Elections

A defense lawyer for Mayor Eric Adams, Alex Spiro, celebrated the Justice Department’s push to drop federal corruption charges against the mayor on Monday, saying that the government’s case had relied on “fanfare and sensational claims” but little evidence.But such statements were at odds with the reasoning given by the Justice Department official who ordered the dismissal. That official, Emil Bove, wrote that the decision had been made “without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” Instead, he said, it was driven by the indictment’s proximity to the upcoming mayoral election and what he said was its interference with Mr. Adams’s ability to aid in Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.The assertions of the mayor’s innocence also conflicted with evidence that federal prosecutors in Manhattan described when they indicted him last September, and in filings since. They had detailed luxury travel arrangements worth more than $100,000 — to India, France, China, Ghana and elsewhere — they said Mr. Adams had accepted, primarily from Turkish Airlines, in exchange for taking official action.Mr. Adams, a Democrat who is running for re-election, was indicted on five counts of bribery conspiracy, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Prosecutors accused him of helping fast-track the approval of a new high-rise Turkish Consulate in Manhattan despite safety concerns, in exchange for unlawful donations and free and heavily discounted luxury travel.Prosecutors quoted text messages about these dealings involving an Adams aide who had helped to arrange that travel and was cooperating with the investigation. And they cited Mr. Adams’s personal communications with city Fire Department officials who they said he had pressured to sign off on the consulate building, and then with a Turkish official who had helped arrange for the gifts of his luxury travel.Prosecutors who brought the charges against Mr. Adams said last month that they had continued to “uncover additional criminal conduct” by the mayor.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesMr. Adams forwarded the Turkish consul general, who had helped arrange for his travel, a note from the city’s fire commissioner: “Letter being drafted now. Everything should be good to go Monday morning,” it said.“You are a true friend of Turkey,” the official responded.The indictment also cited numerous interactions that Mr. Adams or his aides had with foreign businesspeople while seeking to collect illegal foreign contributions for his campaign as part of what prosecutors said was a straw donor scheme that enabled him to defraud the city’s program for public matching funds.In recent weeks, prosecutors said in a court filing that they had gathered additional evidence of Mr. Adams’s criminality. More

The criminal case against Mayor Eric Adams’s former chief adviser, who is charged with participating in a long-running bribery and money-laundering scheme, will proceed despite a request by the Justice Department to drop corruption charges against Mr. Adams.The case against the adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, and her son, Glenn Martin II, was brought by Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, who accused the two of intervening with city regulators on behalf of two businessmen in exchange for $100,000 in bribes.Mr. Trump has no authority to intervene in the case against Ms. Lewis-Martin and Mr. Martin, which was brought in state criminal court in December. The president’s jurisdiction is limited to federal cases, like the one against Mr. Adams.Elizabeth Glazer, a former federal prosecutor who led the mayor’s office of criminal justice under Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, said it was “worth considering whether or not Bragg may have charges that he may be thinking of bringing” against Mr. Adams.In the case involving Ms. Lewis-Martin and her son, the indictment against them says, the businessmen, Mayank Dwivedi and Raizada Vaid, were seeking help pushing construction projects through the city’s Buildings Department.Ms. Lewis-Martin and Mr. Martin received the bribes in the form of checks that Mr. Martin cashed and used to buy a Porsche, according to prosecutors. Ms. Lewis-Martin, the indictment says, used her official position to “illegally influence Department of Buildings and other city decisions” in exchange for the cash and other benefits for herself and her son.Both are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday. More

