标签： Asia

A high-profile transnational legal saga centered on one of India’s wealthiest business magnates has reached an abrupt conclusion after a federal judge in the United States approved the Justice Department’s request to dismiss all criminal bribery and fraud charges against Adani Group chair Gautam Adani. While the case is now permanently closed, the ruling left behind sharp public criticism of the unusual behind-the-scenes process that led to the dismissal, raising lingering questions about procedural fairness and equal application of the rule of law.

The case dates back to 2024, when federal prosecutors brought charges alleging Adani had paid millions in bribes to senior Indian government officials to secure approvals for large-scale renewable energy projects, while intentionally misleading American investors about the illegal practice. From the outset of the proceedings, Adani and all Adani Group entities have forcefully denied any and all wrongdoing, and maintained that stance through the conclusion of the case.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis formally granted the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the indictment in a 47-page written ruling. The decision to drop the case came after senior department official R. Trent McCotter, principal associate deputy attorney general, collaborated directly with Adani’s defense team to craft the dismissal request — a move that cut out the line prosecutors and FBI and SEC investigators who had spent months building the criminal case.

In his ruling, Judge Garaufis did not mince words in condemning the irregular process. He described the arrangement as “highly unusual,” noting that McCotter had overstepped to replace the independent judgment of the career law enforcement officials directly involved in the investigation with his own. “The irregularities in the decision to dismiss the indictment are concerning,” Garaufis wrote in the official order. While he ultimately concluded that there was no direct evidence that Adani’s November 2024 pledge to invest $10 billion in U.S. infrastructure projects and create 15,000 jobs — announced in a post congratulating Donald Trump on his presidential election victory — influenced the Justice Department’s call, he acknowledged that the public retains the right to draw its own conclusions about how these backchannel discussions could shape public trust in equal justice.

The Justice Department first formally requested dismissal of the charges in May of this year. Department officials argued that most of the alleged misconduct occurred outside U.S. borders, making successful prosecution extremely challenging, and added that pursuing the case no longer aligned with the agency’s current prosecutorial priorities. The request came only after Adani assembled a high-powered new legal team led by Robert J. Giuffra Jr., co-chair of elite Washington law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and a longtime personal attorney to former President and current President-elect Donald Trump. Multiple reports confirm Giuffra met with senior Justice Department officials earlier this year to push back on the case and raise the defense’s objections. Judge Garaufis initially rejected the department’s first dismissal request in June, writing that the agency’s explanation for abandoning the prosecution was insufficient and ordering additional disclosures to clarify the decision-making process.

While the criminal charges are now dismissed with prejudice — a legal designation that means they can never be refiled against Adani — this case is not the only ongoing U.S. legal action involving the billionaire and his conglomerate. Earlier this year in May, Adani agreed to pay a $6 million civil penalty, and his nephew Sagar Adani agreed to a $12 million penalty, to settle civil disclosure allegations brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, without admitting or denying the agency’s claims. Separately, Adani Enterprises, the Adani Group’s flagship publicly traded company, reached a $275 million settlement to resolve potential civil liability over apparent violations of U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran.

Adani, 64, who never appeared in any U.S. court during the criminal proceedings, issued a public statement welcoming the ruling, writing on social media platform X that “Throughout this challenging period, our faith in truth, fairness and the rule of law remained unwavering.” He added that he accepted the court’s order with humility and deep respect for the U.S. judicial process. A well-connected tycoon, Adani chairs a sprawling multinational conglomerate with core holdings in ports, energy, airports, and large-scale infrastructure across India and beyond, and is widely recognized as one of the richest men in India, with long-documented personal and political ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hails from the same western Indian state of Gujarat.

In a tit-for-tat response to Iran’s recent demand for war reparations as a condition to reopen the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz, former and current U.S. President Donald Trump announced Monday he will make Iranian compensation for the deaths of American service members a core requirement for any future peace negotiations between the two nations.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump pushed back against Iranian officials’ calls for payments to repair damage inflicted during the five-month military conflict between the two countries – a war Trump has framed as necessary to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. “I see that Representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran are asking for compensation for the damage done to them during the last five-month Military Conflict (started because, THEY WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON), even though it was never mentioned in any of our negotiations or meetings!” Trump’s post read.

