NEW YORK (AP) — New York Mayor Eric Adams’ lawyer asked, top officials in President Donald Trump’s Justice Department agreed, and seven prosecutors resigned in protest.
Now, it’s up to Dale E. Ho, a second-year federal judge in Manhattan, to decide if Adams’ corruption case goes away.
It’s the biggest challenge of Ho’s young judicial career, pitting the political pursuits of new Justice Department leadership in Washington against the objections of federal prosecutors in Manhattan who charged Adams last September and insist he be held accountable for allegedly taking bribes and illegal campaign contributions from foreign interests.
Ho, an Ivy League-educated former civil rights lawyer and law professor, has shown no signs of being a rubber stamp — one way or the other — in a case with serious implications for Adams’ future as mayor and the Justice Department’s desire to abandon prosecutions it no longer finds politically expedient.
Ho, who argued against Trump’s first administration twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, is summoning the parties, including Adams, to his courtroom Wednesday as he seeks to drill down on the Justice Department’s drive to end the case and the mayor’s willingness to go along with that.
The Justice Department’s second-in-command, Emil Bove, has said it wants the case dismissed, in part, to ensure Adams’ cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown. Two prosecutors who quit rather than comply with Bove’s orders last week to drop the case said the arrangement amounted to a “quid pro quo.” Adams’ lawyer denies that.
Ho has moved deliberately since Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, stepped in and filed paperwork last Friday asking him to dismiss the case. Rather than simply sign the blank space above his name on the government’s dismissal motion, Ho is seeking more information, interrogating motives and soliciting input from both sides on his options to resolve the matter.
It’s a trait Ho has embodied throughout his career, said David D. Cole, the former national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, where Ho ran the Voting Rights Project for a decade before joining 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,” said Cole, now a law and public policy professor at Georgetown University. “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. But his civil rights background and admittedly “overheated rhetoric” on social media — including posts criticizing conservative members of the Senate Judiciary Committee voting on his nomination — made for a lengthy and contentious confirmation process.
In his confirmation questionnaire, Ho said he volunteered to make telephone calls, knock on doors and work as a poll watcher for President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. Before the ACLU, Ho worked at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In college, he disclosed, he had written for a left-leaning student magazine called “The Princeton Progressive.”
At Ho’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called him an “extreme partisan” and accused Biden of “trying to put judicial robes” on a “partisan and radical agenda.” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Ho: “You’re a smart man. I can tell. But I think you’re an angry man.”
Ho told 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 about a year before Adams’ corruption case landed in his courtroom — a randomly generated assignment.
Joshua Naftalis, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who isn’t involved in Adams’ case, said that until 80 years ago, cases were automatically dismissed by the parties, but the rules were changed in 1944 to require a judge to approve the dismissal of an indictment.
Ho’s options for Adams’ case appear limited, in part because the body that brought the case no longer wants to pursue it. But in a letter before her resignation last week, interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon cited a 1977 case in which a judge in the same court rejected the government’s dismissal request, finding that doing so was “not in the public interest.”
Ho has taken a hard line on Adams before. In December, the judge issued a 30-page ruling rejecting the mayor’s request to dismiss a bribery count, one of five charges against him. Last month, Ho rejected the mayor’s request for an inquiry into purported grand jury leaks, finding that he hadn’t provided any evidence to back his claim.
Ho, the son of Filipino immigrants, was born and raised in San Jose, California, and now lives in Brooklyn, where he has served on the 2018 New York City Charter Revision Commission that capped the size of financial contributions to candidates for certain elected city offices.
Testifying to a House committee about voting issues in 2017, Ho said his grandfather, Raymundo Seña Estacion, fought for the U.S. in World War II and survived the Bataan Death March during 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., said in supporting Ho’s nomination.
Ho graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1999 and he earned his law degree from Yale in 2005. In between, he started his career as a paralegal at the Manhattan district attorney’s office — down the street from the court where he now works — and was later a law clerk for a Manhattan federal judge.
As director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, Ho wrote and testified extensively about legal voting issues, including racial gerrymandering, voting by mail and purged voter rolls.
In 2019, Ho argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in successfully challenging the first Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the Census. In 2020, he argued before the high court in challenging a Trump memorandum directing that undocumented immigrants be excluded from the population base used to apportion House seats. Ho’s side lost, but Biden reversed Trump’s memo when he took office.
