Who is Dale Ho, the judge deciding whether to drop Eric Adams' case?

By Luc Cohen

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dale Ho, the judge deciding whether to drop the corruption case against New York City mayor Eric Adams, is a former voting rights lawyer whose nomination to the bench by former Democratic President Joe Biden drew fierce opposition from Republicans.

Ho's 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) hearing on the Justice Department's bid to dismiss the charges will be the highest-profile matter in his young judicial career. The case has sparked concern that President Donald Trump's Justice Department is letting politics influence its prosecutorial decisions.

Adams, seeking re-election this year, has pleaded not guilty to charges he took bribes from Turkish officials. Trump's nominees at the Justice Department ordered prosecutors to dismiss the case because it was distracting Adams from helping Trump on immigration enforcement, prompting more than half a dozen prosecutors to resign.

Ho scheduled Wednesday's hearing to determine whether dropping the case was in the public interest. Legal experts say the judge cannot force the Justice Department to continue the case, but that he may question their request to leave open the possibility of bringing the charges again.

In ordering prosecutors to request the charges be dismissed last week, a Justice Department official said the department would revisit the case after the November 2025 New York mayoral election. Critics say that would leave New York's Democratic mayor beholden to Trump, a Republican.

The son of immigrants from the Philippines, Ho was born in 1977 in San Jose, California. Biden nominated Ho to serve as a judge in the Southern District of New York as part of a broader push to name more lawyers with backgrounds in civil rights and public criminal defense to a bench dominated by former prosecutors and corporate lawyers.

Ho said his grandfather served with the United States Army when Japan occupied the Philippines during World War Two, surviving the Bataan Death March in which Japanese troops forcibly transferred thousands of prisoners of war.

The U.S. promised Filipino recruits the same benefits as American soldiers, but the U.S. Congress later rescinded that offer, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

"His service to our country — in defense of a democracy in which he himself could not participate — is a reminder to me of just how precious the right to vote is," Ho said of his grandfather in 2017 congressional testimony about voting rights.

Ho's chambers did not respond to a request for comment.

'OVERHEATED RHETORIC'

After earning degrees from Princeton University and Yale Law School, Ho worked as a lawyer with the NAACP, a civil rights group, and later served for 10 years as the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's voting rights project.

While at the ACLU, Ho successfully persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to block a plan by the first Trump administration to include a question about citizenship status on the 2020 census, which critics called a Republican ploy to scare immigrants into not taking part.

Ho also represented the ACLU before the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful challenge to Trump's plan to exclude immigrants living illegally in the United States from the population count used to allocate congressional districts to states. Biden later rescinded the policy.

Ho was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2023 on a nearly party-line vote of 50-49.

Senators asked Ho about a Twitter post in which he accused Republican Senator Mike Lee, a member of the judiciary committee, of seeking to "maintain minoritarian rule," referring to institutions such as the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate that some on the U.S. left say give outsize influence to low-population, right-leaning states.

Former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin voted against Ho, citing his social media posts.

Ho apologized for his "overheated rhetoric" on social media, but said the tone did not reflect how he conducted himself in court or other professional settings.

"I'm deeply committed to the principle of equal justice under the law," Ho testified during his confirmation hearing before the Senate's judiciary committee. "If confirmed I will do everything I can to ensure that everyone who comes before the court gets a fair shake and fair opportunity to be heard."

(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Daniel Wallis)