Politics

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate voted on Tuesday 51-45 to confirm President Donald Trump’s nominee Howard Lutnick, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, to run the Commerce Department.

The Commerce Department, which has 47,000 employees, is responsible for U.S. export controls, anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties, weather forecasting, fisheries, economic data and promotion of investment in the United States. It also has oversight for the $52.7 billion CHIPS and Science semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidy program, and a $42 billion program to expand high-speed broadband to areas with little or no service.

Trump earlier said he had designated Lutnick as the leader of his trade policy. Lutnick told senators he has advised Trump to pursue across-the-board tariffs country-by-country to restore “reciprocity” to America’s trading relationships.

Last week, Reuters reported the White House is seeking to renegotiate CHIPS awards and has signaled delays to some upcoming semiconductor disbursements.

Lutnick told senators the CHIPS program is “an excellent downpayment” to rebuild the sector in the U.S., but needs to be reviewed.

Lutnick is worth $1.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Lutnick has said he will review year-old restrictions on firearms exports put in place by former President Joe Biden’s administration, aimed at preventing foreign criminal groups from acquiring U.S. guns.

Lutnick wants to improve U.S. access to Canada’s largely closed dairy market and would work to protect the U.S. market from fisheries imports from Russia and China.

Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz said Lutnick will focus on issues including expanding commercial access to wireless spectrum and “will ensure American taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently and that Congress gets ‘the benefit of the bargain’ on legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act.”

Lutnick said last month Chinese AI startup DeepSeek had misappropriated U.S. technology to create a “dirt cheap” AI model and vowed to impose new restrictions on Beijing’s technology access.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler and Chris Reese)

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(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump signed two executive orders and a presidential memorandum on Tuesday, a White House aide said.

Trump signed an order relating to the affordability and availability of in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments, and an order related to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the aide said.

The presidential memorandum that Trump signed was on “imposing radical transparency requirements on government departments and agencies,” the aide told reporters.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Writing by Ismail Shakil; Editing by Chris Reese)

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(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he will block the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One until the news agency stops referring to the Gulf of Mexico.

Trump signed an executive order in January directing the Interior Department to change the name of the body of water to the Gulf of America. The AP, citing editorial standards, said it would continue to use the gulf’s established name.

The White House has kept the AP out of several press pool gatherings during the past week, calling the news agency’s decision divisive and misinformation.

“We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday in his first public comments on the issue.

The agency has retained access to the White House complex itself.

The AP says in its stylebook that the Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. As a global news agency, the AP says it will refer to the gulf by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.

“This is about the government telling the public and press what words to use and retaliating if they do not follow government orders,” said AP spokesperson Lauren Easton.

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents journalists covering the president, has protested the Trump administration’s actions against the AP.

Most news organizations, including Reuters, continue to call the body of water the Gulf of Mexico, although, where relevant, Reuters style is to include the context about Trump’s executive order.

“Reuters stands with the Associated Press and other media organizations in objecting to coverage restrictions imposed by the White House on the AP, because of the AP’s independent editorial decisions,” Reuters said in a statement on Saturday.

(Reporting by Costas Pitas; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he will continue to restrict The Associated Press’ access to his events and news conferences until the news outlet goes along with his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico in its reports. He acknowledged that the move was a presidential retaliation against the news agency’s editorial policy.

“We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said, speaking to reporters who witnessed the signing of an executive order at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate. “We’re very proud of this country, and we want it to be the Gulf of America.”

It was the first time the president himself had commented on the issue since the White House began not allowing AP to cover several of his events last week. Two journalists from AP were denied entrance to Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday; they watched a live television feed of Trump’s remarks and were unable to ask questions.

Shortly after taking office, Trump renamed the international body of water, which borders the United States, Mexico and other countries and has been named the Gulf of Mexico for more than 400 years. The AP, whose influential Stylebook is the arbiter for editorial choices at thousands of news outlets and other editorial operations, said it would continue to use Gulf of Mexico and note Trump’s decision, to ensure that names of geographical features are recognizable around the world.

