Jessica Roth:
Yes, they do come across as expressly political reasons. And that’s exactly the opposite about how decisions about who shall be prosecuted should be made.
And that’s part of why decisions about whether cases should proceed are ordinarily left to the professional judgment of the line prosecutors who investigated the case and charged it and why the more political actors at main Justice, who have the most contact with the White House, generally do not play a role in making those decisions.
The memo that contains this direction to dismiss the case makes very clear that the decision has nothing to do with the merits of the case, nothing to do with the strength of the evidence or with the validity of the legal theories.
Instead, what it says essentially is that Mayor Adams is a political ally and he is expedient to the president pursuing his immigration agenda, and, for that reason, the charges should be dismissed, although it also says that the charges should be reevaluated following the November 25 mayoral election by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, the permanent U.S. attorney, when and if that person is sworn in, and that the charges should be dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they could be refiled at some later date.
And so that holds over Mayor Adams’ head the possibility that the charges could be restarted if in fact he does not comport himself in a way that is viewed favorably by the president and the leadership of the Department of Justice.