Lawmakers were ready to pass a bill to delay a special election in New York State, but Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is in discussions with President Trump on congestion pricing, sidelined it.Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York pressured state legislative leaders on Monday to call off a vote on a bill designed to hobble Republicans’ House majority, frustrating fellow Democrats who were prepared to approve it.Neither Ms. Hochul nor leaders of the State Senate or Assembly gave any public explanation for the 11th-hour postponement. But in private conversations, the governor told them she was seeking to gain leverage in separate negotiations with President Trump over the future of the state’s new congestion pricing program, according to two officials familiar with the matter.If lawmakers had followed through, the vote would almost certainly have antagonized Mr. Trump by giving Ms. Hochul the power to delay until November a special election to fill the House seat that will be vacated by Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, Mr. Trump’s chosen U.N. ambassador, when she is confirmed by the Senate. A monthslong vacancy would deprive House Republicans of a crucial vote as they try to muscle Mr. Trump’s legislative agenda through Congress.Republicans currently control 218 seats in the House, including Ms. Stefanik’s in New York’s North Country, to the Democrats’ 215. (Republicans are expected to pick up two more seats in Florida in special elections in April.)It was not immediately clear if Mr. Trump had expressed dissatisfaction about the bill to the governor, causing her to call off the vote on the special election timing, or if Ms. Hochul was being strategic by wanting to hold a bargaining chit in their talks about congestion pricing. A spokesman for Ms. Hochul declined to comment.The governor’s intervention threw the future of the special election proposal into doubt and risked alienating a key ally: Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top House Democrat who had been aggressively lobbying the governor and state lawmakers to adopt it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

I asked Senator Chuck Schumer what Americans want from Democrats right now.“They want us to beat Trump and stop this shit,” he told me. “And that’s what we’re doing.”It was a welcome sign of life. For three weeks now, President Trump and the world’s richest man have ransacked from within a democracy that took 250 years to build. The country faces a second crisis: an opposition party that doesn’t seem to know how to respond.With no obvious party standard-bearer, the job of leading Washington Democrats in the second Trump era has fallen largely to Mr. Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the minority leaders of the Senate and the House. It’s been a rocky start.Mr. Schumer and Mr. Jeffries are seasoned dealmakers. But in the minority and facing a president bent on laying waste to the very meaning of the U.S. Congress, both men have struggled to shed the familiar rhythms of business as usual.On Monday, they sent letters to congressional Democrats about using litigation and oversight inquiries to fight Mr. Trump’s agenda. There was some substance. But it’s hard to convey that America is in peril through a letter.Last week they touted a bill from House Democrats aimed at barring Elon Musk from having access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, even though it was clear — at least to state attorneys general who have sued — that Mr. Musk’s access violated the Constitution as well as existing laws, including the Privacy Act of 1974. At times, Mr. Jeffries has sounded like someone who has given up. “What leverage do we have?” he told reporters at his weekly news conference on Friday. “They control the House, the Senate and the presidency. It’s their government.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The Justice Department has asked prosecutors to drop the criminal charges that had loomed over Mayor Eric Adams, but what about all of the continuing investigations involving his close associates?The short answer: Many of the cases have been thrown into uncertainty, and the next steps will largely be decided by prosecutors.The Adams administration has been engulfed by at least five separate federal corruption inquiries. Over the past six months, several City Hall officials have resigned or have had their phones seized by federal agents, destabilizing the highest echelons of New York City’s government.For the people in the mayor’s orbit who may be cooperating against him in hopes of reducing their own criminal exposure, prosecutors could decide to drop any charges against them as well, to avoid any claims of unfair treatment, legal experts said.“Now that the main guy is gone, there will be some level of pressure to reconsider the less-culpable people and decide whether it makes sense to continue to prosecute them,” said Mark Chutkow, a former federal prosecutor in Detroit who supervised corruption cases against local officials.Rana Abbasova, the mayor’s former liaison to the Turkish community, has been cooperating with prosecutors after federal agents searched her home, The New York Times has reported.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Eric Trump, a son of the president and the top family executive at the Trump Organization, which manages the family’s New York City office buildings, said Mayor Eric Adams of New York had always treated the family company well.His remarks came in a radio interview last week in which he discussed the criminal case against Mr. Adams and the debate over whether the criminal charges against him might be dropped or he would be pardoned by President Trump.“This guy just never, never got in the way,” Eric Trump said in a radio interview last week, referring to Mr. Adams. “He never tried to throw our company out in New York. He was always supportive of everything that we did. And I can appreciate that.”Instead, Eric Trump said in the interview with Sid Rosenberg, on Sid and Friends in the Morning on WABC, that Mr. Adams had been unfairly targeted by the Justice Department because he challenged the Biden administration on immigration issues. Eric Trump did not provide evidence to back up the assertion.“No one believes that they’re indicting somebody over getting an upgraded ticket on Turkish Airways,” Eric Trump said, referring incorrectly to Turkish Airlines. Mr. Adams is accused of receiving thousands of dollars’ worth of travel benefits over several years, including upgrades on Turkish Airlines. “And I can also appreciate somebody that had the guts to go against the Washington, D.C., machine.”Eric Trump participated in the meeting that President Trump had last month at Mar-a-Lago with Mr. Adams. The mayor said after the meeting that the criminal case was not discussed, but people briefed on the meeting said Mr. Trump did speak generally about what he described as the “weaponized” Justice Department. More

