Why New York Mayor Eric Adams’ Cellphone Might Be His Undoing
Reading Time: 5 minutesThe FBI’s deep dive into the politician’s inner circle has left City Hall in turmoil. His fate may hinge on the content of a few devices., New York Mayor Eric Adams: Why the FBI seizing the Democrat’s cellphone might be his undoing.
New York City politicians tend to rack up their fair share of scandals, but even Ed Koch’s former press secretary claims to have never seen anything like the ‘unprecedented’ mess Mayor Eric Adams is now facing. Last week, the FBI dispatched entire squads to raid the homes of five trusted Adams appointees: two deputy mayors, the schools chancellor, the police commissioner, and a senior mayoral adviser.
The feds have also seized these officials’ personal communication devices, including cellphones and laptops. Their probes encompass multiple cases being pursued against members of Adams’ inner circle, as the local news outlet the City has reported. One of these investigations kicked off in a very public way late last year, when FBI agents searched the home of Adams’ chief campaign fundraiser and confiscated ‘three iPhones and two laptop computers,’ according to the New York Times. A few days later, the FBI intercepted Adams himself and nabbed two of his cellphones and an iPad; the mayor voluntarily submitted two more of his devices to the bureau after that, and all the equipment was handed back to him relatively quickly.
The still-ongoing case there deals with allegations that Adams’ campaign coordinated with Turkey-linked businesses to pocket illegal donations from Turkish officials. But there are three additional investigations that inspired the more recent raids.
One is related to a consulting agency run by a relative of two high-ranking officials whose phones were confiscated. Another involves the police commissioner’s twin brother, a former crooked cop who owns a nightclub-security business and also had his phone seized as part of the probe into whether he used his connections to ensure that certain city clubs earned less-aggressive police oversight than others. The third federal case focuses on Adams’ senior adviser, who oversees funding for immigrant security services, and ‘whether any kickbacks were involved‘ in the ‘city contracts he may have had a hand in,’ per the New York Post.
The feds themselves have not lodged any formal charges against these folks, and they’ve all denied any wrongdoing. But the very fact that the FBI executed warrants to seize their phones and computers portends something very serious.
Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia Law School professor and former federal prosecutor, told the New York Times, ‘Since you have to deal with the police commissioner and his force constantly, it takes a real commitment to a particular case and a real belief that you’re onto something to seize his phone.’ Other former prosecutors remarked to the Times that ‘those higher up in the U.S. attorney’s office would not have decided to execute search warrants lightly’ and that ‘prosecutors don’t typically take steps like this unless they think something nefarious happened.’
In the meantime, Eric Adams and all his high-ranking pals have vowed to continue doing their respective jobs and govern NYC. For a lot of these folks, however, it’s gonna be pretty hard to run things in either their public or private lives without their phones—and, unlike with Adams’ situation last year, it seems clear the FBI won’t be returning their equipment anytime soon. So what are they going to do in the interim? How do you go about your daily life, your work, your personal affairs when the feds have seized your devices and you have no idea when (or if) you’re going to get them back?
There’s very little information out there about What to Do When the Feds Take Your Phone Away, even though it’s one of their more common tactics—I still vividly remember all the piles of evidence in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial that were culled from witnesses’ phones and laptops. I called up Jessica Lonergan, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and current litigation counsel for the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, to ask every question I had about what happens when federal law enforcement takes your stuff.
The first thing you need to understand is that when agents request your devices, they can’t force you to provide them with the passwords/codes/keys through which you unlock your devices (if you have such options in place, that is). This is thanks to the Fifth Amendment, which protects the conveyance of that as speech—but does not, importantly, extend to biometric security.
‘Sometimes a warrant will also give law enforcement the ability to put your thumb on your phone or put your face in front of your phone’ to unlock it, says Lonergan. ‘There’s a line of case law that says putting your thumb or your face in front of your phone is not speech, in much the same way that people can get your fingerprints from you.’
Once that is accomplished, the FBI has to keep the phone unlocked and will usually do so by changing the appropriate settings, perhaps with some experts guiding them over the shoulder. ‘You need to have tech people there whose job it is to keep that phone unlocked,’ says Lonergan. ‘Until you can hook that phone up to software that’s going to download all the data, you need someone who knows how to handle it.’
That gets into another essential point: just how the feds recover potential evidence from your phone or computer. ‘You don’t usually search on the device itself,’ she explains. ‘Usually, there’s a copy made through some software program that allows you to search it.’
Federal officers will also employ legal experts to consult on the data transmission to ensure they’re not infringing on any privileged attorney–client communications—those other lawyers or prosecutors will comb through such messages and obscure the appropriate information.
But even when the phone is unlocked and all the data copied off the device, the feds aren’t apt to return it to you, because they may still require access to the thing down the line. ‘The device itself is often the original evidence, not the copy,’ says Lonergan. ‘Plus, you may not initially have the full tools to search that device, and then you get them later.’ Because of this, lawyers for the clients at hand need to meet a ‘pretty high burden’ if they wish to persuade agents to return the devices before they’re done with them.
If you’re stuck without your phone for that long, guess what? You’re probably just gonna have to buy another one. Don’t worry, though—the feds will need a whole other warrant to search the replacement phone if they so wish, provided they have probable cause that you’re still doing crimes on the new device. If that’s the case, you may have severe problems beyond just missing your phone.
Oh, and by the way: If you, say, work for a mayor under federal investigation and have reason to believe you might get caught up in the muck, you should not try to scrub anything damning from your backlog. ‘There’s rarely only one copy of something digital,’ says Lonergan, pointing to communication servers, other people’s inboxes, and floating screenshots that may retain the messages you’ve deleted. That could get you in extra trouble, potentially for obstruction of justice. And yes, if you are in such a situation, you shouldn’t be surprised if the feds do want your digital communications.
‘Digital electronic evidence is incredibly powerful—I say that both as a defense attorney and as a prosecutor,’ says Lonergan. ‘It’s used in almost every single type of case.’
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