New York Mayor Eric Adams’ lawyer requested, prime officers in President Donald Trump’s Justice Division agreed, and 7 prosecutors resigned in protest.
Now, it’s as much as Dale E. Ho, a second-year federal decide in Manhattan, to determine if Adams’ corruption case goes away.
It is the largest problem of Ho’s younger judicial profession, pitting the political pursuits of latest Justice Division management in Washington in opposition to the objections of federal prosecutors in Manhattan who charged Adams final September and insist he be held accountable for allegedly taking bribes and unlawful marketing campaign contributions from international pursuits.
Ho, an Ivy League-educated former civil rights lawyer and legislation professor, has proven no indicators of being a rubber stamp — by hook or by crook — in a case with severe implications for Adams’ future as mayor and the Justice Division’s need to desert prosecutions it not finds politically expedient.
Ho, who argued in opposition to Trump’s first administration twice earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket, is summoning the events, together with Adams, to his courtroom Wednesday as he seeks to drill down on the Justice Division’s drive to finish the case and the mayor’s willingness to associate with that.
The Justice Division’s second-in-command, Emil Bove, has stated it needs the case dismissed, partially, to make sure Adams’ cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown. Two prosecutors who stop moderately than adjust to Bove’s orders final week to drop the case stated the association amounted to a “quid professional quo.” Adams’ lawyer denies that.
Ho has moved intentionally since Bove, the performing deputy lawyer normal, stepped in and filed paperwork final Friday asking him to dismiss the case. Slightly than merely signal the clean area above his title on the federal government’s dismissal movement, Ho is looking for extra info, interrogating motives and soliciting enter from either side on his choices to resolve the matter.
It is a trait Ho has embodied all through his profession, stated David D. Cole, the previous nationwide authorized director for the American Civil Liberties Union, the place Ho ran the Voting Rights Undertaking for a decade earlier than becoming a member of the federal bench in 2023.
“Dale Ho is one of the very best lawyers I’ve ever worked with. He is diligent, careful and unstinting in his pursuit of justice,” stated Cole, now a legislation and public coverage professor at Georgetown College. “And, as may be relevant here, he is someone who fully appreciates both the limits and the responsibilities of his role.”
Ho, 47, was first nominated to the Manhattan federal bench by then-President Joe Biden in September 2021. However his civil rights background and admittedly “overheated rhetoric” on social media — together with posts criticizing conservative members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voting on his nomination — made for a prolonged and contentious affirmation course of.
In his affirmation questionnaire, Ho stated he volunteered to make phone calls, knock on doorways and work as a ballot watcher for President Barack Obama’s 2008 marketing campaign. Earlier than the ACLU, Ho labored on the NAACP Authorized Protection Fund. In faculty, he disclosed, he had written for a left-leaning scholar journal referred to as “The Princeton Progressive.”
At Ho’s affirmation listening to, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, referred to as him an “extreme partisan” and accused Biden of “trying to put judicial robes” on a “partisan and radical agenda.” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., instructed Ho: “You’re a smart man. I can tell. But I think you’re an angry man.”
Ho instructed the senators that if confirmed, “I’ll do everything I can to ensure that everyone who comes before the court gets a fair shake, a fair opportunity to be heard, and ultimately equal treatment under the law.”
Biden resubmitted Ho’s nomination after midterm elections and the Senate confirmed him in June 2023 in a 50-49 party-line vote. Ho was sworn in two months later and was on the bench for a couple of 12 months earlier than Adams’ corruption case landed in his courtroom — a randomly generated project.
Joshua Naftalis, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who is not concerned in Adams’ case, stated that till 80 years in the past, circumstances had been mechanically dismissed by the events, however the guidelines had been modified in 1944 to require a decide to approve the dismissal of an indictment.
Ho’s choices for Adams’ case seem restricted, partially as a result of the physique that introduced the case not needs to pursue it. However in a letter earlier than her resignation final week, interim Manhattan U.S. Lawyer Danielle Sassoon cited a 1977 case during which a decide in the identical court docket rejected the federal government’s dismissal request, discovering that doing so was “not in the public interest.”
Ho has taken a tough line on Adams earlier than. In December, the decide issued a 30-page ruling rejecting the mayor’s request to dismiss a bribery depend, one in all 5 fees in opposition to him. Final month, Ho rejected the mayor’s request for an inquiry into purported grand jury leaks, discovering that he hadn’t supplied any proof to again his declare.
Ho, the son of Filipino immigrants, was born and raised in San Jose, California, and now lives in Brooklyn, the place he has served on the 2018 New York Metropolis Constitution Revision Fee that capped the dimensions of monetary contributions to candidates for sure elected metropolis workplaces.
Testifying to a Home committee about voting points in 2017, Ho stated his grandfather, Raymundo Seña Estacion, fought for the U.S. in World Battle II and survived the Bataan Loss of life March through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.
“He was always keenly aware, even as a kid, where his parents came from and, frankly, what they escaped from — a country where power rested not in the people but in the whims of one leader,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., stated in supporting Ho’s nomination.
Ho graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1999 and he earned his legislation diploma from Yale in 2005. In between, he began his profession as a paralegal on the Manhattan district lawyer’s workplace — down the road from the court docket the place he now works — and was later a legislation clerk for a Manhattan federal decide.
As director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Undertaking, Ho wrote and testified extensively about authorized voting points, together with racial gerrymandering, voting by mail and purged voter rolls.
In 2019, Ho argued earlier than the U.S. Supreme Court docket in efficiently difficult the primary Trump administration’s try so as to add a citizenship query to the Census. In 2020, he argued earlier than the excessive court docket in difficult a Trump memorandum directing that undocumented immigrants be excluded from the inhabitants base used to apportion Home seats. Ho’s facet misplaced, however Biden reversed Trump’s memo when he took workplace.
