Nicholas Fandos on New York Politics, Eric Adams, and Trump

New York Times reporter Nicholas Fandos, author of a recent article titled “An Emboldened Trump Seeks to Bend New York City to His Will,” joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about why President Trump wants to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Officials in Trump’s Department of Justice say they want Adams to be free to aid Trump’s immigration crackdown in the Big Apple, which since 2014 has been a sanctuary city. But conservative federal prosecutors like Danielle Sassoon and Hagen Scotten say this amounts to a quid pro quo and have resigned rather than drop the case against Adams. Fandos reflects on what might happen next and the larger implications for the Department of Justice.

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This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: The reading that I’ve done shows that he’s not really deporting any more people than the Biden administration was. It’s not happening, right?

Nick Fandos: He has certainly made a much bigger show of it to try and suggest there are more, but to try and boost those numbers, he wants greater cooperation. He wants to force places like New York—liberal places who have been friendly to immigrants, that have passed sanctuary laws and other policies that basically say our police or certain institutions can’t coordinate with federal immigration authorities. Trump wants to eradicate those laws, but he doesn’t control local law, so he’s got to use different levers to do it. He’s tried threatening federal funding. He’s now taking several jurisdictions to court as of this week: Chicago and now New York state. 

What it appears like at this point, and the details are still unfolding, is that both lawyers for Mayor Adams and for President Trump at the Justice Department seem to have identified the mayor’s legal case as one of those levers that he could use. It’s a non-conventional one. Eric Adams has always had a little bit more of a conservative view than a lot of his party on the immigration question and on law enforcement, but according to the line prosecutors who, as Sugi pointed out, have now quit and written these rather extraordinary letters explaining what happened here, and based on reporting by some of my colleagues at the times, we know that there were a series of letters and then private meetings between lawyers for the mayor and top officials at the Justice Department, one of whom happens to have been Donald Trump’s personal lawyer prior to that. Footnote: the mayor’s lawyer is also the lawyer to Elon Musk at the moment. 

So there’s a lot of intertangled webs here, and they start a series of conversations where they say, “Hey, you’ve asked for a pardon. It seems the President’s not interested in that. But we do think that maybe there’s a legal rationale to drop this case if defending yourself against these charges is hindering your ability to assist with or promote the President’s immigration priorities.” The mayor evidently responds to his lawyers, “Yes, it’s absolutely hindering me! It’s hindering me in all kinds of things. I wish I could be more helpful, but this legal case is incredibly demanding.” So earlier this week, when the Justice Department moved to drop the charges, they put out a memo that pretty much explicitly said, “We are doing this so that the mayor is free to help ICE and to help the President deport more people from New York.” 

I’ve been covering these things for a while, not forever, but I can’t think of another legal justification that looked like that. I mean, we’ve been calling it in our pages, “the political justification.” It’s not even really a legal justification. In fact, the Justice Department said “We have not at all weighed the merits or the evidence against you. That is not what we’re making this decision on.” And from there this week the developments have just been drastic. But as this crisis has now unfolded within the Justice Department over what the prosecutors who were handling this case are calling “a miscarriage of justice,” there’s been another crisis in New York City because it’s made it basically look like, “Okay, so this mayor is entirely under the thumb of Donald Trump.” Prosecutors are holding these charges over his head unless he cooperates on the immigration front. So in the middle of all this, Adams met with Trump’s Border Czar, they’ve now done a couple of joint TV appearances together, he agreed to some policy changes: they’re going to let ice have an office in on Rikers Island, which is New York City’s primary jail—they haven’t had one there since 2014. Adams seems to be willing to be critical of or try to chip away at sanctuary laws or policies in the city, though those are set legislatively, and he can’t unilaterally get rid of them, but…

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s so wild. There’s so much of it!

WT: I think it’s important to say what the exact thing that is causing people to leave their jobs as United States Attorneys, which is that conflict. I’m going to read from Hagan Scotten’s resignation letter. He’s talking about the justifications for dropping the case and he says the first justification, being that there’s something tainted about the indictment, is “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.” So in other words, they don’t have any real evidence. But then they say the second justification is worse, which is the one that you’re talking about: this is getting in the way of him pursuing Trump’s immigration policies. He writes, “No system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges or the stick of threatening to bring them again,” which is what you’re talking about, “to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.” I mean, that is the politicization of the Department of Justice, which, oddly, is something that Trump is constantly accusing the Department of Justice of being. But this is doing that. Is it not?

NF: Well, it’s led to this remarkable thing from a linguistic point of view and a terminology point of view. You have on one side, the Trump Justice Department in all of these memos justifying its actions by referencing executive orders about ending the politicization of the Justice Department, and saying, “We need to do this, because the investigation into Adams was politically motivated.” 

WT: Ah, okay. I see. 

NF: So they say they are fighting the politicization of justice, and these prosecutors are non-political appointees; they’re career prosecutors. Although in this case, many of them, Danielle Sassoon being the most notable, are kind of rock-ribbed conservative. Danielle is a member of the Federalist Society, she clerked for Justice Scalia: a giant of conservative jurisprudence. These are not “squishy liberals.” These are not friends of the mayor of New York City. And they’re saying, in fact, this is the very politicization you claim you are trying to root out, so there’s this kind of remarkable talking past each other. 