President Trump signed a full pardon on Monday for Rod R. Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of corruption in 2011 in a scheme to sell a Senate seat being vacated by Barack Obama.“It’s my honor to do it,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office of the pardon. “I’ve watched him. He was set up by a lot of bad people, some of the same people that I had to deal with.”Mr. Blagojevich, who served as Illinois governor from 2003 to 2009, did not immediately comment.The pardon was the latest overture between the president and the former governor, who is still known in Chicago simply as “Blago.” Just five years ago, Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence, allowing him to be released from a Colorado prison after eight years and return to his family home on the North Side of Chicago.“It’s been a long, long journey,” Mr. Blagojevich said in February 2020, speaking to reporters from his front door as he repeatedly dabbed his face with a handkerchief. “I’m bruised, I’m battered and I’m bloody.” (He had nicked himself shaving, unaccustomed to standard razors while in prison.)The former governor insisted then that he had broken no laws and that he was the victim of an overzealous Justice Department during the Obama administration. Federal prosecutors said Mr. Blagojevich’s conduct — trying to benefit from the appointment of a Senate seat, among other actions — was so abysmal that it “would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.”But he found a sympathetic audience in Mr. Trump. While Mr. Blagojevich was awaiting trial 15 years ago, he made appeals to Mr. Trump, appearing on “The Celebrity Apprentice” when Mr. Trump was the host. And Mr. Blagojevich’s wife, Patti, spoke on Fox News while her husband was in prison, a move that seemed calculated to grab Mr. Trump’s attention.Mr. Blagojevich was the fourth governor of Illinois in recent decades to serve time in prison, in a state that has seen its share of corruption charges levied against elected officials from the Chicago City Council to the Statehouse in Springfield.Michael J. Madigan, the former speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives, is currently on federal trial in Chicago, facing racketeering and bribery charges. A jury has been deliberating for nine days so far without a verdict. More

The president’s suggestion that he would seek to stay in office beyond the constitutional limit comes as he has pushed to expand executive authority.Standing inside the Capitol for the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Trump declared his plans to resurrect an idea he had in his first term: to create a national garden filled with statues of notable Americans.The choice of who would be included would be “the president’s sole opinion,” Mr. Trump said, chuckling. And he was giving himself “a 25-year period” to make the selections.A short time later, at a breakfast at a Washington hotel, Mr. Trump flicked again at the prospect that his time in office could extend beyond two four-year terms.“They say I can’t run again; that’s the expression,” he said. “Then somebody said, I don’t think you can. Oh.”At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Mr. Trump spoke of giving himself a “25-year period” to choose statues for a national garden.Eric Lee/The New York TimesJust eight days after he won a second term, Mr. Trump — whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory from being certified — mused about whether he could have a third presidential term, which is barred by the Constitution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More