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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.

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........

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