Mayor Adams suffered a setback in his federal corruption case late Thursday as a judge rejected his request for a formal inquiry into claims that federal authorities have leaked confidential information to the press about his prosecution.
In a 21-page decision, Manhattan Federal Court Judge Dale Ho ruled Adams’ lawyers didn’t lay out convincing enough of a case that the source of certain media reports about his case could only have been the prosecutors who indicted him or FBI officials.
“The Court takes seriously Mayor Adams’s allegations, but ultimately concludes that he has failed to make a prima facie showing that the Government was the source of these disclosures,” Ho wrote, referring to a legal standard that had to be met for the mayor’s request to be granted.
Ho reasoned that the news reports in question, most of them published by the New York Times, could have been based on information provided by various individuals outside of the FBI and the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which is prosecuting Adams.
“Mayor Adams has failed to show that Government attorneys or their agents, as opposed to other individuals, were the source of information in the articles,” he wrote.
Ho’s ruling came after Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, argued in a filing last month that only the U.S. attorney’s office or its agents could be the source of what he described as classified grand jury material about the mayor’s case reported by various media outlets, including the Daily News. The reports he cited as evidence included those predicting the timing of the Sept. 26 unsealing of Adams’ indictment.
To that end, Spiro asked Ho to schedule an evidentiary hearing into those allegations and slap prosecutors with sanctions, potentially as severe as dismissal of the mayor’s five-count indictment.
Though he rejected the demands for sanctions and an evidentiary hearing, Ho suggested he could be open to revisiting the issue at some point, writing: “In any event, the Court need not resolve these issues today.”
Spiro, a celebrity attorney retained by Adams in late September to represent him in the corruption case, declined to immediately comment Friday via a spokeswoman.
Ho’s ruling came hours before Adams was expected to appear in Manhattan Federal Court for a Friday afternoon hearing on a separate motion filed by Spiro seeking the dismissal of the bribery count of his indictment.
Spiro has claimed prosecutors failed to meet the legal standard for that charge and that Ho should therefore throw it out.
Adams, the first sitting New York City mayor in modern history to be under criminal indictment, is facing charges alleging he solicited and accepted bribes and illegal campaign contributions from Turkish government operatives and others in exchange for political favors.
The bribes came in the form of luxury travel benefits and other perks that Adams is accused of accepting in exchange for helping Turkish government officials with certain issues, like pressuring the FDNY to resolve building safety violations at the country’s Manhattan consulate, his indictment claims.
Adams has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Spiro has mocked the indictment as “not a real case,” arguing that what the feds call bribes are actually nothing more than “courtesies” commonly awarded to politicians in the U.S.
“They get corner suites. They get better tables at restaurants. They get free appetizers. They have their ice tea filled up,” Spiro said last month.
