As it now appears, NYC’s Mayor Eric Adams has put his federal corruption prosecution behind him. Former U.S. Solicitor General, now in private practice, Paul T. Clement, was asked by the presiding Judge Dale E. Ho to independently opine on whether the case against Adams should be dismissed as requested by the Trump DOJ – and he so recommended. Adams had been indicted by the Biden DOJ for alleged bribery. Though Judge Ho is not legally bound by the Clement opinion, he is likely to follow it.
While the charges against Adams had been much ballyhooed for months, in fact, they won’t necessarily loom large in the November mayoral election, as witness the experience of President Trump in the Nov. 2024 presidential election. Like the notorious Trump criminal cases, the Adams variety also had the odor of creative and selective prosecutions that exploited technical and insignificant violations of law.
In the Adams case, it should be kept in mind that while the investigations into his conduct may well have started early in his mayoral term, the decision to go forward with an indictment was made by the DOJ after he dissed President Biden over the flood of illegal immigrants and the ensuing municipal budget busting needed to care for them.
But it is not certain that Adam’s leading competitor for reelection, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, will also get cut some legal slack as well. As reported by The New York Times last October, a House subcommittee has referred former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, accusing him of lying to Congress about his involvement in a state Covid report on nursing home deaths.
According to The Times, Mr. Cuomo was accused of engaging in “conscious, calculated effort” to avoid accountability for his handling of nursing homes where thousands of people died of Covid.
The referral was sent by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic and centers on closed-door testimony Cuomo gave to the committee, when he asserted that he had not reviewed a State Health Department report that deflected blame for the deaths of people in New York nursing homes in early 2020.
The Times had earlier reported that Mr. Cuomo had reviewed the report and had personally written portions of early drafts, according to a review of emails and congressional documents reports.
The Times also reported in February 2021 on allegations that Cuomo and his administration had covered up the scope of the coronavirus death toll in New York’s nursing homes. This came after a top aide to the governor admitted that the state had withheld data because it feared an investigation by the Trump Justice Department.
According to The Times, the Biden Justice Department never formally opened an investigation. Nor did NY AG Letitia James, although in a damning report she accused the Cuomo administration of undercounting coronavirus related deaths connected to nursing homes by the thousands.
Maybe his New York City mayoral aspirations will cause some changing of the minds about the one-time governor of New York State.
