United States Attorney Damian Williams toppled political giants well before he unsealed a media bombshell of a criminal indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
In 2023, Williams led his Southern District of New York office in a case against now-resigned Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, accusing him of corruption in his dealings with Egypt’s government, later securing a conviction.
In addition to Menendez and Adams, Williams has prosecuted many more politicians.
Earlier in his career, Williams successfully helped convict high-profile members of the Republican and Democratic parties in successive years. In 2018, he helped prosecute former longtime New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on several corruption charges.
Silver was viewed as one of the most powerful politicians in the state and, after his conviction, was described as “an iron-fisted dictator who turned that legislative body into his own personal, profit-making enterprise.”
The next year, Williams went after former Republican Rep. Chris Collins, who represented a district in Western New York, for insider trading. He successfully got Collins convicted of pushing company information to his son to prevent trading losses.
Williams’s record indicates his unabashed desire to seek justice against politicians who had done wrong regardless of political affiliation. When President Joe Biden appointed him as U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York in 2021, Williams said his goal was “to be fiercely independent of politics.”
While Williams has been indirectly involved in politics in several cases against prominent lawmakers, a statement and his indictment of Menendez draw a clearer picture of what Williams meant.
“My office is firmly committed to rooting out corruption, without fear or favor, and without any regard to partisan politics,” Williams said. “We will continue to do so.”
Williams’s story continued Thursday when he announced his prosecution of Adams. The first New York City mayor to be indicted while in office, Adams is the most high-profile politician the U.S. attorney has pursued in his career.
“Public office is a privilege,” Williams said at a press conference announcing Adams’s indictment. “We allege that Mayor Adams abused that privilege and broke the law, laws that are designed to ensure that officials like him serve the people — not the highest bidder, not a foreign bidder, and certainly not a foreign power.”
Adams has vehemently denied the charges and claimed that he’s become a “target.”
“It is now my belief that the federal government intends to charge me with crimes,” Adams said in a video statement. “If so, these charges would be entirely false, based on lies. But they would not be surprising. I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you that, I would be a target, and a target I became.”
This statement has led some political observers to compare Adams’s case to former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York. Trump has frequently accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department of Justice against him, claims the president and the DOJ, which Biden said operates independently from him, have denied.
Adams and Trump are two high-profile, confident politicians from New York. The New York Times called Adams a “showman,” a moniker often used to describe Trump.
However, unlike Trump’s accusations, often directed at New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a case one critic described as a “historic mistake,” Adams’s attack on the justice system could be less persuasive if he targets Williams specifically.
After all, Adams isn’t the only high-profile politician, Democratic and Republican, Williams has prosecuted.
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“By allegedly taking improper and illegal benefits from foreign nationals, including to allow a Manhattan skyscraper to open without a fire inspection, Adams put the interests of his benefactors, including a foreign official, above those of his constituents,” Williams said in the indictment of Adams.
“This Office and our partners at the FBI and DOI will continue to pursue corruption anywhere in this city, especially when that corruption takes the form of illegal foreign influence on our democratic system,” he concluded.
