Feds Believe Eric Adams Lied About His Personal Cellphone During Manhattan Street Raid

NEW YORK — Federal agents suspected Mayor Eric Adams of misleading them about the location of his personal phone. They compiled evidence suggesting Adams’ administration discussed favorable school placement for the child of a Turkish diplomat. And they continued probing him after President Donald Trump took office.

Those were among the findings in the more than 1,700 pages of documents about Adams’ criminal case that Trump’s Department of Justice released Friday night. They shed light on the FBI’s raids on Adams, his staffers and others in his orbit in relation to the bribery case involving Turkish interests that resulted in an indictment of the mayor last September. Adams pleaded not guilty and a judge dismissed the case last month, at the behest of the DOJ.

The document dump encompassed dozens of search warrant applications and other materials, revealing a far bigger investigation than the public had previously known. The search warrants focused on purported straw donations to the mayor’s 2021 and 2025 campaigns, travel perks involving the Turkish government and the alleged official action Adams provided in return.

Several court papers concerned the whereabouts of the mayor’s personal cellphone, which agents tried to seize in a dramatic confrontation with Adams — a former police captain — on Nov. 6, 2023. Federal gumshoes approached the mayor as he left an event at New York University in Manhattan and tried to seize his devices, but Adams did not have his personal phone on him and provided conflicting explanations of where it was.

He said he left it at City Hall, but location data showed otherwise.

The mayor’s team then told federal agents a mayoral aide had taken the phone. In an effort to find out what actually happened, the agents sought cellphone location data from devices used by Adams and several of his aides.

“The Adams Personal Cellphone traveled from the vicinity of City Hall northbound, passing the vicinity of Washington Square Park and then moving north in a manner consistent with driving northbound on Sixth Avenue,” a federal agent wrote.

At one point, federal investigators were so unsure of how many cellphones Adams used that they sought a warrant to use a cell-site simulator, commonly known as a stingray, to determine which phones he was carrying.

“I know of at least six different cellphone numbers that Adams has used during the time period relevant to this investigation,” an agent wrote in a September 2024 search warrant affidavit. A later warrant raised that to seven.

A federal judge ordered the release of the trove of search warrant data following a request for it from media organizations. DOJ blew its first deadline to unveil the materials last week.

The massive document release comes at a politically perilous time for Adams, who is running a longshot independent bid for reelection. Hours before DOJ made the information public, Adams was confabbing with Trump in the White House, underscoring his burgeoning relationship with the president. It was their first sitdown since Trump took office, and it provided more fodder for Democrats looking to unseat Adams.

“Eric Adams has made it clear that he cares more about staying on Donald Trump’s good side than fighting for New York City,” state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who is running for mayor, said in a statement that referenced the dismissal of Adams’ federal bribery case. “Adams already gave up his independence as Mayor to save himself from criminal prosecution. Now, Trump and his cronies are coming to collect — and New York City will keep paying the price.”

The mayor’s campaign earlier Friday shot back at Myrie, saying his past support for criminal justice reform disqualified him from running the city.

The documents show the feds also found evidence either Adams or those close to him received a request to help the Turkish consul general get his son into a selective New York City public school. It is unclear who communicated about the request, but federal agents refer at one point to Adams’ longtime partner, Tracey Collins, who at the time was a high-ranking official at the city Department of Education. The documents show a judge signed off on a search warrant for Collins’ home in Fort Lee, New Jersey in May, 2024. Collins’ involvement in the criminal investigation had not been previously reported.

The search warrant dump also showed federal agents were continuing to seek new evidence in the case even after Trump’s inauguration — which the mayor raced down to Washington to attend — despite the new president’s apparent disinterest in continuing the case.

And in another finding, investigators noted a longtime friend of Adams had kept in touch with the mayor since he took office — even texting to ask he be named a deputy mayor. That friend, Dwayne Montgomery, served with Adams in the NYPD and pleaded guilty last year to orchestrating a straw donor scheme to Adams’ 2021 campaign. Federal agents raided Montgomery’s home on January 23, three days after Trump took office, seeking more of his communications with the mayor. That search has not been previously reported.

Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, dismissed the revelations as inconsequential.

“This case — the first-of-its-kind airline upgrade ‘corruption’ case — should never have been brought in the first place and is now over,” he said in a statement, referring to Manhattan prosecutors' allegation that Adams was bribed with straw donations and Turkish Airline perks in exchange for official favors.

Adams’ campaign spokesperson said the material further proved Adams did nothing wrong.

“The truth is now well-known: the mayor is innocent of any wrongdoing, and a handful of campaign volunteers attempted to take advantage of his trust,” the spokesperson, Todd Shapiro, said.

The revelations in the defunct case came shortly after Adams and Trump concluded their meeting — with dramatically different takeaways.

“He came in to say hello, he was very nice. I think he came in to thank me, frankly. That would be — I would say — the primary reason,” Trump told reporters afterward, noting they discussed almost nothing. “He was very nice. He’s a nice man."

The mayor issued a statement saying, “I met this afternoon with President Trump and members of his administration at the White House to discuss critical infrastructure projects, as well as the preservation of essential social services, among other topics.”

His campaign sought to explain the gulf between the two readouts.

“During today’s discussion with President Trump regarding issues of importance to New York City, Mayor Eric Adams took a moment to thank the president for his words of support while the President was on the campaign trail,” Shaprio said in a statement. “At a time when Mayor Adams was being unfairly and selectively targeted by federal authorities, then-candidate Trump publicly acknowledged the injustice and stood in defense of fundamental fairness and due process.”

The dismissal of the mayor’s case has continued to haunt Adams.

The former Interim U.S. Attorney for the Southern District in New York, Danielle Sassoon, called the deal between Adams and the DOJ a quid-pro-quo that exchanged the mayor’s freedom for cooperation on federal immigration enforcement — a notion the mayor has denied.

That didn’t stop British broadcaster Piers Morgan from peppering the mayor with questions about the dismissal and Adams’ soft touch with the president during a tense, 30-minute interview Thursday night.

During the spot, Adams avoided any criticism of the president’s tariff regime — even as municipal budget wonks have warned it could create turmoil for city revenue — and defended his own posture toward the White House.

In recognition of Trump’s unpopularity with New York City’s deep-blue electorate, Morgan repeatedly asked Adams why he didn’t switch parties to become a Republican — a notion that rankled the registered Democrat, who is running for reelection as an independent in November.