Indictment of NYC Mayor Eric Adams Details Depths of Illegal Foreign Influence

On Thursday, federal prosecutors announced they are charging New York City Mayor Eric Adams for a bribery and wire fraud scheme spanning nearly a decade. Adams allegedly accepted illegal campaign contributions from corporations and foreign donors, including the Turkish government. Adams is accused of manipulating regulators for the Turkish Consulate and not recognizing the Armenian genocide in exchange for campaign donations and lavish gifts. According to prosecutors, “the mayor knew, accepted and actively sought illegal donations from foreign sources,” says George Joseph, an investigative reporter for The Guardian. “This is a generational-level scandal for New York City.” The unsealed indictment is raising pressure on the mayor to resign. “It is impossible for the mayor to perform his duties,” says Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblymember, who may himself run for mayor. “The same mayor who is now being alleged to have received over $100,000 in bribes was just last week praising New York police officers for opening fire on four New Yorkers at a subway station over the crime of stealing $2.90 of a subway fare.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: New York City Mayor Eric Adams is the first sitting mayor to face federal criminal charges. On Thursday, federal prosecutors formally announced charges of bribery and wire fraud in a scheme spanning nearly a decade. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams described the indictment against Adams in a news conference in Manhattan.

DAMIAN WILLIAMS: Today we are announcing campaign finance, bribery and conspiracy charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City. As the indictment alleges, Mayor Adams engaged in a long-running conspiracy in which he solicited and knowingly accepted illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors and corporations. As we allege, Mayor Adams took these contributions even though he knew they were illegal and even though he knew these contributions were attempts by a Turkish government official and Turkish businessmen to buy influence with him. …

Just because Adams received benefits for free, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t strings attached. As we allege, a particular Turkish government official behind many of the benefits Adams sought and accepted gave Adams all these things to gain influence over him. We allege that Adams knew that and took the benefits anyway. We allege that when the Turkish government official needed him, Adams also took corrupt official action in exchange for some of the luxury travel benefits.

AMY GOODMAN: In exchange, prosecutors allege, Mayor Adams helped Turkey’s government open a new 36-story consular building near the United Nations without a fire inspection. Adams also allegedly agreed not to release a statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, according to the indictment.

Calls for Adams to resign have grown. Thursday, the federal charges against him were announced. Adams refused to step down during a news conference Thursday.

MAYOR ERIC ADAMS: From here, my attorneys will take care of the case so I can take care of the city. My day-to-day will not change. I will continue to do the job for 8.3 million New Yorkers that I was elected to do.

AMY GOODMAN: All of this comes as thousands marched Thursday against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s scheduled speech at the U.N. General Assembly today, also chanted their demands for Mayor Eric Adams to resign.

For more, we’re joined in our New York studio by Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist New York state assemblymember, who’s calling on Mayor Adams to resign and was also at Thursday’s protest. He may run for mayor of New York. And George Joseph is with us, investigative reporter for The Guardian, who’s been following all of this for years. His most recent piece is headlined “’A true friend of Turkey’: Eric Adams bribery indictment reveals years of flights and favors.”

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! So, history is being made in New York. Eric Adams says he won’t resign. George Joseph, if you can go through what this relationship is that Mayor Adams has with Turkey, what exactly these charges allege?

GEORGE JOSEPH: So, this federal prosecutors’ indictment alleges that, going back years, members of the Turkish government and business leaders in Turkey with ties to the Erdoğan regime used free flights, discounted hotels, luxury travel amenities and numerous illegal straw donations coming from foreign sources in order to cultivate Eric Adams as a politician in the United States who would do favors for the Turkish government.

And federal prosecutors allege that on several cases he did so, the most dramatic case being a situation in which there was a consular building that had serious safety regulations that needed to be pushed through so that it could be opened in time for President Erdoğan from Turkey’s visit. Fire officials were concerned about the timeline. They said there were major safety issues. But Eric Adams personally, according to prosecutors, pushed fire officials to get it pushed through. And he did so, they say, as a favor to Turkey.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain. They wanted — Turkey wanted to have this consulate ready for Erdoğan, who was coming to New York. And talk about exactly who Adams put the pressure on and the fact of the Banks brothers, one now in charge of public safety, which is in charge of the Fire Department and the Police Department, what it meant to circumvent the rules for this building, that did open in time for Erdoğan’s visit.

