Federal prosecutors told a judge on Wednesday that they still can’t unlock the personal cell phone they seized from New York’s Mayor, Eric Adams, whom they’ve indicted on corruption charges. The government explained their quandary during the first court hearing in the case before the federal judge, Dale Ho, who has been assigned to preside over the Adams affair.

“Decryption always catches up with encryption,” an assistant U.S. attorney,  Hagan Scotten, told the judge at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. “But we don’t know what we have until we can access it.”

On Friday, Mr. Adams became the first sitting mayor of New York City to be arraigned in federal court, where he pleaded not guilty to charges alleging that he accepted travel perquisites, such as airline ticket upgrades and luxury hotel rooms, worth more than $100,000, and “straw donor” campaign contributions from individuals connected to Turkey and New York’s Turkish community. 

The five count indictment lists four main offenses: conspiracy, wire fraud, soliciting, accepting, and receiving campaign contributions from a foreign national, and bribery.

But on Wednesday Mr. Scotten told the judge that it was “possible” that Mr. Adams could be charged with more crimes, and that it was “quite likely” that other defendants could also be charged either in this or in a separate but related case. While the prosecutor said that investigators were “moving quickly”, he  also told the judge that there were still missing puzzle pieces. The federal government issued subpoenas to City Hall in July to review alleged communications between the mayor and other foreign governments, including those of Israel, China, Qatar, South Korea and Uzbekistan. But City Hall has yet to fully comply.

As for Mr. Adams’s phone, the prosecutor said they believe it will divulge the mayor’s private communications about campaign donations and official favors for the Turkish government. At its core, the indictment alleges that Mr. Adams accepted deeply discounted business class airfare on Turkish airlines, as well as discounted rooms at the St. Regis in Istanbul, and that in exchange, he used his power to expedite a fire inspection of the new Turkish consulate so it could be open in time for a visit by the ruler of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Adams has pleaded not guilty and his attorneys argue that receiving travel perquisites is standard fare for a senior city official and that there was no quid pro quo.

According to the indictment, “When Adams produced his personal cellphone… it was ‘locked,’ such that the device required a password to open… Adams claimed that after he learned about the investigation into his conduct, he changed the password and increased the complexity of his password from four digits to six.” 

The mayor justified the password change by saying he didn’t want  members of his staff to accidentally delete anything. Prosecutors wrote in the indictment that he wanted to “prevent members of his staff from inadvertently or intentionally deleting the contents of his phone, because, according to Adams, he wished to preserve the contents of his phone due to the investigation.”

“But, Adams further claimed, he had forgotten the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone,” the indictment alleges. 

Mr. Adams canceled a meeting at the White House in Washington D.C. last November to rush back to New York, after FBI agents showed up at the home of his top fundraiser Brianna Suggs. USA Today reported last week that Ms. Suggs phoned the mayor five times before opening her door. 

Furthermore, the indictment says that while the FBI interviewed a different Adams staff member, this staffer went into a bathroom to delete the encrypted messaging apps from her phone, which she used to communicate with Mr. Adams, a Turkish businessman, and others.

During Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Scotten referred to the mayor’s phone as “a significant wild card,” suggesting it held unpredictable information. 

Mr. Adams’s principal defense attorney, Alex Spiro, objected to the “wild card” analogy and told the judge that it signaled prosecutors had “a weak case.” But Judge Ho sided with the government, saying, “I don’t find that Mr. Scotten is doing anything inappropriate.”

Mr. Scotten said the prosecution intends to produce a wide range of evidence from emails, text messages, voice memos, encrypted text messages, bank statements, as well as from classified documents, and that many documents needed to be translated from Turkish to English. 

Mr. Spiro, who wore a gold-colored tie to the hearing, mockingly told the judge that prosecutors were seeking “any possible interaction with every immigrant community in New York City.” 

Mr. Spiro also said he was seeking his own documents, specifically about a staff member, believed to be Rana Abbasova, the Director of Protocol in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, who, according to Mr. Spiro was allegedly lying when she admitted to federal investigators that the mayor was soliciting and accepting illegal campaign donations from Turkish nationals.  

As the Sun reported, Mr. Spiro filed a motion to dismiss the bribery charge, one of the five counts, on Monday, and another motion on Tuesday, in which he accused the government of providing the media with “likely criminal” leaks of the indictment before the indictment was officially unsealed. 

Judge Ho scheduled a tentative court date for November 1 to address both motions. 

“We want this trial done by March,” Mr. Spiro pleaded with the court. “They indicted the sitting mayor of New York. We want a trial date.”

Petitions for mayoral candidates to get on the primary ballot must be filed in April, and it appears that Mayor Adams still intends to run for reelection.