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.
