Did Mayor Adams really forget the passcode for his phone seized by the feds?

How’s this for a no good, very bad day?

First, you change your cellphone passcode to keep your employees from meddling with your stuff. Then you forget the new sequence, so you steel yourself for a tedious trip to the Apple Store to help unlock it — only for federal agents to come along and try to seize the device later that evening.

Except you can’t hand over the phone, because you left it at the office.

At least, that’s what attorneys for Mayor Eric Adams told federal investigators in November 2023, according to a warrant request contained in a trove of documents from the discarded criminal case released on Friday. The materials shed light on the inner workings of the federal government’s corruption investigation against the mayor, right up until the Trump administration killed the case in February.

The documents reveal that prosecutors weren't buying the tale of cellphone mishaps and were considering the possibility that Adams was obstructing the investigation. They also suspected that Adams was lying about the device’s location when they attempted to seize it during a confrontation near NYU.

“Location data for the Adams Personal Cellphone indicates that Adams's representations were false,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Derek Wikstrom wrote in a warrant request.

In a signed affidavit, a federal agent detailed how cell site data showed the phone “traveled from the vicinity of City Hall northbound,” passing Washington Square and continuing north along Sixth Avenue at least 42 minutes before the event at NYU began — contradicting the narrative from Adams’ attorneys that the phone was at City Hall. After reaching “approximately 29th Street,” the phone stopped broadcasting location data, suggesting it was either turned off, switched into airplane mode or that it ran out of battery, the affidavit continues.

Adams’ attorney turned over the phone to investigators the day after the encounter with the feds, but said the mayor still didn’t know the passcode after changing it from four digits to six.

They claimed Adams wasn’t trying to meddle with the investigation. On the contrary, they told prosecutors he changed the passcode “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,” warrant requests released Friday state.

Perhaps Adams just couldn’t keep the passcodes for his many devices straight.

The documents reveal that he used at least seven different phone numbers during the course of the investigation, which began in August 2021 and lasted until a top Department of Justice official ordered Manhattan prosecutors to kill the case in February. Warrant requests show prosecutors were still expanding the investigation’s scope as recently as Jan. 24, four days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Todd Shapiro, a spokesperson for the mayor’s 2025 re-election campaign, said the materials amounted to a whole lot of nothing.

“The FBI’s own tracking technology clearly showed the phone was not in the mayor’s possession at the time in question,” Shapiro said in a text message. “The release of these documents confirms what we’ve said from the beginning — this case was built on insinuations and speculation.”

“Any claim that he misled authorities is not only false, it’s a direct insult to his decades of service in law enforcement,” Shapiro added of the mayor, a former police officer.

Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, told Gothamist on Friday that “this case — the first of its kind airline upgrade ‘corruption’ case — should never have been brought in the first place and is now over.”

Just before the release of the documents on Friday, Adams visited Washington to meet with Trump.

In a statement, Adams said they talked about “critical infrastructure projects, as well as the preservation of essential social services.”

Trump told reporters they discussed “almost nothing.” And Adams, he said, “came in to thank me.”