In line with his longstanding pattern of matching Iranian demands with reciprocal claims, Trump immediately extended his counter-demand far beyond the scope of the current ongoing war. The U.S. leader is seeking reparations for attacks on American troops spanning more than 20 years, dating back to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. These include attacks that global intelligence and defense communities widely attribute to Iranian-backed militant groups, including roadside bombings that U.S. officials claim were orchestrated by legendary Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani. Beginning in the mid-2000s, during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Iran began supplying lethal roadside explosive devices to Shia militias opposing American forces as part of a broader regional power struggle between Washington and Tehran for influence over Iraq. That decades-long confrontation culminated in Trump’s 2020 order to assassinate Soleimani in a drone strike inside Baghdad, a decision the White House justified by citing Soleimani’s coordination with anti-U.S. militias.

Notably, Trump also included the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in his list of grievances attributed to Iran – a claim that contradicts longstanding conclusions from U.S. intelligence agencies, which have formally pinned responsibility for the attack that killed 17 American sailors on the al-Qaeda terrorist network, not Tehran.

Trump’s demands go beyond compensation for American casualties: he also called on the Iranian government to pay reparations to its own citizens for the killing of anti-government protesters earlier in 2026. Trump cited this crackdown as one of the core justifications for the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran launched in February 2026. There is already stark division over the death toll from the protests: Trump claims around 50,000 people were killed, while an Iranian official has put the confirmed death toll at no fewer than 5,000.

At this stage, it remains unclear how seriously Trump is advancing these demands, which condition any ceasefire agreement not only on compensation for U.S. service members but also on reparations for Iranian protesters. The counter-demand comes just days after Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei confirmed Tehran would require war reparations from the U.S. before it agrees to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global chokepoint through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supplies pass.

Trump’s latest public statement continues a pattern of inconsistent messaging that has already put him at odds with his own cabinet. Just months prior in July, Trump contradicted his own Secretary of State Marco Rubio by suggesting the U.S. could impose a 20% toll on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for acting as the waterway’s security guarantor. Rubio quickly pushed back, clarifying that any unilateral toll on the international waterway would be “completely illegal” under international maritime law.

The exchange of competing reparation demands underscores the effective collapse of the ceasefire extension between Washington and Tehran that was agreed to back in June, with both sides now maneuvering to gain strategic leverage on the battlefield. However, a recent report from *The Wall Street Journal* published over the weekend indicates Trump has largely abandoned his core stated war objective – reaching a new nuclear agreement that permanently blocks Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. According to the report, Trump now intends to end the military conflict in order to secure the full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a priority that has overtaken his original nuclear goals.

A groundbreaking new analysis from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has uncovered stark inequity in the distribution of U.S. federal security grants designed to protect religious nonprofits, revealing that Muslim American organizations have received less than 4% of total funding allocated over the past nine years. The funding in question is distributed annually through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) initiative overseen by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that provides up to $200,000 per site to cover physical security upgrades such as surveillance cameras, bulletproof glazing, perimeter barriers, and security staff training. According to MPAC’s data, Jewish organizations have claimed nearly 60% of the $850 million distributed through the program since 2017, when Donald Trump first took office, while Christian groups have received just over 25%. Muslim organizations, by contrast, have only secured 3.8% of the total pot, despite facing a rapidly growing risk of targeted hate violence.

“Of the $850m awarded through this program over nine years, Muslim organisations only got 3.8 percent of the funding… it’s a really, really small amount going to a community that is under threat, and a growing threat,” Dr. Sarah Mohamed, co-author of the report and senior researcher at MPAC’s Center for Security, Technology, and Policy, told Middle East Eye in an interview Monday.

The inequitable distribution comes amid a years-long campaign by conservative actors to block Muslim access to the program. A year ago, right-leaning think tank Middle East Forum released a controversial report falsely claiming that DHS had funneled U.S. tax dollars to “terror-linked and extremist” Muslim organizations between 2013 and 2023, naming 49 Muslim American groups and labeling NSGP “the greatest source of DHS funding to extremist groups.” MPAC’s managing director in Washington D.C. and report co-author Sameer Hossein pushed back on these unsubstantiated claims, noting that “Even members of Congress have not been able to verify that.”

