Richard Briffault (Columbia University – Law School) has posted United States of America v. Eric Adams: Three Ways of Looking at Corruption (Columbia Law Review, forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The five-count federal indictment of Mayor Eric Adams in September 2024 rocked New York City’s legal and political worlds. This was the first time in the City’s long history that a sitting mayor had been hit with federal corruption charges. And the charges themselves were stunning: soliciting and accepting luxury travel benefits in exchange for political favors, and defrauding the City’s campaign finance program by soliciting straw donations for public matching funds.
And from the introduction:
But an arguably even greater shock was the federal government’s decision two months before Adams’s trial was to begin to dismiss the case. Apparently based on the newly-inaugurated Trump Administration’s desire to secure Adams’s cooperation with Trump’s program of intensified enforcement of federal immigration laws, the decision to dismiss triggered the resignations of a host of federal prosecutors, an extended public outcry, and the widespread perception of a corrupt quid pro quo. This article uses the Adams case—the charges against him and the dismissal of the Indictment—as an opportunity to consider the meaning(s) of political corruption, and the institutions intended to address it. It first considers the most publicized charges in the Adams indictment—the exchange of political favors for private benefits. Recent Supreme Court cases have narrowed the definition of corruption under federal criminal law. As a result, the article indicates, it is a surprisingly close question whether Adams’s alleged sleazy behavior, would meet the quid pro quo requirement the Supreme Court has made central to federal anti-corruption law. Turning to the straw donor allegations, the Adams case shows how public funding—a reform intended to counter corruption—is itself susceptible to corruption. And the dismissal of the federal indictment triggered a nettlesome constitutional issue of the standard for denying a candidate matching funds in a system in which public funding has become critical to electoral viability.
The dismissal of the indictment raises yet another question of the interplay of politics and corruption. Many of the lawyers and jurists involved in the Adams case saw the linkage of a prosecutorial decision to a political goal as a corruption of the institution of law enforcement. It certainly was at odds with adherence to rule of law norms—prosecutorial independence, impartial decision-making, rejection of partisan politics as a basis for prosecution, that had been considered cornerstones of the criminal justice system in the post-Watergate Era. Strikingly, however, the lawyers in the Trump Justice Department did not see it as corrupt at all. In their view, there was nothing wrong with trading dismissal of the indictment for Adams’s cooperation in advancing the Trump Administration’s overarching goal of more vigorous immigration law enforcement. For the Trump DOJ, linking a prosecutorial decision to an unrelated public policy goal was not a corruption of justice but just ordinary politics—the use of a government power to advance its policy objective. The Adams case presents two dueling visions of the nature of federal law enforcement and its relationship to politics.
The article concludes with brief observations about a fourth aspect of corruption: the level of government responsible for policing state and local corruption. Over the last fifty years, the federal government has played a major role in investigating and prosecuting state and local politicians and officeholders for public corruption. With the Supreme Court narrowing federal corruption law, and the Trump administration disinterested in corruption cases, states and local governments will have to play a greater role in addressing their own corruption. The limited example provided by the Adams case suggests that it is an open question whether they are up to the task.
Highly Recommended!
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