New Delhi: The US attorney whose role in the decision to drop the criminal case against billionaire tycoon Gautam Adani was questioned by a federal judge has now told the court that he was not the decisionmaker and has no reason to doubt the Department of Justice’s explanation for abandoning the prosecution.In a sworn declaration filed on Friday (July 17), Joseph Nocella Jr., the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, said that principal associate deputy attorney general R. Trent McCotter alone decided to seek dismissal of the indictment after considering arguments presented by defence lawyers and Justice Department officials.Nocella said he attended several meetings in the case but that McCotter ultimately exercised his authority to conclude that further government resources should not be devoted to the prosecution.“I was not the decisionmaker for the motion to dismiss,” Nocella said. He added that both his May 11 email to defence lawyers and his signing of the Justice Department’s May 18 motion to dismiss were done at McCotter’s “direction, or authorisation”.He also told the court that he had “no basis to believe” that the reasons advanced by McCotter for dismissing the indictment were not “the real grounds upon which the application is based”.Judge Nicholas Garaufis had directed Nocella to file the declaration after finding that a declaration submitted by Adani’s lawyer, Robert Giuffra Jr., appeared to conflict with McCotter’s earlier assertion that he had been the “final and sole decisionmaker” behind the government’s move to dismiss the indictment.Giuffra’s declaration disclosed a May 11 email from Nocella to defence lawyers rejecting one aspect of a settlement proposal while stating that “other grounds for resolution of the pending criminal charges with the Department of Justice are being explored”.Specifically, Nocella wrote that the Justice Department “categorically rejected” the portion of the joint defence offer that proposed resolving the criminal charges “by, in part, a general proposal to invest $10 billion in the United States.He also clarified that any settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control would remain independent of the criminal case.In his July 15 order, judge Garaufis said the email appeared to suggest that Nocella was involved in determining the “grounds for resolution” of the criminal case as recently as May 11, about a week before the Justice Department moved to dismiss the indictment. That, the judge wrote, appeared to contradict McCotter’s claim that he alone made the decision and called into question whether the reasons offered by the department were the complete explanation for seeking dismissal.The judge therefore ordered Nocella to state under oath whether he agreed with McCotter’s stated reasons for dismissing the case and whether any additional grounds existed for the decision.The declaration comes after judge Garaufis repeatedly questioned the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the criminal case against Adani. The department moved to drop the indictment with prejudice in May, citing its prosecutorial discretion, but the judge declined to immediately approve the request and instead sought a fuller explanation.After the judge also directed Adani to answer under oath whether he had entered into any agreement with the government in exchange for dismissal of the indictment, the tycoon filed an affidavit denying that any such agreement existed.He acknowledged, however, that his lawyers had suggested the Adani Group’s proposed $10 billion investment in the United States “might be part of a resolution” if that was what the Justice Department or the SEC wanted.The criminal case stems from a November 2024 indictment accusing Adani, his nephew Sagar and six others of participating in an alleged scheme to pay about $250 million in bribes to Indian state government officials to secure renewable energy contracts and mislead US investors.