Secret Fed Filing Regarding Dropped Charges Against NYC Mayor to Be Unsealed This Week

Yahoo

28-04-2025

A court has ordered that documents filed under seal that will explain why the federal government dismissed its bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams be available to the public after several New York City newspapers sued for access. The ruling orders that specific filings related to the Trump Administration's refusal to prosecute Adams, a Democrat who was indicted when President Joe Biden was still in the White House by the Southern District of New York City, be unsealed on May 2. The reasons for the Department of Justice's abrupt move to file a nolle prosequi have been shrouded in secrecy. When the charges against Adams were dropped, the acting U.S. Attorney who took over the case, Danielle Sassoon, resigned in protest. In February, before the charges were dropped, the government notified a federal judge that many of the filings in Adams' case would be sealed because the "case will involve information that has been classified in the interest of national security." A draft memo written by Sassoon to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in February expresses outrage at the DOJ, and stated she "wanted no part in the political bargain" Trump made with Adams. That draft was unsealed in late March. Los Angeles reported in November that a Turkish billionaire and reputed CIA asset Sezgin Baran Korkmaz was snuck out of a Utah holding cell where he was awaiting trial on money laundering charges connected to a sprawling green energy scam that bilked the U.S. Treasury out of $511 million dollars. Korkmaz is close to former CIA Director James Woolsey, who worked as a senior advisor to President Trump during his first term, and had been the top spy at the Pentagon under former President Bill Clinton.
Korkmaz was indicted in Utah on money laundering charges connected to a scheme run by an LA fuel magnate and a Mormon polygamist cult sect that pilfered a half billion dollars in bogus biofuel subsidies. Prosecutors say Korkmaz helped the unlikely criminal compatriots launder $133 million in stolen taxpayer cash, and when the green energy swindle led to a slew of arrests in L.A. and Utah, the billionaire went on the run. Interpol tracked his movements for years and found him in June 2021 getting a massage at a five-star hotel in Austria. Korkmaz was extradited to Utah in 2022, where a judge ordered him held without bail after the government argued he was "a flight risk," one with 'every incentive to flee the United States' as well as 'the financial means to do so.'But Korkmaz was inexplicably released from a Utah jail and was spotted in New York City last summer as a free man active on social media, despite the litany of criminal charges he continues to face in Utah, and the government's own assertion that he is a flight risk with access to tens of millions of dollars.
According to the docket in his federal criminal case, Korkmaz' trial has not yet been set, despite it being four years after his arrest. Korkmaz, who court records call a man with "longrunning entanglements with domestic and foreign governments," has now been identified as "Businessman #3" in the 57-page federal indictment against Adams that has now been nixed. Adams' relationship with Turkish officials and the country's wealthiest occupants began in 2014 when he was elected as Brooklyn's Borough President, federal prosecutors said when they indicted him last year. Over the next decade, according to the indictment, he "sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign business people and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him."In exchange, Adams was pressured to ignore Armenian Genocide Day, which falls in April, among other concessions pushed by the Turkish representatives, once he took office, according to the indictment.