“The Associated Press just refuses to go with what the law is,” Trump said, an apparent reference to his executive order renaming the Gulf. No law prevents the AP from choosing the style it deems fit.

AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton said Tuesday that “this is about the government telling the public and press what words to use and retaliating if they do not follow government orders. The White House has restricted AP’s coverage of presidential events because of how we refer to a location.”

While the AP has framed the dispute as a First Amendment issue, Trump’s team says access to its events — most of which are funded by tax dollars — is a privilege extended by invitation, and that while AP is still permitted on White House grounds, it no longer has the right to be part of pools that cover events where space is limited.

While Trump characterized AP as standing alone against the name change, outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post are also using Gulf of Mexico. Fox News Channel said it will use Gulf of America as a reference. Axios, noting that it primarily serves a U.S. audience, said its reference will be “Gulf of America (renamed by the U.S. from Gulf of Mexico).” Additionally, AP’s myriad customers that use its content follow AP style.

It’s all part of an ongoing series of actions by the White House that has targeted legacy media. The Pentagon has evicted eight news organizations from workspaces at the Pentagon, and Trump is continuing his lawsuit against CBS News for how it edited a “60 Minutes” interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, last fall.

Elon Musk, who is coordinating cutbacks in government staffing for Trump, posted on his X social media platform after a “60 Minutes” broadcast Sunday that people there “deserve a long prison sentence.”

Through a story in Axios over the weekend, the Trump administration broadened its complaints against the AP beyond the Gulf dispute. White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich told Axios that the administration is concerned about AP “weaponizing language through their Stylebook to push a partisan world view.”

Specifically, it objects to the Stylebook’s use of the phrase “gender-affirming care” to describe medical treatments for transgender people, and the capitalization of Black and not white in racial descriptions.

Trump said that some of the phrases that the AP wants to use are “ridiculous” and “obsolete.” “I guess some are OK, but many aren’t,” the president said, without being specific.

He also said, referring to himself in the third person, that AP “has been very, very wrong on the election on Trump and the treatment of Trump and other things having to do with Trump and Republicans and conservatives. And they’re doing us no favors. And I guess I’m doing them no favors. That’s the way life works.”

It was unclear which election he was referring to. The AP reported Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election against Trump, and Trump the victor over Harris last fall.

Trump’s Mar-a-Lago appearance on Tuesday was opened to several news outlets that were not part of the small group of reporters that have been traveling with the president in Florida since Friday. Among the outlets admitted into Mar-a-Lago Tuesday were The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Axios, Fox News Channel and Agence France-Presse.

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AP White House correspondent Darlene Superville contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate Republicans aim to vote this week on their own plan to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda on border security, immigration, fossil fuel production and defense, pushing ahead of a rival Republican blueprint in the House of Representatives.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the chamber’s top Republican, said on Tuesday that it was time to act on a budget resolution that was authored by Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and approved by his panel last week.

“It’s time to act on the decisive mandate the American people gave to President Trump in November,” Thune said in a post on X. “That starts this week with passing Chairman @LindseyGrahamSC’s budget.”

Trump’s agenda calls for trillions of dollars in tax cuts, a surge in fossil fuel production, higher defense spending, tighter border security and the deportation of people living in the United States illegally.

But the two chambers have split over their approaches, with Senate Republicans pursuing a two-step plan intended to give Trump an early win on border, defense and energy issues, while leaving the thornier topic of tax policy for later in the year.

House Republicans, fearing the Senate plan could make tax cuts impossible to pass as standalone legislation, are hoping to unify their notoriously fractious majority behind a blueprint for enacting the entire Trump agenda in one fell swoop, an approach that Trump says he favors.

The House and Senate need to pass the same resolution to unlock a special parliamentary tool that would allow them to pass Trump’s agenda without contending with Democrats or the Senate filibuster.

