Mayor Eric Adams of New York on Tuesday criticized federal authorities who brought a corruption case against him, saying that documents made public last week showed they were “plotting” to embarrass him.
Mr. Adams, who faced federal bribery and fraud charges before President Trump’s Justice Department abandoned the case against him earlier this year, assailed the investigation and in particular the suggestion that federal agents had considered seizing his electronic devices at the finish line of the 2023 New York City Marathon.
“I was targeted for humiliation,” he said at this weekly news conference at City Hall, adding: “They wanted to take my phones at the goddamn marathon.”
Mr. Adams’s comments on Tuesday were his most extensive, and pointed, since some 1,700 pages of documents from his case were released on Friday, revealing new details about the corruption investigation that had focused on the mayor. They showed that federal authorities were forging ahead with the investigation, obtaining a new warrant in February seeking evidence of fraud and federal program bribery by Mr. Adams’s campaigns. Then the Trump administration intervened to end it.
Mr. Adams was indicted in September by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on five counts, including bribery, wire fraud and solicitation of illegal foreign donations.
In February, the Justice Department’s acting No. 2 official, Emil Bove III, directed the interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan to seek the case’s dismissal, arguing that the indictment was interfering with the mayor’s ability to cooperate with Mr. Trump’s deportation agenda.
Judge Dale E. Ho granted the government’s request to dismiss the charges, saying he did so because the prerogative to pursue or drop a case rests with prosecutors. He wrote that his decision was not a reflection of the merit of the case against Mr. Adams.
The unsealed records also shed light on a claim Mr. Adams made to federal authorities about forgetting the password to his primary cellphone, which prevented the F.B.I. from opening it after obtaining a warrant to search it. The mayor’s lawyers told authorities that he changed it to prevent aides from accessing it and forgot the new password, according to the records.
But an affidavit from an F.B.I. agent included in the documents said that it appeared that Mr. Adams “concealed that device from law enforcement when he was searched, and then made false statements, both directly and through counsel,” to obstruct investigators from opening it and reviewing its contents.
On Tuesday, Mr. Adams said that he could not remember the password to his phone because he has dyslexia, a learning disability that he has frequently spoken about.
“Hey, folks, I’m dyslexic,” he said. “I forget numbers. That’s a byproduct of it.”
The F.B.I., which obtained warrants to track Mr. Adams’s location using cellphone data, found that he had used seven different phone numbers since the investigation began in August 2021, according to the files. He often carried several devices.
Mr. Adams’s use of so many phones prompted the F.B.I. to seek permission to use a “cell site simulator” to discover other devices in the vicinity of ones Mr. Adams was known to be using.
In one F.B.I. affidavit, an agent wrote that “individuals involved in criminal activity commonly use multiple cellphones in order to reduce the chances that law enforcement’s discovery or seizure of one phone will reveal or disrupt their illegal activities.”
When Mr. Adams was asked on Saturday why he had so many phones, he told reporters that he had a work phone, a personal phone and a campaign phone and that when federal officials took his phones, he had to get new ones.
“Many New Yorkers have several phones,” Mr. Adams said.
Instead of trying to seize his devices at the marathon on Nov. 5, 2023, the F.B.I. approached him the next evening after an event near Washington Square Park. Agents seized two or three iPhones and an iPad from the mayor, but he was not carrying his personal phone, which the F.B.I. called “the target cellphone,” according to the warrant files.
The next day, Mr. Adams’s lawyers turned over that phone, a gray Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max that Mr. Adams said he had locked himself out of, and another phone, according to the documents from the investigation.
In an affidavit seeking a warrant to search Gracie Mansion, an F.B.I. agent wrote that location data for one of the mayor’s phones indicated that he “regularly spends the overnight hours” of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at his official residence of Gracie Mansion in Manhattan and “occasionally does so on other days as well.” That raised questions about where Mr. Adams sleeps during the rest of the week. (When Mr. Adams was running for mayor in 2021, he invited reporters into a home he owns in Brooklyn to try to quell speculation that he actually lived in Fort Lee, N.J.)
The agents conducted the search of Gracie Mansion in the early morning hours of Thursday Sept. 26, 2024, the same day the indictment of Mr. Adams was unsealed.
More electronic devices were seized: two more iPhones, an iPad with a “NYC Mayor’s Office” sticker and an Iridium satellite phone that was in a protective case on the night stand next to Mr. Adams’s bed.
On Tuesday, Mr. Adams also discussed his visit with Mr. Trump at the White House last Friday. The mayor said he had discussed infrastructure and other important issues with the president. Mr. Trump later told reporters that they had discussed “almost nothing” and that Mr. Adams had come “to thank me.”
The mayor said that he was not thanking Mr. Trump for his administration’s push to drop the corruption case against him, but for Mr. Trump’s comments last October saying that Mr. Adams’s case was unfair and political.
“Why wouldn’t I say thank you?” Mr. Adams said. “While I was going through the most devastating experience I had as a human being, this person that I didn’t know said, ‘It’s wrong what they’re doing to the mayor of the City of New York.’ The first thing I did when I walked in his office is say ‘thank you.’”