Former Adams Aide to Plead Guilty to Conspiracy in Straw Donations Case

A former City Hall aide charged last year with witness tampering tied to the federal corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York intends to plead guilty, according to a court document that prosecutors filed in the mayor’s case on Friday.

It was not clear from the document whether the aide, Mohamed Bahi, who had served as the mayor’s liaison to the Muslim community, was cooperating with the prosecutors. But it identified Mr. Bahi, 40, as a co-conspirator in the case against the mayor.

In the document — a letter to the judge presiding over Mr. Adams’s bribery and fraud case — the prosecutors outlined the connections between the indictment against the mayor and the cases of Mr. Bahi and another man. The other man, a Turkish American businessman who had been charged separately, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to commit fraud related to straw donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.

The prosecutors said that the charges against Mr. Bahi and the businessman, Erden Arkan, stemmed from their involvement in one of the criminal schemes laid out in the indictment of the mayor.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is prosecuting the case against Mayor Adams, declined to comment. Mr. Bahi’s lawyer, Derek Adams, could not be immediately reached for comment.

A lawyer for the mayor, Alex Spiro, also could not be immediately reached for comment.

The disclosure of Mr. Bahi’s guilty plea would seem to further cloud the situation surrounding the prosecution of Mr. Adams himself. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Adams’s legal team met with U.S. Justice Department officials and federal prosecutors from Manhattan about the possibility of dropping the case against him.