Despite the appearance of rival plans, Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson insist they are striving toward the same goal. The Senate’s decision to move forward on its own budget blueprint appeared to spur Republicans to unveil their own plan last week and win House Budget Committee approval to move the measure to the floor as early as next week.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Louis DeJoy, the head of the U.S. Postal Service, intends to step down, the federal agency said Tuesday, after a nearly five-year tenure marked by the coronavirus pandemic, surges in mail-in election ballots and efforts to stem losses through cost and service cuts.

In a Monday letter, Postmaster General DeJoy asked the Postal Service Board of Governors to begin looking for his successor.

“As you know, I have worked tirelessly to lead the 640,000 men and women of the Postal Service in accomplishing an extraordinary transformation,” he wrote. “We have served the American people through an unprecedented pandemic and through a period of high inflation and sensationalized politics.”

DeJoy took the helm of the postal service in the summer of 2020 during President Donald Trump’s first term. He was a Republican donor who owned a logistics business before taking office and was the first postmaster general in nearly two decades who was not a career postal employee.

DeJoy developed a 10-year plan to modernize operations and stem losses. He previously said that postal customers should get used to “uncomfortable” rate hikes as the postal service seeks to stabilize its finances and become more self-sufficient.

The plan calls for making the mail delivery system more efficient and less costly by consolidating mail processing centers. Critics, including members of Congress from several states, have said the first consolidations slowed service and that further consolidations could particularly hurt rural mail delivery.

DeJoy has disputed that and told a U.S. House subcommittee during a contentious September hearing that the Postal Service had embarked on long-overdue investments in “ratty” facilities and making other changes to create “a Postal Service for the future” that delivered mail more quickly.

DeJoy also oversaw the postal service during two presidential elections that saw spikes in mail-in ballots.

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge limited one of the postal service’s cost-cutting practices after finding it contributed to delays in mail delivery. DeJoy had restricted overtime payments for postal workers and stopped the agency’s longtime practice of allowing late and extra truck deliveries in the summer of 2020. The moves reduced costs but meant some mail was left behind to be delivered the following day.

DeJoy said in his letter that he was committed to being “as helpful as possible in facilitating a transition.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans pushed ahead late Tuesday on a scaled-back budget bill, a $340 billion package to give the Trump administration money for mass deportations and other priorities, as Democrats prepare a counter-campaign against the onslaught of actions coming from the White House.

On a party-line vote, 50-47, Republicans launched the process, skipping ahead of the House Republicans who prefer President Donald Trump’s approach for a “big, beautiful bill” that includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that are tops on the party agenda. Senate Republicans plan to deal with tax cuts later, in a second package.

“It’s time to act,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., on social media, announcing the plan ahead as the House is on recess week. “Let’s get it done.”

This is the first step in unlocking Trump’s campaign promises — tax cuts, energy production and border controls — and dominating the agenda in Congress. While Republicans have majority control of both the House and Senate, giving a rare sweep of Washington power, they face big hurdles trying to put the president’s agenda into law over steep Democratic objections.

It’s coming as the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency effort is slashing costs across government departments, leaving a trail of fired federal workers and dismantling programs on which many Americans depend. Democrats, having floundered amid the initial chaos coming from the White House, emerged galvanized as they try to warn Americans what’s at stake.

“These bills that they have have one purpose — and that is they’re trying to give a tax break to their billionaire buddies and have you, the average American person, pay for it,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told AP. “It is outrageous.”

Schumer convened a private weekend call with Democratic senators and emerged with a strategy to challenge Republicans for prioritizing tax cuts that primarily flow to the wealthy at the expense of program and service cuts to U.S. health care, scientific research, veterans services and other programs.

As the Senate begins the cumbersome budget process this week — which entails an initial 50 hours of debate followed by an expected all-night session with dozens if not 100 or more efforts to amend the package in what’s called a vote-a-rama — Democrats are preparing to drill down on those issues.