Hossein added that new restrictions imposed by the current Trump administration have made it far harder for Muslim and other marginalized community organizations to access the critical grant funding. The administration has added prohibitions targeting activities that conflict with its policy agenda, including Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work, support for undocumented immigrants, and boycotts of Israel, leaving grantees that engage in any of these activities exposed to heightened legal risk.

Because no public data is available on the total number of organizations that applied for NSGP funding each year, researchers cannot confirm whether the low share of funding awarded to Muslim groups stems primarily from lower application rates or systemic bias. But Hossein pointed to structural advantages that have helped other religious groups secure more funding: Jewish American organizations, which first advocated for the creation of a program like NSGP in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks shortly after DHS was founded, have more existing resources and greater experience navigating the grant program’s complex, bureaucratic application process. MPAC has already collaborated with Jewish American groups on this issue to address shared concerns around community security.

The lack of equitable security funding comes as anti-Muslim sentiment across the U.S. has surged to unprecedented levels following Trump’s return to the White House in 2025. Much of the current administration’s policy agenda, pre-developed by the far-right Heritage Foundation in its Project 2025 blueprint, explicitly targets Muslim American communities and Muslim-majority nations. Top Republican elected officials have openly promoted anti-Muslim rhetoric and called for punitive or violent action against Muslim Americans, with high-profile examples including Florida Congressman Randy Fine, Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville.

Trump himself has amplified anti-Muslim hate repeatedly on his social platform Truth Social. Most recently, he shared a photo of Muslim kindergarten students in Minnesota wearing hijabs, and has repeatedly called for the investigation and deportation of Somali Americans living in the state, including hijab-wearing Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

Data from independent hate monitoring groups confirms the rapid spread of online and offline anti-Muslim aggression. Ahead of last year’s New York City mayoral election, which saw Zohran Mamdani become the city’s first Muslim mayor, the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) documented that Islamophobic and xenophobic discourse about Mamdani on X reached 1.5 billion user accounts between his June Democratic primary win and the end of October. CSOH called on X to implement election-specific content protections, enforce existing community guidelines targeting religious and racial hate speech, and adjust the platform’s algorithm to prioritize corrective counter-narratives to disinformation and hate.

CSOH also recorded a sharp spike in anti-Muslim content on X immediately after the U.S. and Israel launched a joint military campaign against Iran on February 28. Between January 1 and March 5, a period when Trump repeatedly threatened to launch military action against Iran, CSOH tracked thousands of posts that explicitly dehumanized Muslims, called for their exclusion, or incited violence against the community. On the day the war began, daily volumes of these harmful posts jumped from fewer than 2,000 to more than 6,000.

Offline attacks have also reached alarming levels. In April, MPAC reported that targeted attacks against Muslim American individuals and institutions hit a 15-month high in the first quarter of 2025 under the Trump administration, with an 11-fold increase in targeted incidents compared to previous periods. At least nine attacks were recorded in March alone, ranging from mosque vandalism and bomb threats to sexual assaults against Muslim women, according to MPAC’s policy paper *The Pitfalls of Operation Epic Fury: How the Undeclared War Against Iran Hurts Americans’ Interests Abroad and at Home.*

In May, a mass shooting outside a California mosque that hosted a children’s school left three people dead. Muslim American advocacy groups immediately blamed the attack on the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hate speech by Republican lawmakers and far-right influencers. “We are deeply disturbed, but not at all surprised,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement following the shooting. “Hate against American Muslims is completely out of control.”

As the 2025 Senate campaign in Michigan heads toward a potentially historic outcome, with Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed positioned to become the first Muslim U.S. senator in American history, anti-Muslim rhetoric has seeped into the race. His Republican opponent Mike Rogers has released a attack ad against El-Sayed that features images of deceased al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, echoing a long pattern of Islamophobic dog whistles in American electoral politics.