drop the charges was put forth because a trial would come too close to the reelection campaign of Adams and would also keep him from helping Trump’s law-and-order priorities.
This argument has, however, led to speculation from legal experts that the only way for Adams to escape a trial is if he agrees to assist the Trump Administration in rounding up illegal immigrants in New York City.
This is largely the reasoning that former interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon provided in her resignation letter, wherein she accused Bove of promising Adams a dismissal of his case if he helped with the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement efforts.
According to The Associated Press, Judge Ho, who is a former civil rights attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, is not rushing to a decision because he wants to have as much information as possible at his disposal before making a choice regarding whether or not to continue the trial of Adams.
As David D. Cole, the former national legal director for the ACLU, where Ho ran the Voting Rights Project for 10 years before joining the federal bench in 2023, told the AP, this course of action is standard for him.
“Dale Ho is one of the very best lawyers I’ve ever worked with. He is diligent, careful and unstinting in his pursuit of justice,” Cole said, Cole is now a law and public policy professor at Georgetown University. “And, as may be relevant here, he is someone who fully appreciates both the limits and the responsibilities of his role.”
According to The New York Times, also on Feb. 21, New York City sued the Trump Administration after the city discovered that it was missing $80.5 million, which the Biden Administration sent the city to offset the costs of sheltering the city’s migrant population.
In their lawsuit, the city described the recoup of funds by the Trump Administration as “lawless” and a “money grab” of the funds which had been previously granted by Congress and allocated through the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Adams, who has been accused of being used as a pawn by the Trump Administration, appeared to fight back against this likely overreach of the executive branch, as he issued a statement decrying the theft of taxpayer monies.
“The $80 million that FEMA approved, paid, and then rescinded — after the city spent more than $7 billion in the last three years — is the bare minimum our taxpayers deserve,” Adams said in a statement. “And that’s why we’re going to work to ensure our city’s residents get every dollar they are owed.”
Brad Lander, the New York City Comptroller, asserted in a letter to the city’s Finance Department that this was just another episode of federal overreach being facilitated by Elon Musk and his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency.
“This withdrawal is just one component of an escalating series of measures by which Musk and DOGE are weaponizing government payments to support unchecked federal executive power, in violation of the law,” Lander wrote.
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