GEORGE JOSEPH: So, what prosecutors allege is, at the time of this building, a multimillion-dollar building about to be opened, Eric Adams reached out to top fire officials and put pressure on them, saying, “You need to make sure that you cut through whatever safety issues you have and get this opened,” and that those fire officials then put pressure on their subordinates to cut through the normal safety processes, that are important for all residents of New York to actually live in safe buildings, so that the building could, in fact, be opened. And it was opened, quickly, on schedule, in time for Erdoğan’s visit.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite the fact that there were what? Well over 60 violations found?

GEORGE JOSEPH: Correct. And you mentioned the police commissioner and the friend of Eric Adams, who he put in charge of public safety. Those guys are involved in a completely separate inquiry. There’s actually probably four different federal investigations swirling around right now. The one we’re talking about is just one of them.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I just mentioned in the lede this whole issue of the Armenian genocide. What does Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, have to do with that?

GEORGE JOSEPH: Well, it’s very customary for a leader of a major city like New York to express remembrance and solidarity for victims of genocide, such as the Armenian genocide. And because Turkey is so hell-bent on denying that genocide, according to prosecutors, after cultivating Adams, they pushed him not to put out a statement on that day to commemorate and honor the victims of that genocide. And they say he agreed not to put out that statement and then, consequently, did not do so.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the people in his inner circle was a foreign agent for the Turkish government before coming into that circle?

GEORGE JOSEPH: One of his longtime staffers, even before he became mayor, was a person that was sort of his liaison between the Turkish government and him. I don’t know if we would use the term “foreign agent” for her, but, yes, they had close ties.

AMY GOODMAN: What were you most shocked by? Unlike many others, you’ve been following this for years. And how did he develop this relationship with the Turkish government? And talk about Turkish Airlines and the flights that he took, no matter where he was going in the world.

GEORGE JOSEPH: What I was surprised by, as a reporter that’s been investigating these kinds of suspicious donations for years, is that the prosecutor indictment actually has numerous text message exchanges involving Adams and Adams campaign staffers that are very explicit, suggesting or showing, according to prosecutors, that they knew that this money was illegal, coming from foreign sources and being passed through illegally through straw donors.

So, often in our investigations in the past, we found very suspicious indicia of straw donations, or we’ve had people admit to us that they were straw donors being used as pass-throughs illegally to flout campaign finance rules, but usually those have involved people close to the mayor. In this case, prosecutors are showing evidence that they say shows the mayor knew, accepted and actively sought illegal donations from foreign sources.

AMY GOODMAN: The person who I was talking about being a foreign agent, Mayor Adams, one of his press secretaries, Amaris Cockfield, registered as a foreign agent for the Turkish-U.S. Business Council, a group closely allied — right? — with Erdoğan.

GEORGE JOSEPH: Yes, and she is actually the daughter of a pastor who Eric Adams is a longtime friend with, who we investigated for a completely separate issue, in which he also allegedly pushed city buildings inspectors to skirt building safety regulations on behalf of yet another Eric Adams fundraiser who is accused of yet another separate straw donor scheme.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the straw donors. Talk about the bundling of money as Eric Adams ran for mayor, what he revealed and what he didn’t reveal, and also when it comes to gifts.

GEORGE JOSEPH: So, New York City has a public matching funds program that’s meant to help sort of strengthen our democracy by evening the playing field. What it does is, small donors’ donations are matched by public matching funds. But numerous donations that Eric Adams made, according — or, received, according to prosecutors, were actually straw donations, donations that were coming from wealthy individuals but being framed as if they were coming from small-time donors. Those small donations allowed Adams to access thousands of extra dollars — millions, in fact, in total — in public, taxpayer-funded matching funds. And that was a large part of why he had the biggest campaign war chest going into the 2021 mayoral election.

AMY GOODMAN: Zohran Mamdani, you may run against the mayor. You’re a New York state assemblymember. You were part of the protests yesterday. Can you talk about, first, your response to the indictment? One of the things we’ve seen over the last weeks, months — and maybe, George, you’d first like to comment on this — is the seizing of cellphones, the iPad of Eric Adams — this is well before this indictment was announced — making it difficult, actually, for many people to reach commissioners, because so many of them — what is it: something like 15 people now in his inner circle and in his Cabinet — have had their electronic devices, their communication devices, seized.

