Biden Judge to Decide Fate of Trump’s Attempt to Drop Charges Against Adams “`

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams’s attorney requested it, top officials within President Trump’s Justice Department concurred, and seven prosecutors resigned in protest.

Now, Judge Dale E. Ho must decide the fate of Adams’s corruption case.

This is the most significant challenge of Ho’s young judicial career, pitting the political aims of the Justice Department’s new leadership against Manhattan federal prosecutors who charged Adams last September and maintain he should be held accountable for alleged bribery and illegal campaign contributions from foreign entities.

Ho, an Ivy League-educated former civil rights lawyer and law professor, hasn’t shown bias in a case with significant ramifications for Adams’s future and the Justice Department’s pursuit of politically expedient dismissals.

Ho, who twice argued against Trump’s first administration before the Supreme Court, will convene a hearing with all parties, including Adams, on Wednesday to investigate the Justice Department’s motives for dropping the case and Adams’s willingness to comply.

The Justice Department’s second-in-command, Emil Bove, stated the dismissal aims to secure Adams’s cooperation with Trump’s immigration policies. Two prosecutors who resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order last week to drop the case described this as a “quid pro quo.” Adams’s lawyer denies this.

Since Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, intervened and filed for dismissal last Friday, Ho has proceeded cautiously. Instead of simply granting the dismissal, Ho is seeking further information, scrutinizing motives, and soliciting input from both sides.

This approach is characteristic of Ho’s career, according to David D. Cole, former national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, where Ho led the Voting Rights Project for a decade before his judicial appointment in 2023.

“Dale Ho is one of the best lawyers I’ve worked with. He is diligent, meticulous, and unwavering in his pursuit of justice,” said Cole, now a law and public policy professor at Georgetown University. “And, importantly, he understands the limits and responsibilities of his role.”

Ho, 47, was nominated to the Manhattan federal bench by President Biden in September 2021. His civil rights background and social media posts criticizing conservative senators during his confirmation process resulted in a protracted and contentious confirmation.

In his confirmation questionnaire, Ho disclosed volunteering for Obama’s 2008 campaign. Before the ACLU, he worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and, in college, wrote for a left-leaning student magazine.

At his confirmation hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz called him an “extreme partisan,” and Sen. John Kennedy described him as “an angry man.”

Ho assured senators that he would ensure fair treatment for everyone appearing before the court.

Biden resubmitted Ho’s nomination after the midterm elections, and the Senate confirmed him in June 2023 in a 50-49 party-line vote. He was sworn in two months later and assigned Adams’s case randomly.

Joshua Naftalis, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor uninvolved in Adams’s case, explained that, until 1944, cases were automatically dismissed, but rules now require judicial approval.

Ho’s options are limited because the prosecution wants to drop the case. However, in a letter before her resignation, interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon cited a 1977 case where a judge rejected a similar dismissal request, deeming it against the public interest.

Ho previously ruled against Adams, rejecting his motion to dismiss a bribery charge and a request for an inquiry into grand jury leaks.

Ho, the son of Filipino immigrants, was born in San Jose, California, and now lives in Brooklyn. He served on the 2018 New York City Charter Revision Commission.

In 2017 testimony, Ho mentioned his grandfather’s service in World War II and survival of the Bataan Death March.

“He was always keenly aware of his parents’ origins and what they escaped—a country where power rested not in the people but in the whims of one leader,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said in support of Ho’s nomination.

Ho graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1999 and earned his law degree from Yale in 2005. He worked as a paralegal and then a law clerk for a Manhattan federal judge.

As director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Ho wrote and testified on voting rights, including gerrymandering, mail-in voting, and voter purges.

In 2019, Ho successfully challenged Trump’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census. In 2020, he challenged a Trump memo excluding undocumented immigrants from the apportionment base; his side lost, but Biden reversed the memo.