Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty
Earlier this month, the New York political world was rocked by the news that federal agents had executed search warrants on the homes of several top members of Eric Adams’s administration, including the now-former NYPD commissioner Edward Caban and two deputy mayors. The raids stem from an ongoing investigation helmed by the Southern District of New York, which has branched off into several different inquiries involving the mayor and members of his inner circle.
I recently spoke with Carrie Cohen, a partner at Morrison Foerster and former assistant U.S. Attorney at SDNY, about what the searches might indicate about the timeline of the investigation and what approach prosecutors are taking.
I thought it was notable that these search warrants were all executed simultaneously in the early morning, hitting multiple homes across different boroughs. Is that typical operating procedure for these kinds of searches, or do those particular tactics indicate any potential concern about evidence retention?
It’s hard to read too much into the timing and the execution. And while one could read into that — that the government was concerned about deletion, destruction of evidence — on the other hand, because the government is aware that those searches were going to become public and as much as possible, the government, at least, is cognizant of the fact that they have not charged anyone with a crime, that, you know, allegations are allegations.
A drip, drip, drip news cycle can be extremely damaging to public officials. So perhaps doing the searches all at once avoids sort of a constant public discussion of an ongoing investigation. It’s very hard to investigate criminal conduct in the public eye. Also, as you organize investigations, it takes a lot of law-enforcement officials and a lot of planning to execute warrants. And so, from a resource standpoint, it may make sense to do them all at once. So while I think some people might perceive it as being done because there was a fear of document destruction or document deletion, it’s a little reading tea leaves because there can be other reasons.
Sure, just because it appears one way in the reporting doesn’t mean that necessarily came into play from their perspective.
Government prosecutors are always worried about document deletion and destruction when the investigation is overt. Always. But it doesn’t mean that they’re worried about it because they have evidence that people have done that in the past, that are under investigation. It’s just more of a generalized worry.
According to reports, many of the figures involved, including the former NYPD commissioner and two deputy mayors, had their electronic devices seized. What are investigators typically looking for in these situations?
The search warrant would be very detailed about their need to seize the phone and what they’re looking for and which numbers they’re looking for communications between. A search warrant is limited in scope, as it should be. But typically, what you are looking for when you are searching someone’s cell phone is text messages, meaning text messages depending if they’re on an app or whether they’re phone-to-phone. You sometimes may also be looking at location data or photos, to the extent those are relevant. But primarily, and as we’ve seen in many cases of all different types, they’re figuring out what people did, who they spoke to, when they spoke to them, where they were. In the modern day, there’s a lot of that detail in people’s text messages. And unlike email, which is on a server, the way to get text messages is either through the cloud if it’s stored there or on the actual phone itself.
We first learned of the ongoing investigation into the links between Adams’s mayoral campaign and Turkey late last year, but it’s unclear when these latest probes began. Does this recent movement give us any indication of a potential timeline?
It’s hard to tell, but I would not say that the government is at the beginning of its investigation. Search warrants typically are not done in the beginning because the legal standard requires the government to exhaust other avenues that are less intrusive before obtaining search warrants. So they typically are not the first stage of an investigation. In public-corruption investigations in particular — especially ones that are investigating an elected official’s senior staff or even the elected officials him or herself and when that investigation has become public — it is extremely important to move, as the government, as fast as possible.
Now, you should never sacrifice the exacting legal standard before charging because of the need for speed. But when you have a publicly elected official who him or herself or senior staff is in the public’s eye under investigation for very serious, potentially serious allegations related to corruption, the government has a responsibility, I think, to the people to move as fast as it can to bring the investigation to a conclusion. Whether that conclusion is closing it because there is no proof of criminal conduct or charging if they believe they have proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Especially here, where you have a mayor and there is a timetable of reelection and there have already been candidates who announced their intent to run against the mayor, the public really needs to know whether the people running for office have either tolerated corruption in the highest levels of their staff or have engaged in any criminal conduct themselves. And having the investigation still be open for months and months as you get closer and closer to the election, is, I think, very damaging to our electoral system, and the government is aware of that. But I do think there is some inherent time pressure because the government is aware of and, I think, sensitive to the public’s need to know.
So, I would expect that either there will be a declination, meaning they are not going to charge certain individuals, certain public officials, or you will see indictments — and I would suspect that would come, if not by the end of this year, very early in 2025.
Adams has consistently said that he’s cooperating with the investigations, and so far, he hasn’t been implicated in anything. I know we’re both on the outside of this case, but is there anything that we’ve seen publicly that might indicate that Adams could be a target of investigators himself?
I think in any investigation of public corruption, insider trading, fraud schemes, international narcotics trafficking, the government is always looking to see how far up did this sort of criminal conduct go. One would assume this is true in this situation, that there are different branches of the investigation, they include senior people within the mayor’s staff, and the government is going to be asking questions of witnesses and looking at documents and trying to figure out, what did the highest-up person in this organization know? And the highest-up person in the mayor’s office is, of course, the mayor. And that is not to say that he’s under investigation, that he’s a subject, that he’s a target. But it is the natural way that government investigations go that the government tries to figure out how widespread was the conduct, how high up did it go, and did it go up to the very top.
The Southern District of New York is no stranger to taking on high-profile cases and targets, as the past few weeks have shown. But, from your experience, is there a different approach when working on cases involving political figures and the people surrounding them?
I think the Southern District in particular approaches every case in somewhat the same way in that their mission is to do the right thing for the right reasons, to follow the facts wherever they lead, to not favor anyone or any entity or any point of view. I think they apply that mission, which is really ingrained in every prosecutor in that office, to the public-corruption investigations the same way prosecutors in that office apply that ethos to all of their work.
I would say the one difference in public-corruption prosecutions is the understanding that what you are investigating has very broad implications for our democratic process. And that is true when you are investigating an office of an elected official or people within that office or the elected official him or herself, because the people elected that person and the allegations at some point in the investigation, as they have here, become public because you need to obtain evidence through, for example, search warrants. And when allegations of public corruption are in the public eye and you’re dealing with an elected office, elected officials, that office, is rightfully so sensitive to the need to move as quickly as possible, close the investigation, decline to prosecute if they do not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt of criminal conduct. The federal laws that govern corruption have been narrowed over the past decade, especially the past five years. Not all conduct that one might think of as corrupt is criminally corrupt. Bribery is very narrowly defined under the federal law. So you have to be extremely cognizant of not only the need for speed for the public, but also the limitations of federal law. Insider-trading law is limited federally, and there are other areas of our federal criminal statutes that are limited. A lot of what looks to a prosecutor as highly suspect can end up not fitting within the federal statutes that the prosecutors have. There are a lot of public investigations that the public never knows about because no charges are filed and nothing ever went overt.
But here, you do have an investigation of the highest office in our city, and prosecutors have to make doubly sure, triply sure, quadruply sure that conduct that they may find unethical, immoral, not appropriate for an office of the mayor’s, they have to make doubly, triply, quadruply sure that that conduct actually is a crime under the federal statutes because the federal criminal statutes are much narrower perhaps than what the public may think is corrupt conduct.
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