New Delhi: Two Democratic US senators have again demanded answers from the Department of Justice over its decision to drop the criminal case against Indian billionaire tycoon Gautam Adani, seeking fresh details after court filings confirmed that the Adani Group had offered to invest $10 billion in the United States as part of discussions over resolving the case.In a September 23 letter to US Attorney General Todd Blanche, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal said that the court filings had confirmed that Adani had made the investment offer. They also pointed to a declaration by his lawyer Robert Giuffra Jr., who said his firm had told the Justice Department on two occasions that the Adani Group would be “amenable to following through on a public statement by Gautam Adani regarding the Group’s willingness to invest $10 billion in the United States as a means of promoting the US-India trade relationship”.The senators, who had first written to Blanche in June seeking information about the reported offer, said the disclosures made since then raised fresh questions about the Justice Department’s handling of the case.“The audacity of this statement is astounding,” Warren and Blumenthal wrote. They said the legal team led by Trump’s personal lawyer had “swore under oath that his firm conveyed a $10 billion investment offer from a foreign company ‘as part of any resolution’ of a multi-billion dollar federal criminal case against one of the wealthiest men in the world”.“This appears to be an offer of a quid-pro-quo for individual criminal immunity,” they wrote.The latest letter comes after US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis allowed the dismissal of securities and wire fraud charges against Adani, his nephew Sagar Adani and Adani Green Energy chief executive Vneet Jaain on August 10, but sharply criticised the process by which the Justice Department had sought to abandon the prosecution.‘Highly unusual’The judge said Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter, who described himself as the “final and sole decisionmaker” on seeking dismissal, had reached the decision “largely in collaboration with defense counsel” and “seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct” or the lawyers from the Justice Department, SEC and US Attorney’s Office who had brought the case.He observed that the process “appears to be highly unusual” and that the “irregularities in the decision to dismiss the Indictment are concerning”.The two senators stated that while the court filings confirmed that Adani’s lawyers had raised the investment with the Justice Department, they did not answer questions about what happened after the offer was made.They said McCotter’s apparent response to the confirmed $10 billion offer was to direct or authorise another lawyer to send an email stating that the investment offer was not the reason for the dismissal.“But no further information has been provided about how the DOJ responded to these offers at the time they were made, why Sullivan and Cromwell made the offer at least twice, or any additional actions taken in response to such a remarkable situation,” the senators wrote.They have now asked the Justice Department to provide details for every investment offer made on behalf of any defendant in the case, including the date and setting in which it was made, the names and titles of DOJ employees present, the “precise wording and terms of the offer”, the legal entity that would have made the investment and how the officials present reacted.They have also asked what explanation, if any, Adani or his representatives provided for why the investment could not be made before the DOJ dropped its charges.‘Mr. McCotter explain precisely when he decided to drop the charges…’The senators also questioned the timing of McCotter’s decision to seek dismissal.In a July 4 filing, McCotter said, “Before that topic [of an investment offer] first arose, I had already firmly concluded I would seek dismissal of the securities charges no matter what, because they were so indefensible”.But in the same filing, he said, “I made the decision to dismiss these charges after conducting numerous meetings with defense counsel”, including two meetings involving more than a dozen lawyers. He also said he had held separate meetings with Justice Department counsel, reviewed hundreds of pages of material and conducted his own research and analysis.Warren and Blumenthal pointed out that Adani’s lawyers had made the investment offer twice, with at least one of those offers made during a meeting with the DOJ.“Given that Mr. Adani’s lawyers made the investment offer twice, at least one of which was at a meeting with the DOJ, we request that Mr. McCotter explain precisely when he decided to drop the charges and what information he had at the time,” they wrote.The senators asked the DOJ to clarify when McCotter made the decision, what information he had been presented with before making it and whether either of his statements to the court was inaccurate. If either statement was inaccurate, they asked for a correction and an explanation of why an inaccurate statement had been filed with the court.The senators also cited Garaufis’s observation that the DOJ and Adani’s lawyers had continued to provide information to the court “in a piecemeal fashion”, while volunteering information that had not been requested and “prompting new questions and appearing to contradict previous representations”.Sequence of events raise questions The senators have also expanded their questions about the involvement of lawyers and advisers with close personal connections to President Donald Trump.Adani’s legal team was led by Giuffra, one of Trump’s personal lawyers. Warren and Blumenthal now also point to media reports concerning Boris Epshteyn, another Trump personal lawyer and adviser.The senators cited a Wall Street Journal report describing Epshteyn as the “quarterback [of] the president’s legal fights”. They also cited the same newspaper report that he had helped connect Blanche to Trump, had pushed for McCotter to receive a Justice Department posting and had been “operating as a connector for clients with business before the Trump Administration”.They claimed that the media reporting indicated that Adani’s family had sought to determine whether Epshteyn was an insider in the Trump administration and that he had begun working on behalf of the family as early as the summer of 2025.Epshteyn and others have denied the reports, calling them “falsehood-ridden”, a denial the senators included in their letter.The senators have asked the DOJ whether its employees determined that Epshteyn was working on behalf of Adani and whether he or anyone working for him had contacted DOJ officials about the case. They have also asked whether Donald Trump Jr. or anyone acting on his behalf had contacted the department about Adani.The senators said the sequence of events raised broader questions about the Justice Department’s handling of the case.“A series of public reports and documents filed with the court appear to indicate that (i) Mr. Adani’s attorneys conveyed an offer to invest $10 billion in the United States ‘as part of any resolution of’ a criminal matter, (ii) the DOJ then sought to dismiss the case against Mr. Adani, but struggled to ultimately provide the Court with satisfactory information about the process by which this occurred, and (iii) Mr. Adani’s legal team may be attempting to politicize the judicial process working with attorneys with close personal connections to the President,” they wrote.The senators’ letter comes after months of scrutiny by Judge Garaufis of the Justice Department’s attempt to abandon the prosecution.On August 10, the judge dismissed the securities and wire fraud charges against Gautam Adani, Sagar Adani and Jaain, but reserved judgment on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act charge against five other defendants and an obstruction charge against four of them.On September 3, he again refused to approve the DOJ’s attempt to dismiss those remaining charges, saying the department had failed to provide the factual support required under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.Garaufis also reiterated his criticism of the DOJ’s reliance on three Indian judicial and regulatory orders. The department had cited those documents as evidence that India had investigated allegations in the US case and found no actionable misconduct. The judge said the evidence appeared instead to show that Indian authorities had decided “not to investigate” and that the proceedings bore “very little resemblance” to the conduct alleged in the US indictment.The September 3 ruling did not finally prevent the DOJ from seeking dismissal again. The department can make another request if it provides sufficient factual support.The two senators have asked Blanche to respond to their questions by October 7.