Federal agents were like, totally getting all up in New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ business, seizing phones and applying for search warrants just days before Justice Department big shots were like, “Nah, drop the corruption case.” This all came out in documents released on Friday, which had been sealed until then.
The documents spill the tea on the criminal case, showing that while Washington officials were backing off, investigators in Manhattan were still going hard. The feds were checking out whether Adams was taking sketchy campaign contributions since the summer of 2021, back when he was still the Brooklyn borough president and everyone knew he was gonna win the mayor’s race that fall.
Adams keeps saying he thinks he got targeted because he criticized Joe Biden’s immigration stuff when he was mayor. The whole investigation became public knowledge in November 2023 when FBI agents swiped Adams’ phones and iPad after an event in Manhattan. Ten months later, he got hit with charges of accepting free travel and shady campaign contributions from folks trying to buy his influence, including a Turkish diplomat.
But on Feb. 10, after Donald Trump took the wheel, new Justice Department peeps told prosecutors to drop the charges. They were all like, “Uh, this case is not helping us with our immigration plans.” This caused chaos in the prosecutor offices in New York and Washington. Some prosecutors bounced, including Danielle Sassoon, the top fed prosecutor in Manhattan.
They were about to hit Adams with more charges for messing with the investigation when the whole thing got shut down. Just before the case got the axe, a judge signed off on searching a phone that some mystery person handed over in response to a subpoena. They also got a warrant to search a crib in Middletown, New York, in connection with the probe into shady donations to Adams’ campaign in 2020. And they wanted to track a mobile phone’s location too. On Dec. 4, a judge said it was all good for federal investigators to search a townhouse in Queens.
The documents were unsealed after The New York Times and the New York Post were like, “Yo, we wanna see those.” The Times argued in court that the public should know what’s up since there wouldn’t be a trial. Adams’ lawyers and the prosecutors were cool with it.
The papers give a sneak peek at how the investigators put together their case by searching electronics and places all over New York and beyond. Turns out, in May 2024, they got the green light to search the condo in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Adams’ sweetheart, Tracey Collins, lives. She used to be a big deal in the city’s Department of Education.
The search was to get five iPhones to see if someone from the Turkish consulate tried to get a kid into a fancy public school. The warrant app didn’t drop Collins’ name but called her Adams’ partner and mentioned that he crashes there sometimes. They also wanted to search Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s spot in Manhattan. An FBI agent noted that Adams spends a lot of nights there, especially on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.
No word from Adams’ peeps on all this, but he’s acting like the case being thrown out is a win. He says he didn’t make a deal with Trump to get off easy. They even kicked it in D.C. recently, talking about infrastructure and social services.
Even though the legal drama is behind him, Adams’ future in politics is shaky. He’s saying he’ll skip the Democratic primary and run as an independent in the general election. Who knows where this rollercoaster is gonna take him next?