The Senate GOP package would allow $175 billion to be spent on border security, including funding for mass deportation operations and to build the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border; a $150 billion boost to the Pentagon for defense spending; and $20 billion for the Coast Guard.

Republicans are determined to push ahead after Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and top aide Stephen Miller told senators privately last week they are running short of cash to accomplish the president’s mass deportations and other border priorities.

The Senate Budget Committee said the package would cost about $85.5 billion a year, for four years of Trump’s presidency, paid for with new reductions and revenues elsewhere that other committees will draw up.

Eyeing ways to pay for the package, Senate Republicans are considering a rollback of the Biden administration’s methane emissions fee, which was approved by Democrats as part of climate change strategies in the Inflation Reduction Act, and hoping to draw new revenue from energy leases as they aim to spur domestic energy production.

While the House and Senate budget resolutions are often considered simply statements of policy priorities, these could actually become law.

The budget resolutions are being considered under what’s called the reconciliation process, which allows passage on a simple majority vote without many of the procedural hurdles that stall bills. Once rare, reconciliation is increasingly being used in the House and Senate to pass big packages on party-line votes when one party controls the White House and Congress.

During Trump’s first term, Republicans used the reconciliation process to pass the GOP tax cuts in 2017. Democrats used reconciliation during the Biden presidency era to approve COVID relief and also the Inflation Reduction Act.

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Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

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By Bianca Flowers and Helen Coster

CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Casey Cooper knew the odds were stacked against her as a Black woman when she entered the long-haul trucking industry, a male-dominated field. 

She grew her business for 11 years, long-hauling products from her home state of Virginia to Florida before landing her first federal contract in 2017. She has since secured nearly $6 million in federal contracts.

But when President Donald Trump began targeting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives across the federal government – which could include a program aimed specifically at helping Black-owned firms like her own compete for federal government contracts – Cooper was unfazed. 

Some minority-owned firms may have benefited from DEI programs,  the business owner said, but such initiatives did not go far enough in dismantling other barriers.

“DEI isn’t for us,” she said. “It looks good on paper, but that money doesn’t go to us anyway.” 

Now the Trump rollback of DEI initiatives threatens to erode even the modest progress made under President Joe Biden’s administration in increasing representation of Black-owned companies doing business with the federal government, according to 10 experts in DEI, government contracts and public policy and advocacy group leaders interviewed by Reuters.

Trump signed two executive orders in January that directed agencies and staff to repeal prior executive orders designed to ensure equal opportunity in the workplace. The exact implications of the orders are unclear, experts, contractors and trade association leaders say.  

“Many of these business owners feel disillusioned, betrayed, and deeply concerned about the future of their enterprises,” said Ken Harris, president and chief executive of the National Business League, a trade association for Black-owned businesses. “DEI policies, while far from perfect, provided a semblance of opportunity in an otherwise exclusionary system.”

MIXED RESULTS

In December 2021, the Biden White House bolstered DEI efforts by asking federal agencies to direct at least 11% of federal contract dollars to small disadvantaged businesses – a category that includes Black, Latino and other minority-owned ventures – with the goal of reaching 15% by 2025. For the previous five years, small disadvantaged businesses had received an average of 9.8% of contract dollars.  

The results have been mixed. Although small disadvantaged businesses overall received slightly over 12% of contract dollars in 2023, Black-owned businesses accounted for only a fraction of those contracts, 1.61%, according to government data. Black-owned firms received an even smaller slice of the pie last year, 1.54% of $637 billion in small business-eligible federal contracting, according to the data. In both years, the vast majority of federal contracts went to large companies.

In 2023 14.4% of the U.S. population identified as Black, according to Pew Research Center data.

Nine Black business owners and trade association representatives interviewed by Reuters blamed structural barriers including challenges raising capital to secure big jobs and the growing size of federal contracts, which tends to favor large companies.

“Over more than a decade, contracts have been getting larger and larger, and fewer and fewer. It gets more difficult for small firms to get in and get the experience they need to become federal prime contractors,” said Isabel Guzman, who headed the Small Business Administration under Biden and oversaw federal contracting programs for minority-owned businesses.   

