UPDATE (Feb. 27, 2025, 12:48 p.m. ET): On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho ordered the Justice Department to file “any opposition” to Eric Adams’ motion to dismiss his case “with prejudice” by March 7. The judge ordered Adams to submit any reply by March 11.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams just added a new wrinkle to the ongoing saga over the Trump Justice Department’s bid to dismiss his case. As a reminder, the DOJ moved to dismiss the Democrat’s corruption indictment “without prejudice” — which would give the Republican administration leverage to revive the case in the future — a crucial condition Adams didn’t oppose at a hearing last week.
But Adams, who’s been politically aligning himself with the White House on immigration enforcement, now argues that his case should be dismissed “with prejudice,” or forever.
Prior to Adams raising the argument in a motion Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Dale Ho had appointed a third party to help more fully explore the DOJ’s “without prejudice” dismissal bid because, without Adams opposing it, there wasn’t adversarial testing as there usually is in the American legal system. Those newly requested legal arguments haven’t come in yet — Ho ordered them due in writing March 7, with possible oral argument to follow on March 14.
But now with Adams’ motion, the Biden-appointed judge has a new aspect to consider. It claims prosecutorial misconduct in the fallout from the resignations of the federal prosecutors who refused an order from top Trump DOJ lawyer Emil Bove to move to dismiss the case without prejudice. Among other things, the mayor’s lawyers cited what they called “leaked” letters from those prosecutors blasting Bove’s move.
“In addition to violating Mayor Adams’s fundamental constitutional rights and ability to receive a fair trial, the government’s leaks violated numerous statutory and court rules, including the Justice Department’s own longstanding policies aimed at curbing prosecutorial misconduct,” they wrote in the motion to Ho, concluding: “The most appropriate recourse is to dismiss this case now and do so with prejudice.”
So how does this latest move affect the pending motion to dismiss without prejudice?
One of the interesting questions is what the Bove-led DOJ will say if the judge asks the government to weigh in on Adams’ latest request. Would that turn the proceeding into a more adversarial one? It would seem so, unless Bove is ready to give up on the political leverage that apparently animated the bid for a “without prejudice” dismissal to begin with. As it stands, the case still isn’t dismissed, but there’s now a fresh argument in play for how it should be dismissed, and that distinction could make all the difference for how the case moves forward. Indeed, if Adams is successful in his latest motion, it won’t move forward at all. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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