NYC Mayor Eric Adams facing five federal charges of bribery, fraud

Late Wednesday, New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on federal criminal charges. At the time, the indictment was sealed, but it has since been unsealed. More on that in a moment. On Thursday, federal agents executed a search warrant on Gracie Mansion!! That’s the official home of the NYC mayor. The search warrant was for all of Mayor Adams’ tablets and phones and anything pertaining to Turkey. The country. Because apparently, Mayor Adams was taking bribes from Turkish officials. He faces five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Here’s the thing: I totally believe he did it and I totally believe the feds have enough evidence on him, but OMG, Donald Trump and Clarence Thomas are RIGHT THERE. Some highlights from the NY Times:

Mayor Eric Adams was defiant on Thursday in the face of five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, insisting he would stay in office and imploring New Yorkers to hear his defense. The indictment, which was unsealed on Thursday morning after a search of the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, followed an investigation that started in 2021. Prosecutors said the scheme began when he was a top elected official in Brooklyn and continued after he became mayor.

The investigation focused on whether Mr. Adams, 64, had conspired with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign campaign contributions in exchange for acting on its behalf. Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said that Mr. Adams had been “showered” with gifts that he knew were illegal.

“This was a multiyear scheme to buy favor with a single New York City politician on the rise: Eric Adams,” Mr. Williams said at a news conference. “Year after year, he kept the public in the dark.”

If convicted of all five counts in the indictment, the maximum penalty under law would be 45 years in prison. But under the federal sentencing guidelines, he would likely receive far less.

According to the indictment, Mr. Adams had “sought and accepted improper valuable benefits” since at least 2014, when he was Brooklyn borough president. The benefits included luxury travel — free and discounted Turkish Airlines tickets and free meals and hotel rooms — from wealthy foreigners and at least one Turkish government official, prosecutors said. He traveled on the airline even when it was inconvenient, they said, including a 2017 flight to France from New York that first stopped in Istanbul. Mr. Adams tried to hide the gifts or make it appear as if he had paid for them, according to the indictment. Their value exceeded $100,000, prosecutors said.

In exchange, prosecutors said, Mr. Adams pressured officials at the New York Fire Department to permit a new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan despite safety problems. A Fire Department official overseeing the safety assessment said he was told he would lose his job if he did not follow the order.

[From The NY Times]

You can read the indictment here, the NYT put the full document online and annotated it. I’m not a lawyer, obviously, but from I read, they really do have an abundance of evidence, not just from Adams, but his staffers who acted as go-betweens with Turkish officials. There are extensive electronic receipts. It shows the equal-parts horrifying and hilarious banality of fraud, the bargaining, the sleaze, the fact that they were so stupid to leave all of this documentation of their crimes.

The ultimate Eric Adams thing is that the feds have this message pic.twitter.com/kFumQJF54t

— David Dayen (@ddayen) September 26, 2024

“You are a disgrace for all Black people in this city!”– Eric Adams’s news conference is not going well pic.twitter.com/Gq0Ui8Yeyh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 26, 2024

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.