After federal authorities indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams with corruption charges, they continued to gather evidence and was expanding its criminal case against him, according to legal papers released on Friday.
The Department of Justice obeyed a court order from the federal judge in the now-dismissed case against Adams, and released more than 1,700 pages of unsealed evidence against Adams and his alleged co-conspirators.
The documents includes search warrants, sworn statements by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and other materials, according to the New York Times.
They offered a rough sketch of an investigation that began in August 2021 focused on the mayor’s fund-raising and his connections to the government of Turkey. Most of the names of people ensnared in the inquiry were redacted, including that of the person whose phone was searched in February, and much of what was in the documents had already been publicly disclosed, according to the paper.
That said, some of the records contained details that had not previously been known.
One affidavit suggested that federal agents had considered trying to seize the mayor’s electronic devices at the finish line of the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5, 2023. Instead, they approached him the next night outside an event in Greenwich Village and seized the devices after telling his security detail to step aside, the paper reported.
But after they did so, an FBI agent wrote in a different affidavit, it appeared that Adams — whose chief fund-raiser’s home had been searched only days earlier — tried to obstruct their efforts to obtain his personal cellphone, the Times reported.
In addition, the mayor also had seven cell phones, according to Hell Gate.
Another filing said the mayor was being investigated for witness tampering, a crime with which he was never charged, the Times said. That related to an episode in which an aide to the mayor urged an Uzbek businessman and his employees to lie to the FBI about an alleged straw donor scheme that benefited Mr. Adams, according to documents in the case.
In a statement on Friday, his lawyer, Alex Spiro, said the case “should never have been brought in the first place and is now over.”
The mayor was in Washington, D.C. on Friday and met with President Donald Trump, according to his press schedule and his posts on social media.
Afterward, Trump told reporters that he thought Adams had come “to thank me,” apparently referring to the dismissal of the case, and that they had discussed “almost nothing," the Times said.
