New Delhi: Just over three weeks after allowing the dismissal of charges against Gautam Adani and his two other executives, a US federal judge has again refused to approve the Justice Department’s attempt to drop charges against five remaining co-defendants, repeating his earlier finding that the Indian legal orders cited by the department appeared to contradict India’s claim that its authorities had investigated the allegations.On August 10, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York had dismissed the securities and wire fraud charges against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Vneet Jaain. The August 10 dismissal rested on just one of several rationales the department had put forward for dismissal, which was that the statements in Adani Green Energy’s financial documents about its anti-bribery policies, amounted to language too generic for investors to have reasonably relied on when deciding whether to buy the company’s bonds.At the same time, the US judge reserved judgment on two charges against the five other defendants. He directed the Justice Department to provide “sufficient factual support for each reason” for seeking dismissal of those remaining counts by August 31.It was followed by several fraught weeks between the court and DOJ, with Trent McCotter, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General and by mid-August the Acting Deputy Attorney General, sending two letters, on August 11 and August 14, which the judge stated added no new evidence.In a 14-page memorandum and order issued on September 3, Judge Garaufis denied without prejudice the pending portions of the department’s motion to dismiss the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act conspiracy charge against Ranjit Gupta, Cyril Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal, Deepak Malhotra and Rupesh Agarwal, along with the obstruction conspiracy charge against four of the five. Gupta and Rupesh Agarwal are former executives of renewable energy company Azure Power, while Cabanes, Saurabh Agarwal and Malhotra are former executives of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), the Canadian pension fund that was a major investor in Azure.The judge said the department had failed to meet the threshold procedural requirements of Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.The ruling, however, does not finally reject the Justice Department’s effort to end the prosecution. The department can make another request. Garaufis, in fact, wrote that he continued to encourage the government to submit sufficient factual support for its reasons for dismissal.But the ruling represents a further rejection of the way the Trump administration has sought to justify abandoning the case.The judge observed that the August 11 letter “offered no new reasons to dismiss Counts One and Five, and no additional facts to support the reasons given for the requested dismissal”. Instead, McCotter had urged the court to “reconsider its rejection of those reasons” and stated that if the court did not “dismiss the remaining charges with prejudice by the end of the day on August 25,” the government intended to “seek appellate relief.”The central issue is not, the judge stressed, the number of reasons put forward by the government, but whether those reasons are accompanied by evidence that allows the court to evaluate them. “Not so,” Garaufis wrote after describing McCotter’s insistence that his own statements were sufficient.“The court cannot agree with McCotter’s unsubstantiated, self-serving pronouncements” that the statements of the official who made the dismissal decision themselves provided the necessary evidentiary basis under Rule 48(a), the judge said.In a footnote, Garaufis pointed out that McCotter had “incorrectly asserted” that the court had “disagreed” with his stated reasons. The court had disagreed with nothing, he clarified, but had instead concluded it lacked the “sufficient factual information” needed to support all but one of them.Among the specific gaps the judge pointed to again was one involving the three Indian orders that McCotter had attached to his July 4 letter as proof that India “has investigated many of the allegations in this case” and that Indian decisions issued in 2026 had found “no actionable misconduct”.Evidence appeares to show that Indian authorities had decided ‘not to investigate’But Garaufis had already rejected that characterisation in his August 10 order, after examining three Indian decisions attached to McCotter’s filing.The September 3 order reiterates that finding, saying the evidence before the court appeared to point in the opposite direction.For the claim that India had “investigated” the allegations and “found no actionable misconduct”, Garaufis wrote, the evidence appeared to show that Indian authorities had decided “not to investigate”. He also noted that the alleged conduct considered in those proceedings bore “very little resemblance (if any)” to the conduct alleged in the US indictment and that “no document concludes that nothing inappropriate happened” in this case.