It had been rumored for quite a while, so it wasn’t a big surprise when the Justice Department sent a memo to Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim US. Attorney for Manhattan instructing her to dismiss the bribery and other charges brought against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Most notably the memorandum states “The Justice Department has reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence of the legal theories on which the case is based…”
The memorandum indicated that it was being done to allow Adams to focus on crime prevention and immigration while figures for crime in New York as trumpeted by Adams himself indicate that street crime is not a serious problem in New York and to imply that immigration cannot be dealt with in the Adams administration if he was defending himself in court appears to be unsupported by any evidence.
It will be interesting to see how Ms. Sassoon, a conservative Republican, and former clerk for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will respond to the memorandum. In a recent Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which she strongly criticized the mass commutations of President Biden at the close of his presidency, she wrote, “The mass commutations – made without consulting the career prosecutors who handled the cases or the judges who imposed the original sentences, and apparently without regard to the underlying facts of each case – undermine our mission to keep Americans safe and administer justice fairly.” She went on to say that “The lack of a considered decision-making proess exhibited a disregard for the work and knowledge of prosecutors and judges.” Whether these opinions will carry forward into how she responds to the demands of the memorandum to dismiss the charges against Mayor Adams remain to be seen.
In fact, Ms. Sassoon does not on her own have the authority to dismiss the charges. She would have to make a motion to dismiss the case which Judge Dale E. Ho, the judge assigned to the case would have the sole authority to dismiss the case. Judge Ho, who has already turned down a motion to dismiss the charges brought by Adams’ lawyers, however, is not likely to turn down a motion to dismiss brought by Attorney Sassoon.
The Trump administration’s actions to dismiss the bribery charges against Mayor Adams is not an isolated case. Earlier this month, the president signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to stop stop prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) which outlaws bribery and corruption in foreign countries. The President’s basis for taking this unusual step was that by not allowing bribery, it put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage, particularly in countries he said where such practices were common.
This law has been used many times in the past, most notably against Goldman Sachs for its role in the looting of Mayalysia’s sovereign wealth fund which resulted in a fine of $2.9 billion.
Last year the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission which have joint jurisdiction for enforcing the FCPA brought 26 enforcement actions with another 31 companies presently under investigation.
It should be noted that the new policy in regard to the FCPA should not be taken by companies as an invitation to use bribery in their foreign business dealings. The statutes of limitations for FCPA violations are five years for its anti-bribery provisions and a future administration may not take the permissive position that the Trump administration has taken. Further, other countries have their own anti-bribery laws such as France’s SapinII Law nd the UK Bribery Act. The UK Bribery Act is particularly strict and applies to any company that does business in the UK regardless of where the bribery may have occurred.
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