Even with his federal criminal case dismissed over six months ago, Mayor Eric Adams has seen his legal bills continue to climb — leaving a trust he set up under city rules to pay those bills with over $4.5 million in unpaid expenses, according to the latest filings.
Adams set up a trust that in most cases can accept donations of up to $5,000 per person shortly after the feds seized his electronic devices as part of their probe into alleged corruption in late 2023. Those limits apply to Adams while he’s mayor, where the rules of the trust are governed by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, but once he leaves City Hall at the end of this year he won’t be bound by the rules limiting gifts to public servants.
The former Manhattan U.S. attorney brought an indictment against Adams on charges that included bribery and conspiracy in September 2024, but the Department of Justice dropped that case without reviewing its merits as President Donald Trump sought Adams’ help with immigration enforcement.
The trusts’ latest filings with the Conflicts of Interest Board show that Adams hasn’t raised a penny for it this year, even though he has committed to making good on his debts.
At the same time, the filings revised expenses from prior reporting periods that collectively raised his outstanding legal bills by $1.3 million — nearly all of it owed to the firm of Adams’ celebrity attorney on the federal case, Alex Spiro.
This included a revision of an expense dated November 2024 to Spiro’s firm, Quinn Emanuel LLP, that in two prior filings was reported as $301.24. It was revised in last week’s filings to $301,238.97.
The new filings also added an expense to the firm dated February 2025, which didn’t appear in the two previous filings, for over $1.2 million. A few other expenses were revised downward, the filings show.
The monthly legal bills to Quinn Emanuel don’t show expenses covering February through April 2025, so additional costs could surface in future filings. Quinn Emanuel had a number of high-profile attorneys working on Adams’ case, and a second major firm, WilmerHale, also did legal work for Adams early in the federal investigation.
Mayor Eric Adams stands beside his lawyer Alex Spiro outside Gracie Mansion after being indicted on federal corruption charges, Sept. 26, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Adams’ campaign attorney, Vito Pitta, who oversees the legal defense trust, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Spiro and Adams’ former campaign spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, also didn’t respond to inquiries.
Adams declined to run in the Democratic primary and then last month suspended his campaign for re-election, amid polls that showed him lagging considerably behind Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
Despite dropping out, Adams has continued his legal battle to secure matching public dollars from the city’s Campaign Finance Board, saying the money is needed to pay for expenses already accrued.
The board has repeatedly denied the campaign’s bid for matching funds, citing some of the same issues that arose during his federal prosecution, along with a host of documentation the board says his campaign has refused to provide. The board has even suggested that it could claw back up to $10 million in public matching funds that it previously awarded to Adams’ 2021 campaign for mayor.
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