Noah Shachtman on How Trump Weaponized The Justice Department to Save Democratic Mayor Eric Adams
Veteran journalist Noah Shachtman, who has spent decades covering corruption, power, and national security, has been reporting aggressively on how President Donald Trump’s Justice Department squashed a bombshell corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams — a Democrat — under the guise of fighting against “weaponization.”
The Justice Department argued that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, which charged Adams with a brazen and extensive corruption scheme, were seeking to interfere with the upcoming mayoral election, which is nine months away.
Yet, as Shachtman noted on this week’s episode of Press Club, the shuttering of five separate investigations into Adams was itself a weaponization of government intended to protect a mayor who has, very transparently, positioned himself as an ally to Trump in order to escape accountability.
“He went down to Mar-a-Lago,” Schachtman recalled in a wide-ranging interview with Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin, and “rushed to Trump’s defense when Kamala Harris was calling him a fascist.”
“He didn’t actually go to the inaugural — he went to the overflow room. That’s how hard he was pushing for it.”
In addition to ingratiating himself to Trump personally, Adams has offered to partner with the administration on its efforts to crack down on undocumented migrants. And the Trump administration is holding the mayor’s feet to the fire to make sure he complies. During an infamous recent segment on Fox & Friends, Trump border czar Tom Homan told an uncomfortable looking Adams on-air: “I’ll be up your butt if you don’t comply with the immigration agenda.”
Shachtman noted that even the judge who dismissed the case at the behest of Trump’s Justice Department said publicly that the charges were dropped for political reasons.
“The judge basically said the whole thing was a quid pro quo,” Shachtman said. “And the Justice Department tried to leave open the door for Adams to be prosecuted down the line. The Justice Department wanted to dismiss the case, but keep the charges hanging over Eric Adams’ head — as a way to say, hey, you gotta work with us or else we’ll charge you again.”
But the Adams saga is just the tip of the iceberg of how Trump has wielded the might of America’s governmental institutions in an unprecedented way. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Shachtman laid out how Trump’s administration is dismantling the very systems meant to protect America from foreign threats.
“It’s never been easier to steal secrets from the United States government,” he warned.
Beyond the Signal chat fiasco, Shachtman pointed to “thousands of people with security clearances” who were fired “who now have a grudge against their former employer”, “the dissolving federal task forces against foreign bribery and covert foreign influence,” and a deliberate effort to “bust up the Southern District of New York” — the DOJ’s strongest counterintelligence unit.
Even more alarming is how top officials use encrypted messaging apps like Signal not to evade foreign adversaries, but instead their own colleagues. “You use Signal and its disappearing message feature to keep what you’re doing away from your own workforce and from history,” he said, referencing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s detailings of the exact timings and targets of impending U.S. airstrikes against Houthi rebels in a group chat.
“The Defense Department has both a secret and a top-secret equivalent of the internet that you can connect to. They chose to use a commercial encrypted messaging system. That’s a choice.”
Shachtman, the former top editor of Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast, also spoke about the future of magazines, the Trump administration’s lawsuits against the press, and the FBI resources currently being spent on Jeffrey Epstein — for little apparent reason.
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