Eric Adams Indicted on Federal Corruption Charges
The first sitting New York City mayor to be so honored.
NYT (“Eric Adams Is Indicted After Federal Corruption Investigation“):
Eric Adams, a retired police captain who was elected as New York City’s 110th mayor nearly three years ago on a promise to rein in crime, has been indicted in a federal corruption investigation, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The indictment remained sealed on Wednesday night, and it was unclear what charge or charges Mr. Adams will face. But the federal investigation has focused at least in part on whether Mr. Adams and his campaign conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign donations.
When the indictment is made public, Mr. Adams, a Democrat, will become the first New York City mayor to face a federal charge while in office. It was not clear when he will surrender to the authorities. Federal prosecutors were expected to announce more details on Thursday.
The indictment promised to reverberate across the nation’s largest city and beyond, plunging Mr. Adams’s embattled administration further into chaos just months before he is set to face challengers in a hotly contested mayoral primary.
And, if it contains allegations of conspiring to commit crimes with foreign nationals, it will have landed on the same week that the city was playing host to leaders from across the world at the United Nations General Assembly, including Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Mr. Adams struck a defiant tone in a video statement issued Wednesday, insisting that he had done nothing wrong.
“I always knew that if I stood my ground for New Yorkers that I would be a target — and a target I became,” he said. “If I am charged, I am innocent, and I will fight this with every ounce of my strength and spirit.”
[…]
Even before he was indicted, Mr. Adams’s administration had been battered not just by the investigation into him and his campaign but by three separate inquiries involving some of his highest ranking aides and advisers — investigations that included a drumbeat of searches and seizures that destabilized City Hall and made it difficult for him to govern effectively.
Calls for Mr. Adams’s resignation had been steadily accumulating over the past several weeks.
Earlier on Wednesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said she could “not see how Mayor Adams can continue” in his job.
On Wednesday night, the news of the indictment fueled the criticism. Scott Stringer, the former New York City comptroller who is among the Democrats running against Mr. Adams in next year’s mayoral primary, said that the mayor was presiding over “a broken-down train wreck of a municipal government” and that he should step down.
I need to head to class, so don’t have time for significant analysis. But the parallels between Adams and Trump in terms of authoritarian rhetoric and disregard for norms is striking. It’s not that they’ve broken the law, you see, but that the system is rigged against them. As is the fact that NYC Democrats are uniting to tell Adams to step down while Republicans, with very few exceptions, have not only stood by Trump but prostrate themselves before him.
If he wants his party to back him and defend him to the death, he should become a Republiqan.
Adams is about as MAGA a human as you can get, and he’s going to go down like Trump. But it sounds like everyone has turned on him. Even his defenders in the party are saying he deserves the ‘presumption of innocence’ which is not exactly stirring.
Just take it to SCOTUS and say they were tips. Problem solved.
@Franklin:
Or that, retroactively, they were part of his official duties.
The classic model for big city corruption is to grant big favors for lots of different interest groups while hoovering the cash into your pocket. That way you’ve got people all over the city who will fight for you, no matter what the accusation. Tammany Hall was a den of corruption, but tell that to the millions of Irish-Americans they lifted from poverty to positions of influence and power.
But Adams is such a greedy asshole he couldn’t be bothered to help anyone other than his personal cronies and a certain type of corrupt cop. (Although maybe I’m repeating myself.) Oh, and maybe the super-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn who are mad because the city demands that they actually teach their schoolkids something more than just the Torah, and who Adams was willing to pander to.
But aside from that? His big plan for the city’s budget was to close down libraries. Just about every Democrat who sees him sinking is planning to throw him an anchor…
@wr:
I still can’t get over the fact that his chief advisor said she has never taken the subway. That’s not like knowing what the Yankees uniform looks like. It’s an incredible feat for a NYC politico.
So much for the notion that some held a few years ago that Adams’ “tough on crime” brand of politics was the way forward for the Democratic Party…
@Steven L. Taylor:
God, that gave me such a headache in my eye. Adams has been one of the go-to “authorities” who helped create the moral crime panic that’s been plaguing us for the last few years. That panic has resulted in problematic policy changes that will have long-term impacts.
Yes, we went through a notable spike in crime. The majority of analysts see that as the result of a “perfect storm” of events (including COVID, the BLM protests, and USB car hacking). As many of those experts predicted, this was also a short-term aberration. Four years later we see numbers moving back in line with historic trends… but all of the moral panic legislation and policy remain with us.
I have to regularly remind myself that progress is neither linear or always forward moving.
I remember, right after he was elected (next day?), he was spotted eating fish at Rao’s in Harlem, despite claiming to be vegan.
He denied it. He made his staff deny it. And it was like a tiny version of Trump’s insistence that his inauguration drew a bigger crowd than Obama’s.
No gently chuckling “you got me, I cheat sometimes” or even a “wait, fish isn’t vegan?” His first instinct was to lie and make others lie for him.
That little moment defined his character for me, and nothing he has done came as a surprise.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Indeed. Although I would note that the current Democratic POTUS nominee made her bones as a prosecutor and is running pretty heavily on that background.
Is there a party switch in the cards? I mean he would be a piker in the Republican party corruption-wise, but a guy can learn … am I right:)
It was so stinkin’ obvious this guy was corrupt from the very beginning, even during the election. Partying all night and hosting expensive dinner parties with 8-12 people at nightclubs whose owners had been indicted by the feds. How was an ex-cop spending thousands of dollars a night, multiple times per week?
@Steven L. Taylor & @James Joyner:
I don’t know. I seem to remember hearing in the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime; and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. Believing “cops are always the good guys” isn’t necessary the only way to be “tough on crime.”
“No one is above the law” is remains a potent message for Harris and the Democrats. Especially since the Dems aren’t going to circle the wagons for Adams anymore than they did for Menendez.
@James Joyner:
Harris is running in part on being a prosecutor. While she wasn’t as progressive a prosecutor as someone like George Gascon or Larry Krasner, Harris still was far more liberal in her approach to the application of the Criminal Legal System than Adams.
Adams, at least in that regard, was much more of a traditional “tough on crime” politician regarding the policies he advocated for.
Again, I’m not saying Harris is super progressive. Just far more progressive than Adams.
I am enjoying Popehat crapping on Adams and the NYPD.
@Paul L.: One of Adams’ recent appointees to be forced out was the police commissioner who, in his time in office, killed every single civilian complaint against a cop.
Adams is really a remarkable guy — he represents the worst of political culture AND the worst of cop culture.