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for clarification about the implications of the new policy for Black and other contractors of color.

Trump and his supporters say DEI programs unfairly discriminate against other Americans – including white people and men – and weaken the importance of candidates’ merit in job hiring or promotion.

DEI advocates say programs advancing minority-owned businesses are critical to remedy decades-long discrimination in traditional lending and race-based disparities in venture capital opportunities.  

Trump also rescinded a 1965 executive order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson that prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin by federal contractors. The new policy requires federal contractors to certify that they don’t operate any DEI programs deemed “illegal” by the administration. 

That is likely to end government pressure on companies to diversify their ranks, said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at NYU School of Law. It also creates uncertainty for contracting firms, he said.

“I think part of the intention behind this executive order is to be deliberately opaque about that, in order to sow confusion and panic among contractors of: ‘How do I know what’s legal and illegal? Maybe I should just shut all my DEI programs down, because I’m going to be creating risk for us if we do them,’” Glasgow said.  

When asked to comment, White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields said there should be no confusion around Trump’s orders. “He received a resounding mandate from 77 million voters who overwhelmingly chose him to restore common-sense policies, reestablish America’s dominance on the world stage, and strengthen the economy.”  

‘GOOD OLD BOY’ NETWORK

Patricia Sigers, a Black woman who owns a five-person construction firm that has done work for Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, said one of the biggest obstacles she has faced is getting the “performance bond” typically required for construction jobs.

Performance bonds are issued by insurance companies and provide assurance to a client that a construction firm will complete its job. The larger the job, the larger the performance bond, and as contracts balloon in size, small business owners like Sigers get shut out of the bidding process, she said.  

“White men can get a bond quicker than we can get a bond because they have been in business long enough to accumulate the wealth that is needed to get it,” Sigers said. 

Wendell Stemley, the owner of Black IPO Construction Management in San Diego and president of the National Association of Minority Contractors – which represents federal and state contractors and construction managers – said that a “good old boy network” has contributed to the lack of opportunities for minority contractors in government projects.

Stemley also described a false narrative about the effectiveness of initiatives designed to help Black and other minority contractors. 

“People want you to believe that, oh, the government got this big minority business program to give Blacks these multitude of contracts,” he said. “That’s just not the way it works.”

Stemley has requested a meeting with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, whose department hires contractors for infrastructure projects, and plans to inquire about meeting with Trump. He described the lack of contracting opportunities for Black and other minority business owners as a “bipartisan failure,” citing the need for more minority workforce training and better compliance by prime contractors. 

Other leaders of minority-focused trade associations are considering legal challenges to the Trump orders and bringing in legal advisers to speak with members. They are also planning to meet with lawmakers to make the case for maintaining diversity efforts, Harris of the National Business League, said. 

Drexel Johnson, a Black general engineering contractor with the state of California, expressed frustration with previous administrations over the limited prospects for Black contractors and the possible risk to future opportunities. 

“If you take away the little bit of progress that we’ve gotten over the years, that’s not fair.”

(Reporting by Bianca Flowers in Chicago and Helen Coster in New York; Editing by Kat Stafford and Suzanne Goldenberg)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Billionaire Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration is as a White House employee and senior adviser to the president, and is not an employee of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has no decision-making authority, the White House said in a court filing on Monday.

According to a filing signed by Joshua Fisher, director of the Office of Administration at the White House, Musk can only advise the president and communicate the president’s directives.

“Like other senior White House advisors, Mr Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself,” it said.

Fisher’s filing, made in a case brought against Musk by the State of New Mexico, said that Musk was not an employee of the U.S. DOGE Service, or the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization, and added: “Mr Musk is not the U.S. DOGE Service Administrator.”

DOGE has swept through federal agencies since Donald Trump began his second term as president last month and put Musk, the chief executive of carmaker Tesla , in charge of rooting out wasteful spending as part a dramatic overhaul of government that has included thousands of job cuts.

