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MANHATTAN (CN) — Mohamed Bahi, a former aide to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, pleaded guilty on Tuesday afternoon to one count of conspiracy related to organizing illegal campaign contributions, putting to bed one of the outstanding indictments that stemmed from multiple investigations into the first-term Democrat mayor.
During a four-minute plea allocution in Manhattan federal court, Bahi — a former community affairs liaison to the city’s Muslim community — said he was instructed by a volunteer of the Eric Adams 2021 election campaign to organize a fundraiser in December 2020, where he would collect employees’ straw donor campaign contributions that both he and the Adams campaign knew would be actually reimbursed by their companies’ owners.
“I understood that the Adams campaign would then seek matching funds for their contributions,” he said, reading from a written statement.
Bahi was represented at the sparsely attended hearing on the ninth floor of Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse by attorney Derek Adams, of the Washington-based Potomac Law Group.
U.S. District Judge Dale Ho accepted Bahi’s guilty plea and set his sentencing for Nov. 18, 2025.
Ho, a Biden appointee, advised Bahi that he faces up to a maximum sentence of five years in prison on the guilty plea.
Pursuant to the written plea agreement, Bahi agreed to not challenge any sentence of six months or less. He also consented to paying $32,000 in restitution and agreed to not challenge any additional punitive fine under $20,000.
Wearing a black, short-sleeve button-down shirt to the change-of-plea hearing on Tuesday, Bahi did not respond to questions from reporters when he exited the court building.
Bahi was charged in October 2024 on a two-count indictment that accused him of ordering other witness to lie in their statements to federal agents in June 2024, and deleting potentially incriminating Signal app messages from his phone just before it was seized by FBI agents the following month.
Prosecutors claimed Bahi — a co-founder and director of Muslims Giving Back, a volunteer effort in Sunset Park, Brooklyn —used the encrypted app to communicate with Adams.
Bahi was the first additional person to be charged from federal prosecutors’ investigations into Adams besides Adams himself, who’s referred to as “Official-1” in Bahi’s indictment.
Adams, a first-term Democrat mayor and former NYPD captain, was set to become the first active New York City mayor to stand criminal trial on his own set of criminal charges — until the Trump administration presented itself as an unexpected ally.
Prosecutors accused Adams of receiving illegal straw donor contributions — “including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” they claimed — in order to tap into $10 million in matching public funds from a municipal program that matches small-dollar contributions from New York City residents.
Four months after Adams pleaded not guilty to the federal indictment in September 2024, and shortly into Trump’s second term in office, Trump’s Justice Department intervened to drop Manhattan federal prosecutors’ bribery case against Adams — sparking resignations and suspicion of a quid pro quo wherein Adams would back federal deportation efforts in exchange for the charges being dropped.
After months of Adams cozying up to then-President-elect Trump — meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, attending his inauguration and agreeing not to criticize him publicly — the Justice Department on Feb. 10 ordered federal prosecutors to drop their ongoing corruption case against the mayor.
Another defendant charged in a related case with campaign donor fraud, Turkish-born construction executive Erden Arkan, pleaded guilty in January to one count of conspiracy, admitting to signing checks on behalf of his employees who then made illegal straw donations to the Eric Adams 2021 mayoral campaign.
Arkan is set to be sentenced on Aug. 15. Prosecutors have requested a non-incarceration sentence of probation.
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