DOJ Drops Federal Fraud Charges Against Indian Billionaire After He Hires Trump’s Lawyer and Pledges $10 Billion Investment

Gautam Adani, one of the world’s wealthiest men, was indicted by federal prosecutors for orchestrating a massive $265 million bribery scheme to secure solar energy contracts, hiding the corruption from U.S. investors to raise capital. Following aggressive backchanneling after Trump’s return to office, the Justice Department moved to permanently dismiss the criminal indictment—with prejudice—just weeks after Adani’s legal team formally offered a $10 billion U.S. investment deal during private negotiations.

The New York Times has the details:

The reversal came after the Indian billionaire, Gautam Adani, hired a new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., one of President Trump’s personal lawyers and the co-chairman of the prominent firm Sullivan & Cromwell. ... Mr. Giuffra ticked through about 100 slides outlining why prosecutors lacked basic evidence, as well as the jurisdiction even to bring the case, one of the people said. Another slide also made an unusual offer: If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs. ...

The proposal—which Mr. Trump could have held up as a political and economic win—underscores the highly transactional approach to justice in Mr. Trump’s second term. Over the past year, he has awarded pardons to his donors and even a business partner, while prosecutors in his Justice Department have dropped charges and investigations against other political allies. Those results, a striking break from prosecutorial norms, have fueled the perception that freedom is up for sale in Mr. Trump’s Washington, emboldening defendants to offer economic settlement terms that were once unthinkable.

The transaction is about as naked as pay-to-play corruption gets, but the operational mechanics elevate it to a historic level of audacity. Robert Giuffra simultaneously serves as both Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer and Adani’s representative. In other words, the president’s own attorney used a slide presentation to pitch an economic quid pro quo to the president’s own Justice Department: a promise of corporate investment in exchange for permanently scrapping criminal fraud charges against a foreign billionaire.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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