Why the FBI’s seizure of a Democrat’s cellphone could be disastrous for him.

New York City politicians tend to rack up their fair share of scandals, but even Ed Koch’s former press secretary says he’s never seen anything like the “unprecedented” mess Mayor Eric Adams now faces. Last week, the FBI sent a full force to search the homes of five trusted appointees of Adams’s: two deputy mayors, the schools chancellor, the police commissioner and a senior aide to the mayor.

The feds also seized personal communications devices from those officials, including cellphones and laptops. Their investigations include multiple cases against members of Adams’ inner circle, according to a local City news outlet. One of those investigations began in a very public way late last year, when FBI agents searched the home of a top Adams campaign fundraiser and seized “three iPhones and two laptops,” according to the New York Times. Days later, the FBI intercepted Adams himself and seized two of his cellphones and an iPad; the mayor later voluntarily turned over two more devices to the bureau, and all of his equipment was returned to him relatively quickly.

The ongoing case involves accusations that Adams’ campaign worked with Turkish-linked companies to obtain illegal donations from Turkish officials. But there are three additional investigations that inspired more recent raids.

One involves a consulting firm run by relatives of two high-ranking officials whose phones were confiscated. Another involves the twin brother of a police commissioner, a corrupt former cop who owns a nightclub security company and whose phone was also confiscated as part of an investigation into whether he used his connections to ensure that some city clubs had less aggressive policing than others. A third federal case focuses on a senior aide to Adams who oversees funding for immigrant protection services and whether there were any kickbacks in “city contracts he may have had a hand in,” according to the New York Post.

The feds themselves have not filed any formal charges against these men, and they have all denied any wrongdoing. But the fact that the FBI carried out the execution justifies confiscate their phones and computers heralds something very serious.

Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School and former federal prosecutor, told the New York Times, “Because you have to constantly deal with the police commissioner and his forces, it takes a real commitment to a particular case and a real belief that you’re onto something to confiscate his phone.” Other former prosecutors noted to the Times that “senior officials in the U.S. attorney’s office would not act on a whim to execute search warrants” and that “prosecutors generally do not do so unless they believe something nefarious has happened.”

In the meantime, Eric Adams and all of his high-ranking cronies have vowed to continue doing their jobs and running New York City. But for many of these people, it’s going to be pretty tough to manage their public or private lives without their phones — and, unlike Adams’ situation last year, it seems clear that the FBI won’t be returning its equipment anytime soon. So what are they going to do in the meantime? How do you manage your daily life, your job, your personal life, when the feds have confiscated your devices and you have no idea when (or if) you’ll get them back?

There’s very little information out there about what to do if the feds take your phone, even though it’s one of their more common tactics—I still vividly remember all the mounds of evidence in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial that was collected from witnesses’ phones and laptops. I called Jessica Lonergan, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and current litigation counsel at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, to ask all the questions I had about what happens when federal law enforcement takes your stuff.

The first thing you need to understand is that when agents ask for your devices, they can’t force you to give them the passwords/codes/keys that will unlock your devices (if you have those options). This is thanks to the Fifth Amendment, which protects the transmission of this as speech — but can NOImportantly, they also include biometric security.

“Sometimes a warrant gives law enforcement the ability to put your thumb on the phone or put your face in front of the phone” to unlock it, Lonergan says. “There’s a line of case law that says putting your thumb or face in front of the phone is not speech, just like people can fingerprint you.”

Once this is achieved, the FBI will have to to hold phone unlocked, and will usually do so by changing the appropriate settings, perhaps with the help of experts who will guide them over their shoulder. “You need to have technology people there whose job it is to keep the phone unlocked,” Lonergan says. “Until you can connect the phone to software that will download all the data, you need someone who knows how to do that.”

This leads to another important point: simply How the feds recover potential evidence from your phone or computer. “You don’t usually search the device itself,” he explains. “There’s usually a copy that’s been made with some program that allows you to search it.”

Federal officials will also hire legal experts to review the data transmission to ensure it does not violate confidential attorney-client communications — other lawyers or prosecutors would sift through such messages and suppress relevant information.

But even if the phone is unlocked and all the data is copied off the device, the feds are reluctant to return it because they could still need access to the stuff in the future. “The device itself is often the original evidence, not a copy,” Lonergan says. “Plus, you may not have the full tools to search that device initially, and you’ll get them later.” Because of that, attorneys for clients face a “pretty high burden” to convince agents to return the devices before they’re done with them.

If you’re stuck without a phone for that long, what do you say? You’ll probably have to buy a new one. But don’t worry — the feds will need the whole Other order a search of the replacement phone if they so desire, provided they have probable cause that you are still committing crimes on the new device. If that is the case, you could have serious problems beyond the lack of a phone.

By the way, if, for example, you work for a mayor under federal investigation and you have reason to believe that you might be involved in a mess, you should NO try to remove anything incriminating from your backlog. “It’s rare that there’s just one copy of something digital,” Lonergan says, pointing to messaging servers, other people’s inboxes and moving screenshots that could contain deleted messages. This could land you in additional trouble, potentially for obstructing justice. And yes, if you’re in that situation, you shouldn’t be surprised if the feds want your digital communications.

“Digital electronic evidence is incredibly powerful—I say that as both a defense attorney and a prosecutor,” Lonergan says. “It’s used in almost every type of thing.”