I think from the point of view of Washington and one of the big stories already of this second Trump term—obviously the pardoning of the January six rioters was a very big deal on the President’s first or second day in office, but this feels like, so far at least, the biggest high water mark or crisis for the Justice Department that is pitting the values of the department and its career workforce against the new sheriffs in town in a huge way. I think we may see many more resignations in the coming days, and it’s possible a judge could intercede here to slap the Justice Department on the wrist, maybe even appoint a special prosecutor to complete the case, but most likely, they’re not going to have much recourse but to sign off on this, and the Justice Department will get what it wants. So that’s one thing, and then in New York City, it’s set off this whole other crisis, which we can talk more about. 

VVG: So before we go away from this letter by Hagan Scotten, I just want to read the other line many people are quoting: “Any assistant US attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” 

I will say that I did not expect—I mean, even with Danielle Sassoon’s letter, I find myself reading these and I’m like, “Good writing, guys!” If I were gonna resign in a way that was, like, “Fuck you, Donald Trump—” I think they’re quite eloquent and quite clear and surprisingly personal in a way that’s very interesting to see. I mean, not that it’s so healthy, but there are still conservatives who are hewing to an older version that is adherence and loyalty to the law as they understand it. And so…

WT: It’s also notable that the Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, who’s the guy who’s asking these people to file these charges, does not himself want to file the charge. He could do it himself, and The Times has speculated in pieces that I’ve been reading that it looks ugly, it would be a problem. He’s going to receive criticism, and he might not want to go into a courtroom and get yelled at by a judge for doing this.

NF: Right, to sign that motion of dismissal. Two things come to mind: One is perhaps Hagan Scotten is a good guest for the show in the future. He may have some time on his hands. I write a lot about legal writing, and there can be a kind of stiffness or formality sometimes, but I often find there’s like a remarkable elegance that comes through from these people who are trained to isolate arguments and lead with the most powerful arguments and write as succinctly and clearly as possible. When applied to a situation like this, the prose is really quite striking. And all of these letters were written as—just to dwell on this for a moment—were written as internal communications. In other words, Sassoon’s letter was written to the Attorney General to inform her of the view of the case and ask for a meeting, though offer her resignation if she wouldn’t take that meeting to reconsider the dismissal. But clearly, they’re all being written with the eventual public audience in mind, but then also with the judge in mind. So they’re doing an extraordinary amount of work on different levels. They’re advancing legal arguments. They’re disclosing new information. 

Sassoon’s letter said that, in fact, prosecutors were prepared to bring a superseding indictment with additional charges against Adams, and were not allowed to do so. They were going to charge him with obstruction of justice for trying to delete or destroy evidence while at the same time trying to speak more broadly to convey to people why this matters. I just think that as a textual document, they’re quite fascinating. 

VVG: They’re really interesting. The carrot and the stick thing, also, right? If the charges get dismissed, they’ll be dismissed—correct me if I’m wrong here—without prejudice, such that they could be resurrected very easily if Adams doesn’t do what Trump wants. So there’s the stick.

WT: I just want to editorialize here in a way that you can’t do if you’re a reporter, but I’m a novelist. So beyond all of the legal talk and all of this stuff, what I saw as soon as I saw Trump starting to speak positively about Adams in the fall is that with Trump very frequently when you break the law, you become someone he realizes he can use. Particularly now that he has the ability to pardon people, and he knows that Adams needs something, if you’ve broken the law and you’re compromised in some way, that makes you a useful person to someone who’s running basically an authoritarian government. This is my personal opinion; I’m not asking you to ratify that statement, I just think that you’ll see Trump use broken people like this, and for the people who he uses, it doesn’t usually go well: witness Rudy Giuliani. In my view, this is where Eric Adams’ story ends, somewhere outside some landscaping service giving a terrible press conference. I just don’t think this is going to go well for him.

VVG: Nick, to your point about them being alike—to the Rikers Island thing, the loophole that they figured out to get ICE onto Rikers Island has to do with Adams issuing an executive order, right?

NF: That’s right, which, obviously Trump is moving by a number of executive orders. He’s trying to move a lot of his policies that way.  I actually am less familiar with the history of executive orders in New York City, in full disclosure, than in the presidency, in part because the structure of government in a city like New York is just so different. They usually take on less significance because it’s assumed the mayor has greater authority in certain areas, though this isn’t one of them. 

I was just going to say in response to the earlier point: yes, as a journalist, my job is to report all of these things and not to opine on them, but I do think that it’s just objectively true and analytically interesting that the mayor of the nation’s largest city seemed to believe that if he could just convince Trump to help give him a legal reprieve, he could regain his footing and control over the city, and potentially regain his path to winning a second term, because he’s up for re-election this year and these charges were obviously going to be a big impediment to doing that. He basically got what he wanted this week, and I think that he totally and potentially fatally miscalculated the effect of that. He now has potentially foreclosed his path to re-election, and he also is now dangerously close to losing the faith of the city that he leads that he is acting in their best interest and not Donald Trump’s. That’s just a remarkable reversal and misjudgment.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Nicholas Fandos by Erin Schaff.

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Nicholas Fandos

An Emboldened Trump Seeks to Bend New York City to His Will • Eric Adams Discussed Possible Republican Primary Run with G.O.P. Leader • Jeffries Works With N.Y. Democrats to Weaken G.O.P. Control of the House

Others:

Who Is Danielle Sassoon, the Prosecutor Who Quit Over Eric Adams’s Corruption Case? | New York Times • Danielle Sassoon’s Letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Annotated | New York Times • Here Are the Charges Eric Adams Faces, Annotated | New York Times | September 26, 2024 • Read the Resignation Letter From Hagan Scotten | New York Times •  Read The Letter From Emil Bove Accepting Danielle Sassoon’s Resignation, Annotated | New York Times