New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, was officially charged Thursday by federal prosecutors, who have been investigating him since 2021, with five counts of bribery, fraud and receiving donations from foreign businessmen and at least one Turkish government official to fund his mayoral campaign in 2021, the year the FBI investigation into those contacts began. In exchange for these contributions, Adams allegedly expedited the granting of permits for the new headquarters of the Turkish consulate in New York, among other favors.
For a decade, Adams sought and accepted “valuable improper benefits,” including luxury international travel, from foreign businessmen and a senior Turkish official “who sought to gain influence over him,” the indictment published by CNN reads. Indeed, Adams’ pressure on the city’s Fire Department expedited the permit and occupancy permit for the consulate, a brand-new skyscraper that was suspected of several security breaches, the indictment says. In short, Adams accepted illegal contributions to his campaign in 2018, when he announced his mayoral aspirations, through phantom donors — such as an unknown Turkish university with a campus in Washington — and foreign agents, the indictment found after months of investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, in the hands of the FBI. Adams’ charge as a “foreign agent” is reminiscent of that of veteran Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, who was convicted in July of 16 similar crimes, including receiving money from Egypt in exchange for preferential treatment.
The indictment was unsealed today in the federal court for the southern district of New York, in Manhattan, just a few steps from the mayor’s office and the mayor’s official residence, which FBI agents searched this morning and where they confiscated his cell phone. The indictment makes Adams, who before becoming mayor was a New York State senator and police captain, the first mayor of the city to be charged while in office. Adams has promised to defend himself and asked New Yorkers to wait to hear his version of events before judging him politically, when there are only a few months left until the next municipal elections, in which he was going to run. The Democrat, who took office in January 2022 with a proclamation of law and order, has assured that he has no intention of resigning and his lawyer has confirmed that he is cooperating with justice. In fact, after the newspaper The New York Times Adams, who had teased the imminent federal indictment on Wednesday night, released a recording in which he claimed his innocence and said defending New Yorkers would “always” make him a “target.” Adams called the charges “completely false, based on lies.”
The charges were filed shortly after federal prosecutors demanded that the city disclose all communications maintained by the Adams administration, as of today an alleged “foreign agent,” with Turkey and five other countries. The indictment caps a tumultuous few weeks in the city government, with a series of resignations of senior officials — all of them close to Adams, old and loyal comrades, some of them in the police department — who were also investigated for corruption in at least four independent investigations.
At a press conference after the charges were filed, prosecutor Damian Williams described Adams’ conduct as a “serious breach of public trust.” The stain of the Democratic politician’s indictment threatens to reach his party as well, and for no other reason than that New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had come forward to call for his immediate resignation on Wednesday. Ocasio-Cortez, from the progressive faction, and Adams, a centrist Democrat with little political color but a marked personal profile, have never hidden their differences, but the judicial abyss that Adams faces has pushed the Democrats of the State of New York to establish, or at least try to, a firewall in the final stretch of the campaign for the November elections.
Adams, a kind of loose cannon in the Democratic Party, very prone to coups and bombastic initiatives that were soon subsumed into nothing – his security plans for the city’s subway, for example, or the signing — who is a friendly robot patrol car — came to office with the challenge of revitalizing the city’s economy after the coronavirus pandemic, although his ambitious plans have been slowed by issues such as citizen insecurity, which he once claimed he could defeat, or the migration crisis, due to the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants from the border to the city. The criticism received for the militarization of the subway, his attempt to lock up homeless people with mental problems in psychiatric hospitals against their will or the black hole in the municipal coffers have been setbacks during his mandate, but nothing comparable to the fact of becoming the first mayor of New York to be indicted.
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