“By definition, evidence that appears to contradict the government’s proffered rationale cannot serve as sufficient factual support for that stated reason to dismiss under Rule 48(a)’s procedural component,” the judge wrote.This is a significant reiteration of the judge’s criticism of the DOJ’s use of Indian judicial and regulatory decisions to justify abandoning the US prosecution. The three decisions cited by the department include orders of the Competition Commission of India, the Delhi high court and the Bombay high court.As The Wire had reported when the July 4 letter was filed, the three annexures were an April 2026 order of the Competition Commission of India declining to investigate a complaint of anti-competitive conduct, a March 2026 Delhi high court judgment dismissing a public interest litigation on the transfer of Azure Power’s project capacity to Adani Green, and a March 27 Bombay high court judgment dismissing another PIL that had sought a CBI probe. None of the three examined the alleged bribery scheme at the heart of the US indictment.The judge also said that the problem extended beyond the India argument. McCotter’s “charge-specific” reasons for abandoning the FCPA and obstruction charges were likewise unsupported by facts.“His sworn views give the court no way to evaluate his statements in support of each proffered rationale,” Garaufis wrote. They did not change his analysis in the August 10 order and appeared to be contradicted by the specific facts already before the court.One of McCotter’s arguments was that the FCPA charge should be dismissed under the Justice Department’s current enforcement policy, set out in a memorandum issued by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.The September 3 order says McCotter’s own views, the text of the Blanche memorandum and the allegations in the indictment were essentially all the court had before it.Garaufis specifically rejected McCotter’s insistence that it was his role alone to interpret and apply the Blanche memorandum to the alleged conduct. “It is unquestionably the court’s duty to review the facts before it,” the judge wrote, particularly because the memorandum was being offered as the only “evidence” supporting that rationale for dismissal.The judge did not, however, decide in the September order whether the government’s reasons were substantively sufficient to justify dismissal.He repeatedly emphasised that the ruling rested solely on the procedural failure to provide the required factual support.“Due to the procedural deficiencies in McCotter’s submissions,” he wrote, the court did not reach the question of whether the department had provided a “substantial” reason for dismissing Counts One and Five.A check on executive powerGaraufis also rejected the apparent premise that a prosecutor’s assertion of his own reasons should be enough to end a prosecution.He described the court’s role under Rule 48(a) as “narrow and distinctly judicial”: “to ensure the Executive satisfies the Rule’s procedural and substantive components.”The requirement that the government obtain the court’s permission to dismiss an indictment, he said, necessarily requires judicial review. That review acts as “a critical check on Executive power” and helps ensure that the reasons for abandoning an indictment returned by a grand jury can be scrutinised by both courts and the public.The judge cited a 1977 decision by then-Southern District of New York Chief Judge David Edelstein, who had rejected a government attempt to abandon a prosecution where the government had argued, among other things, that foreign defendants were unlikely to come to the US for trial.Garaufis found the comparison relevant because McCotter’s reasoning similarly relied on “a vague decision not to devote further resources to this prosecution”, speculative problems concerning witnesses, claims about the likelihood of the defendants’ future arrests and the uncertainty of success based on undisclosed evidence.He also noted that the DOJ’s argument for dropping the obstruction charge depended on dismissal of the underlying FCPA charge. McCotter had argued that the government would not devote resources to a “tagalong obstruction charge” if no underlying crime was being pursued.Garaufis concluded that the August 11 and August 14 letters had simply resubmitted reasons that the court had already found unsupported rather than complying with its request for evidence. “Such total disregard for the procedures of this court is disheartening,” he wrote, quoting the 1977 case.The judge’s final assessment was unusually pointed.“Here, the evidence (or lack thereof) tells a story that either does not match or does not support the reasons given for McCotter’s decision,” he wrote.“The court simply cannot ignore glaring insufficiencies in the record or the apparent disconnect between the decision made and the facts given.”Accepting “unsubstantiated reasons” or reasons “that appear to be directly contradicted by the evidence” would, he said, defeat the purpose of Rule 48(a). Judicial review, he added, must demand “something better than the explanation[s] offered for the action taken in this case.”