Honig says prosecutors better be 'damn sure' they have enough evidence after charging Adams

(CNN) — Federal prosecutors say New York City Mayor Eric Adams engaged in a “long-running conspiracy,” accepting luxury travel and gifts from foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official.

Adams, who’s been indicted on five federal public corruption charges, has denied wrongdoing and says he is being targeted because of his positions.

“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target – and a target I became,” he said in a statement after news of his indictment broke Wednesday night, but before the charges were unsealed Thursday and his official residence, Gracie Mansion, was searched by federal agents.

That defense – that politics begets legal problems – is a common refrain among the few powerful people charged in federal court with wrongdoing.

A major platform in former President Donald Trump’s third run for the White House is that he has been unfairly targeted by the Department of Justice. Trump has promised to use the DOJ to go after his political rivals if he is able to win a second White House term in November.

That Adams, a Democrat, has been charged by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York on corruption charges does not, on its own, disprove Trump’s point.

Neither does the recent conviction of former Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who was only found guilty after his second, distinct corruption and bribery trial. The first, on completely different charges, ended in a hung jury and a mistrial.

One strong piece of evidence against Trump’s “witch hunt” argument is that the same office that is prosecuting Adams and secured a conviction against Menendez ultimately decided in 2021, after Trump left office, not to pursue charges against him for violating campaign finance law with hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels.

It was Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected official rather than an appointed prosecutor, who ultimately resuscitated the case by figuring out how to apply state law to federal campaign finance violations. Trump was ultimately convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records, something for which he will now be sentenced in late November, after the presidential election.

Special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee federal investigations involving Trump, did ultimately pursue federal indictments against the former president for trying to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and for mishandling classified data.

Both of those federal prosecutions of Trump have been stalled in federal courts.

A Trump-appointed judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case after agreeing with Trump’s attorneys that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.

The election interference prosecution was delayed while the Supreme Court, a third of which was appointed by Trump, took its time to decide that Trump should get special immunity for things he did while he was president.

Smith has subsequently amended Trump’s indictment, and on Thursday filed an outline of the case in Washington, DC. Even if Trump’s prosecution in that case doesn’t happen before Election Day, voters may get to see the government’s case before then.

Earlier this year, after Menendez’s conviction, I updated my ongoing list of federal prosecutions of federal elected officials, which shows a close-to-equal split in prosecutions nationwide since the turn of the century. Adams’ prosecution would not go on the list since he is a city official. The guilty plea of former Rep. George Santos, a Republican, would. The Santos case was prosecuted by a different US attorney’s office in New York.

CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig is a former assistant US attorney in the Southern District of New York who wrote in his book about the decision not to prosecute Trump. Reacting to the news of the Adams indictment on CNN Wednesday night, Honig noted that the Manhattan-based office now prosecuting Adams is located just a few blocks from the mayor’s office in Lower Manhattan and has a track record of trying corruption cases in recent years.

The Southern District of New York secured a bribery conviction against Sheldon Silver, the former top Democrat in the New York State Assembly, and also Dean Skelos, a Republican who was the majority leader in the New York State Senate.

“Not to be overly idealistic about it, but the track record shows that the only unifying principle is they look at each case individually, and that’s that,” Honig told me in a phone conversation.

But launching the first prosecution of a sitting New York City mayor leaves no margin for error, Honig said.

“If you’re going to charge the sitting mayor of New York City, you better be damn sure that you have the evidence on him, because if you don’t, it will be a disaster,” he said Wednesday night on CNN.

Adams remains defiant in the face of the charges, but they are clearly having an effect on New York politics. Key New York Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have called on Adams to step down. It is possible that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, also a Democrat, could remove him from office, but she has not yet publicly taken any steps in that direction.

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