Ilya Shapiro:
Well, I think it’s a disagreement of political judgment between different prosecutors. The U.S. attorney disagrees with what her superiors say. The principals are denying that there’s a quid pro quo, so we don’t quite have evidence of that. And Eric Adams, for the last year or so, has been moving in a direction to crack down on illegal immigration anyway.
So I don’t know whether he’d be behaving differently in the first place. But, ultimately, this is a judgment call. And the U.S. attorneys, whether in the Southern District of New York, which sometimes thinks of itself as its own sovereign, Sovereign District, they sometimes call it, doesn’t get to make that call at the end of the day.
And if the superiors decide that the underlying evidence is flimsy or the prosecution itself was politically motivated and doesn’t serve the purposes of justice, that’s their call to make. And, ultimately, the voters will evaluate that.