(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Michael Perry)

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NEW YORK (AP) — A former Watergate prosecutor on Monday urged a federal judge presiding over the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams to assign a special counsel to help decide how to handle the Justice Department’s request to drop charges while three ex-U.S. attorneys urged a “searching factual inquiry.”

Attorney Nathaniel Akerman told Judge Dale E. Ho in a letter filed in the case record in Manhattan federal court that he sought to intervene because nobody was representing the public’s interest after three attorneys from the Justice Department in Washington made the request Friday.

The one-time Watergate prosecutor urged the judge to reject the dismissal request, saying the court could look into how the Justice Department reached its decision and could require Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who first directed prosecutors to drop the case, to appear in court and explain his position.

Akerman, representing Common Cause, a nonpartisan advocacy group for U.S. elections integrity, said the judge may ultimately need to appoint an independent special prosecutor to the case.

Three ex-U.S. attorneys also submitted arguments to Ho Monday, saying what was at stake was “far more than an internal prosecutorial dispute about an individual case.”

“The public furor that has arisen during the past week raises concerns about respect for the rule of law and the division of power between the Executive and Judicial Branches of government in our nation,” wrote John S. Martin Jr., the Manhattan U.S. attorney from 1980 to 1983; Robert J. Cleary, U.S. attorney for New Jersey from 1999 to 2002; and Deirdre M. Daly, U.S. attorney for Connecticut from 2013 to 2017.

They suggested Ho first learn why the Justice Department wanted the charges dismissed and whether its reasons were pretextual.

If the judge decides dismissal of charges is inappropriate, he will have multiple remedies, including the power to appoint a special prosecutor or to direct federal prosecutors to make evidence, including grand jury materials, available to state and local prosecutors, they said.

They also wrote that a factual inquiry might lead to other “necessary and important outcomes,” including the possibility of a contempt proceeding, criminal referrals and disciplinary recommendations.

“In short, depending on the circumstances, the Court could have a variety of procedural avenues available to protect the integrity of the Court and the justice system from abuse,” the former prosecutors said.

The ex-prosecutors also told the judge that additional public statements regarding the events of the past week have been issued or would be issued shortly by hundreds of former federal prosecutors.

Adams has pleaded not guilty to charges that while in his prior role as Brooklyn borough president, he accepted over $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and lavish travel perks from a Turkish official and business leaders seeking to buy his influence.

The last week has featured after an unusual public fight between Bove, the second-in-command of the Justice Department, and two top New York federal prosecutors: interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten, an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan who led the Adams prosecution.

On Thursday, Sassoon resigned, along with five high-ranking Justice Department officials. A day later, Scotten resigned, noting that Sassoon had properly resisted a demand that the charges be dropped and the possibility they could be reinstated after this year’s election.

“No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” he wrote.

On Monday, Adams — amid calls to resign by some Democrats — confirmed that four of his top deputies had decided to resign in the fallout from the Justice Department’s push to end the corruption case against him and ensure his cooperation with Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In his letter to Ho, Akerman echoed Sassoon’s assertion that the Justice Department had accepted a request by Adams’ lawyers for a “quid pro quo” — his help on immigration enforcement in exchange for dropping the case. She called it a “breathtaking and dangerous precedent.”

Akerman wrote that there was “overwhelming evidence from DOJ’s own internal documents showing that the dismissal of the Adams indictment is not in the public interest and is part of a corrupt quid pro quo between Mayor Adams and the Trump administration.”

He said the internal documents show that in return for dismissal of the indictment, Adams agreed to improperly assist the Trump administration with immigration enforcement.

Adams’ lawyer Alex Spiro said Thursday that the allegation of a quid pro quo was a “total lie.”

When he directed Sassoon to drop the charges a week ago, Bove said the mayor of America’s largest city was needed to assist in Trump’s immigration crackdown and the dismissal of charges could enable Adams to campaign for reelection against multiple opponents unencumbered by criminal charges.

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