The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has strongly defended its decision to drop the criminal case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani and seven others, telling a federal judge that the prosecution was legally flawed, diplomatically counterproductive and inconsistent with the Trump administration’s enforcement priorities.In a sharply worded 10-page filing, the DoJ said the case “should have been dropped a year ago or never brought in the first place”, arguing that the court had only a limited role in reviewing its decision to dismiss charges with prejudice.The filing came after US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis asked the department to explain why it was seeking to permanently dismiss the indictment, calling its earlier motion “terse, bland and conclusory”.The DoJ, under the Biden administration, indicted Adani and others in 2024 for allegedly being involved in a scheme to pay bribes worth $250 million to Indian government officials and mislead investors in order to secure billions of dollars in additional investments. During the alleged scheme, Adani Green Energy Ltd is said to have raised at least $175 million from US investors.The DoJ said requiring prosecutors to publicly justify decisions to drop cases would discourage future dismissals, expose privileged internal deliberations and infringe on the executive branch’s constitutional authority over charging decisions.“Judicial inquisitions into the bases for dismissal will expose privileged internal debates,” Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General R Trent McCotter wrote, adding that such demand hurt defendants by potentially chilling the department from seeking dismissal of criminal charges it determines are not in the interests of justice.Waiving privilege only for this case, McCotter said he decided to dismiss the charges after months of meetings with defence lawyers, reviewing hundreds of pages of submissions and conducting his own legal analysis. “The decision to seek dismissal was not a close call,” he wrote.The department cited six overarching reasons for dropping all charges, including that the alleged conduct was overwhelmingly centred in India, Indian authorities had investigated the allegations and found no actionable misconduct, investors suffered no financial losses, key evidence and witnesses were located abroad, the defendants were unlikely to ever appear before a US court, and the prosecution faced significant evidentiary hurdles.