Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, alongside FBI Director Kash Patel and other officials, announces new Trump administration actions against the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) during a press conference at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 5, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
A federal judge blasted the Justice Department for dropping bribery charges against an Indian billionaire with connections to President Donald Trump, calling the move "highly unusual."
U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis issued the ruling Monday against Gautam Adani, the billionaire chairman of India's Adani Group, who was indicted in November 2024 on charges of orchestrating a $265 million bribery scheme to secure solar energy contracts in India, according to the indictment.
The judge partially dismissed the case — wiping out the securities and wire fraud counts against Adani and two co-defendants — but refused to dismiss bribery and obstruction charges against five others, ordering the Justice Department to justify those dismissals by Aug. 31.
The ruling said that on the current record, McCotter appeared to have "eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment."
The decision came "seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney's Office who brought the case," the ruling added.
R. Trent McCotter, the Justice Department official who drove the dismissal, had "never heard of any defendants in this case" when he arrived at the department in January 2026, the ruling said.
Adani had retained Robert Giuffra of Sullivan & Cromwell in August 2025 — five months before McCotter joined the Justice Department, the ruling said.
Giuffra also serves as Trump's personal attorney, leading the legal team handling Trump's criminal appeal of his Manhattan hush money conviction, according to CBS News.
Giuffra's team then submitted roughly 600 pages of legal arguments and expert reports to familiarize McCotter with the case, the ruling said.
In meetings with Justice Department officials, Giuffra raised the possibility that Adani would invest $10 billion in the United States if the charges were dropped, according to the ruling.
The judge accepted the investment offer as a "non-consideration" in the final decision — but put the episode on the record, noting it was McCotter himself who volunteered the detail in an unsolicited reference to media reports.
McCotter cited a June 2025 memo by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as justification for dropping the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charges — and Blanche was confirmed as attorney general just two days before the ruling dropped, according to NPR.
"McCotter's refusal to meet the procedural requirements of Rule 48(a) — even after the court's clear direction to do so — evinces a lack of respect for the Judiciary as a co-equal branch," the judge wrote.
"McCotter's baseless assertion is unbecoming of his office," Garaufis added, rejecting McCotter's claim that the prior administration had brought the case out of political spite.
His handling of the obstruction charges, the judge wrote, was "at best insufficient to meet Rule 48(a)'s procedural requirements and at worst misleading."
Adani is not the first billionaire to see legal trouble ease after cultivating ties to the Trump administration.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was pardoned by Trump after his firm brokered a $2 billion deal tied to Trump's stablecoin venture; the Securities and Exchange Commission separately dropped its case against crypto billionaire Justin Sun after Sun invested $90 million in Trump's crypto ventures, according to Americans for Financial Reform.
Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Blanche in June, saying the decision raised "serious questions" about whether Adani "bought his way to criminal immunity," according to NBC News.