NY Times: A former City Hall aide charged last year with witness tampering tied to the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York intends to plead guilty, according to a court document that prosecutors filed in the mayor’s case on Friday.
It was not clear from the document whether the aide, Mohamed Bahi, who had served as the mayor’s liaison to the Muslim community, was cooperating with the prosecutors. But it identified Mr. Bahi, 40, as a co-conspirator in the case against the mayor.
In the document — a letter to the judge presiding over Mr. Adams’s bribery and fraud case — the prosecutors outlined the connections between the indictment against the mayor and the cases of Mr. Bahi and another man. The other man, a Turkish American businessman who had been charged separately, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit fraud related to straw donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.
The prosecutors said that the charges against Mr. Bahi and the businessman, Erden Arkan, stemmed from their involvement in one of the criminal schemes laid out in the indictment of the mayor.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case against Mayor Adams, declined to comment. Mr. Bahi’s lawyer, Derek Adams, could not be immediately reached for comment.
A lawyer for the mayor, Alex Spiro, also could not be immediately reached for comment.
The disclosure of Mr. Bahi’s guilty plea would seem to further cloud the situation surrounding the prosecution of Mr. Adams himself. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Adams’s legal team met with U.S. Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors from Manhattan about the possibility of dropping the case against him.
That meeting followed statements by President Trump suggesting that the mayor had been charged for political reasons under the Biden administration. Mr. Adams has said he was indicted because he criticized the former administration’s response to the migrant crisis.
Manhattan federal prosecutors have said in court filings that such claims are unfounded.
It would be unusual, if Mr. Adams’s case were dropped, for prosecutors to move forward with cases against other defendants, such as Mr. Bahi, who were charged with participating in the same criminal activities as the mayor — especially when prosecutors had said the scheme was primarily intended to benefit Mr. Adams.
Initially, Mr. Spiro decried the indictment against Mr. Adams as weak because he said it was based on the account of one former aide, Rana Abbasova, who was cooperating with the investigation.
But prosecutors have since said in court papers that “there are multiple witnesses who will expressly implicate the defendant in criminal conduct, each of whom is corroborated by electronic communications and other data obtained from over 50 cellphones and other electronic devices and accounts.”
And the case against Mr. Bahi, who was charged less than two weeks after Mr. Adams was indicted, appeared at the time to strengthen the case against the mayor.
The initial charges against Mr. Bahi, detailed in a criminal complaint unsealed on Oct. 8, revealed that an Uzbek businessman who prosecutors said had made straw donations to Mr. Adams was cooperating with their investigation. The case also raised the possibility that Mr. Bahi could testify against Mr. Adams himself.
Mr. Bahi was accused of acting as a liaison between Mr. Adams and the businessman, Tolib Mansurov, who prosecutors said later sought and received help from the mayor in resolving problems that his construction company was having with the city’s Buildings Department.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Bahi coached Mr. Mansurov and his employees to lie to federal investigators about the contributions, and that he photographed grand jury subpoenas the employees had been given. The F.B.I. executed search warrants at the homes of Mr. Mansurov and Mr. Bahi last year, according to court filings.
No charges have been publicly filed against Mr. Mansurov, his employees or Ms. Abbasova.
The prosecutors, in their letter to the judge, Dale E. Ho, said that Mr. Bahi would plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy, the same crime to which Mr. Arkan admitted.
Both men, prosecutors wrote, had conspired to collect campaign contributions “under the name of someone other than the true contributor.” Using those sham donations, Mr. Adams was able to fraudulently obtain additional public matching funds from the city for his campaign, the prosecutors said.
The mayor, in his indictment, is charged with the same conduct.
The prosecutors also noted in their letter that “Bahi has indicated that he intends to plead guilty to the sole count of the information against him,” referring to the charging document filed against him on Thursday.
