In late 2024, when federal prosecutors secured an indictment against Gautam Adani, it wasn’t just another case. Adani, with a net worth of $104 billion, is India’s richest man with unparalleled influence in his home country, making the criminal indictment a matter of geopolitical significance.
In the United States, the Justice Department nevertheless concluded that he had allegedly overseen a bribery scheme, which he and his team lied about while trying to raise money from American investors.
According to new reporting from The New York Times, however, Donald Trump’s DOJ is prepared to abandon the case:
Now, according to several people with knowledge of the case, the Justice Department is planning to drop the charges altogether.
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.
The Times’ article, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, added that the billionaire’s defense lawyer met directly with Justice Department officials last month, and he went through a series of slides intended to show what he characterized as weaknesses in the case.
One of the slides, however, stood out: “If prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy and create 15,000 jobs, echoing a pledge he had made in the wake of Mr. Trump’s election.”
The Times’ reporting went on to note that Adani’s lawyer also took steps to resolve related cases from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department, and “both of those agencies are now preparing to strike settlements with Mr. Adani and impose financial penalties, according to people familiar with the deals.”
None of the relevant players made any comment on the developments (MS NOW’s request for comment from the Justice Department was not immediately returned) and the article conceded that the burgeoning deal might yet fail to come together. For now, however, it looks like an indicted fraudster hired a Trump lawyer, told Trump administration officials he’s prepared to invest billions in the U.S. economy and discovered that Trump’s Justice Department was open to possibly dropping the case.
One day before the article was published, JD Vance held an event at the White House where the vice president talked about the administration’s antifraud task force. The Ohio Republican said this was a priority because “we have a president who takes fraud seriously.”
His timing could’ve been better.
Indeed, let’s not lose sight of the larger context. Not to put too fine a point on this, but Trump ran a fraudulent “university” that led him to pay a steep out-of-court settlement, oversaw a fraudulent charitable foundation and had to pay $2 million in court-ordered damages, ran a family business that was found to have engaged in systemic fraud and has issued presidential pardons for people convicted of fraud. If the Times is correct, and Trump’s Justice Department is prepared to walk away from a case against an accused fraudster, it would stunning, but it would also be in keeping with the pattern.
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