A federal judge in Brooklyn has ordered Indian billionaire Gautam Adani to answer questions about whether there was any sort of quid pro quo made in connection with the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss criminal foreign bribery and securities fraud charges against him.
In a court filing early Thursday, U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis told Adani he has until July 15 to answer whether he is aware of “anything promised, offered, sought, received, agreed to, or accepted, by anyone in connection with the dismissal of the indictment” and whether he knows of any “agreement exchanging anything for the dismissal of the Indictment.”
The demand represents an escalation between the Justice Department and the court, after senior politically-appointed DOJ officials sought to dismiss all the charges against Adani and other executives over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian government officials to secure solar energy supply contracts.
The decision to dismiss the case has raised eyebrows and sparked questions from Garaufis. Two career prosecutors who were involved in the case withdrew from the matter after the motion to dismiss was filed. Additionally, politically-appointed officials — the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and Trent McCotter, the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General — were the only signatories on the motion to dismiss.
Although the Adani case in the Eastern District of New York previously survived a DOJ and Securities and Exchange Commission review ordered by the White House into all Foreign Corrupt Practices pending prosecutions, the decision was later reversed by McCotter.
McCotter made the determination after he and other government officials met with Jamie McDonald, Bob Giuffra and Andrew DeFilippis of Sullivan & Cromwell who represented Adani, sources previously told CBS News. McDonald has since been nominated by President Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He returned to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan this week to help lead it until its current top prosecutor, Jay Clayton, is confirmed by the Senate to oversee the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
In one of these meetings at the Justice Department about the Adani case, Giuffra made a presentation that disputed evidence of the alleged bribery scheme, according to sources familiar with the matter and records reviewed by CBS News. One slide touted how one of Adani’s companies is “powering India’s progress,” and another slide said the Trump administration “would not have brought the case.”
If prosecutors were to drop the charges, Giuffra also said at the meeting, Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy, sources told CBS News.
McCotter, in a recent letter to the court, aggressively pushed back against any effort by the judge to question the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the charges.
“Demanding the rationales for dismissal will hurt defendants—not just the defendants here, but untold other defendants in future cases—by potentially chilling the Department from seeking dismissal of criminal charges it determines are not in the interests of justice,” he wrote in a July 4 filing.
McCotter also addressed the media reports about the offer by Adani to invest in the U.S. economy, telling the judge that those stories were leaked by current and former prosecutors and had no bearing on his decision-making.
“Current or former department attorneys who unethically fed those stories have suggested that I sought dismissal of the securities charges at least in part because of some promise by those defendants to invest money in the United States. That is false. Before that topic first arose, I had already firmly concluded I would seek dismissal of the securities charges no matter what, because they were so indefensible,” he wrote.
Garaufis on Thursday highlighted those comments in his order, saying they raised fresh concerns about the potential for an improper quid pro quo.
The statement “raises-for the first time- the specter of a possible agreement (involving one or multiple defendants) in connection with the dismissal of the indictment that has neither been memorialized nor previously brought to the attention of this court,” he wrote.
This is not the first time that the Justice Department has had a standoff with a federal judge over the dismissal of criminal charges.
Last year, a federal judge in New York’s Southern District raised questions after senior political officials sought to dismiss public corruption charges against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
The move sparked resignations in protest from 11 federal prosecutors in New York and Washington, and it raised questions about whether the Trump Justice Department was dismissing the case in exchange for Adams’ cooperation with the president’s immigration priorities.
U.S. District Judge Dale Ho forced the government to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it could not be brought again, and said the entire thing “smacks of a bargain.”