Federal Judge Appoints Attorney Not Obviously in Cahoots With Trump’s DOJ to Review Mayor Adams's Dismissal

The good news for Mayor Eric Adams is that the federal judge overseeing his case, Dale Ho, has canceled his upcoming trial in April. The bad news for the mayor is that Judge Ho has ordered a high-powered attorney with impeccable conservative credentials to scrutinize the legally and morally dubious dismissal deal that Adams made with Donald Trump's Justice Department.

During Wednesday's hearing on the government's motion to dismiss the case against Adams "without prejudice"—meaning that Trump's DOJ could revive the case at any time, casting a pall over Mayor Adams and, as is apparent to any reasonable New Yorker, placing him snugly in the president's pocket—both Adams's attorney, Alex Spiro, and the number two at the DOJ, Emil Bove III, were in complete agreement: This is fine.

But of course, this is not normal—not for our adversarial system of justice in which the truth is supposed to arise from two parties zealously at odds, not for the federal prosecutors who resigned in protest after explicitly alleging a corrupt quid pro quo, and certainly not for Judge Ho, who probably didn't expect to be overseeing a municipal corruption case that has turned into an attempt by the Trump administration to remake the rule of law in the United States.

So on Friday, Judge Ho issued an order that simultaneously canceled the mayor's trial and injected a little adversarialism into the mix, by appointing Paul Clement as an amicus curae, or "friend of the court," to review the government's motion to dismiss.