A federal prosecutor who withdrew from the criminal case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani shortly after senior Justice Department officials moved to dismiss the charges has been fired, several sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
Andrew Tyler, an acting assistant chief in the fraud section of the Criminal Division, was removed on Tuesday over allegations of ethical violations, two of the sources said, without providing further details.
He couldn’t be immediately reached for comment, though a person who previously worked with him described him as a dedicated employee who had worked at the Justice Department for most of his career.
His Linkedin profile shows he started as an intern in the tax and criminal divisions. After a brief stint as a law clerk in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia, he returned to the Justice Department, where he started as a clerk before becoming a trial attorney and eventually an assistant chief.
His termination was first reported by NBC News.
Adani and other executives at his renewable energy company were indicted at the end of the Biden administration in a wide-ranging foreign bribery and securities fraud scheme which alleged they paid off Indian government officials to obtain lucrative solar energy supply contracts.
In May, Trent McCotter, who is now the acting deputy attorney general, ordered the case to be dismissed. The decision came after Adani’s attorneys at Sullivan & Cromwell including Bob Giuffra met with department officials about the case.
In one meeting at the Justice Department about the Adani case, Giuffra made a presentation that disputed evidence of the alleged bribery scheme, according to sources familiar with the matter and records reviewed by CBS News. One slide claimed that one of Adani’s companies is “powering India’s progress,” and another slide said the Trump administration “would not have brought the case.”
Giuffra also said at the meeting that if prosecutors were to drop the charges, Adani would be willing to invest $10 billion in the American economy, sources told CBS News.
The motion to dismiss the case was only signed by politically appointed Justice Department officials, and not by the career prosecutors involved in the case.
Shortly afterwards, Tyler and one of his co-counsels, Shy Jackson, filed motions to withdraw from the case — an act that was widely viewed as a quiet form of protest.
U.S. District Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis, in the Eastern District of New York, initially refused to drop the charges. He said the Justice Department had not provided an adequate factual basis for doing so.
He demanded more information from the Justice Department, and also asked Adani to submit a sworn statement answering questions about whether there was a quid pro quo. Adani denied the existence of one.
Garaufis ultimately agreed to drop the charges against Adani and several of his co-defendants last month, but he has steadfastly refused to drop the charges against the remaining defendants on the grounds that the Justice Department has provided “no new reasons to dismiss counts one and five, and no additional facts to support the reasons given for the requested dismissal.”
Judge Garaufis also accused McCotter of improperly interfering in the case, saying he had “eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment.”
Tyler is the second federal prosecutor to be fired this month amid disagreements with senior department officials over a high-profile criminal case.
Earlier this month, the department fired Matthew Evans, a prosecutor in Minnesota who was investigating ICE officer Christian Castro over the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant earlier this year.
His firing came shortly after ProPublica reported that Evans told attorneys for the man who was shot, Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, and other victims to prepare for Castro to only be charged with making false statements. That would result in lesser penalties than criminal charges that Castro had violated people’s constitutional rights under color of law.
Several sources told CBS News that Evans is now under investigation.
