Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City who, after his federal corruption indictment, forged a mutually beneficial relationship with President Donald J. Trump, on Wednesday made clear where his loyalties lie.
Hours after a federal judge granted the Trump administration’s request to dismiss the corruption charges against him, Mr. Adams suggested at a news conference in front of Gracie Mansion that Mr. Trump’s Justice Department was doing God’s will.
“Jesus stepped in and he uses who he uses,” Mr. Adams said at the news conference, seemingly referring to the Justice Department officials who moved to drop his case.
“New Yorkers stop me all the time trying to find the rationale behind this,” Mr. Adams said. “And I found it in this book.”
Then he held up a copy of “Government Gangsters” by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist who has spread misinformation about the agency he now runs, arguing that Americans are the victims of an unbridled cabal of federal officials referred to by Mr. Patel and others as the “deep state.”
Mr. Adams turned Mr. Patel’s book so that the audience could read the title and waved it for emphasis. “I’m going to encourage every New Yorker to read it,” he said. “Read it and understand how we can never allow this to happen to another innocent American.”
The extraordinary moment occurred during Mr. Adams’s first public comments after the charges were dropped.
And his brandishing of the book at the news conference seemed to underscore the bargain he has been accused of striking with the Trump administration — one that the judge who dismissed the charges on Wednesday referred to explicitly, saying it appeared that federal prosecutors had sought to dismiss the indictment in exchange for “immigration policy concessions.”
Mr. Adams was indicted in September and charged with bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. But after Mr. Trump took office, officials at the Justice Department moved to drop his case, saying that it was hindering the mayor from cooperating fully with Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
The judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, dismissed it on Wednesday. But he noted that “the record does not show that this case has impaired Mayor Adams in his immigration enforcement efforts.”
Mr. Patel’s book, published in 2023, is a broadside against federal law enforcement officials, including Justice Department prosecutors and F.B.I. agents. Mr. Patel wrote in the book that the “Deep State isn’t some crazy conspiracy but a real force — and the most dangerous threat to our democracy.”
Mr. Patel said that the term, often used by Mr. Trump’s allies to refer to unelected civil servants, described officials who worked at the highest levels of almost every federal agency, including the F.B.I., and who were hopelessly politicized.
“Government Gangsters” is not Mr. Patel’s only published work. In 2022, he wrote a children’s book called “The Plot Against the King,” a retelling of the investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and its potential ties to Russia.
In the book, Mr. Patel cast himself as a wizard who saves “King Donald” from the machinations of law enforcement and Democratic villains.