GEORGE JOSEPH: This is unprecedented in a generation in New York. We have people at the top rungs of the Police Department, the Education Department, City Hall. They’re all having their homes raided, phone seized. They’re not at work. They’re busy focusing on their legal matters. You know, this is a generational-level scandal for New York City.

AMY GOODMAN: Zohran Mamdani, your response?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I think it’s an incredibly disappointing day, but it’s, sadly, one that is not surprising. We have known for many years that Eric Adams has been investigated at multiple levels of government, even when he was just a candidate for mayor. And one of the things that we feared was that big donors and special interests supported him because they knew that he was vulnerable to access and influence in the manner that we’re now seeing in these federal allegations.

And I think in this moment right now it is impossible for the mayor to perform his duties as the leader of a city of 8.3 million people, especially when, in his own words, he said he’s going to spend every ounce of strength and spirit in his body fighting these charges, which begs the question where that leaves New Yorkers, the 300,000 municipal workforce he’s supposed to lead or the more than $100 billion budget that he is supposed to manage.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what about that? How is the government functioning right now? It’s very interesting that, in fact — and this isn’t true across the United States — the governor of New York, Governor Hochul, has the power to fire, essentially, Mayor Adams, to force him out.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: She has the power to remove him. And, you know, the question here is, there is a standard for that removal. We are currently calling for him to resign, because of the fact that we know that this mayor is unable to meet this moment, and hasn’t been able to meet this moment for weeks and months, frankly, prior to this indictment. You know, the same mayor who is now being alleged to have received over $100,000 in bribes was just last week praising New York police officers for opening fire on four New Yorkers at a subway station over the crime of stealing $2.90 in a subway fare. This is the mayor that we’re talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: And there’s another entity that has the ability to basically remove Mayor Adams as the mayor of New York. It’s the inability committee?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Yes. These are the — first time that many people are learning about this kind of a committee. It’s included in the City Charter. I think, however, that the likelihood of removal from that committee is a little lower, given the fact that my understanding is that it requires four out of the five members of that committee to vote for his removal, and of those five members, two of them are appointees of Eric Adams.

AMY GOODMAN: So, State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, can you talk about why you were out in the streets yesterday? There was a kind of converging of issues, the demand for Mayor Adams to resign and Netanyahu coming to the United Nations, the prime minister of Israel, as the assault on Gaza and on Lebanon continues.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: You know, I think these two events are united in one fact, which is a crisis of faith in our government. As New Yorkers look to City Hall being rife with corruption and see a municipal government that is unable to meet their most basic needs, they also look at a federal government that continues to greenlight billions of dollars in funding for an Israeli genocide of Palestinians and a military bombardment that has now spread into Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. And so I joined with thousands of New Yorkers yesterday marching in opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, because we understand that these two things are related, in that they are both displays of a bankruptcy of leadership. And what we need to see is a vision that is worthy of New Yorkers’ belief and Americans’ belief, and that vision has to be one that meets their needs, as opposed to telling them, “There isn’t enough money for you here, for everything you need to live a dignified life, but we have enough to kill children abroad.”

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to go to Beirut to get the latest. But when you were on the streets, this isn’t the first time you’ve protested. I interviewed you at Grand Central many months ago, a large contingent, about a thousand people, mainly Jewish New Yorkers, who were protesting Netanyahu. Many people got arrested there, hundreds. You weren’t getting arrested, because you had been arrested, what, the week before. Was it in front of the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s house?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Yes, yes, I was arrested in front of the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s house with hundreds of others, New Yorkers, most of whom were Jewish, in saying that: Do not use their pain for the justification of more of exactly that. And we’ve sadly seen, over these many months, an expansion of the very war crimes we were hoping to prevent.

AMY GOODMAN: And you were also one of the sponsors of the Not on Our Dime bill in the Assembly. Where does that stand right now? And what is it?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: So, that is a piece of legislation that I introduced in the State Assembly in 2023. Jabari Brisport, a state senator from Brooklyn, introduced it in the state Senate. And it’s a piece of legislation that would make it illegal for New York charities to fund Israeli war crimes, whether they be taking place across the West Bank or in Gaza. And the reason that it’s necessary is that we’ve found that New York charities have been sending more than $60 million a year, in violation of international law and in violation of the spirit of New York law, and we need to make that explicit now in our state’s laws.

AMY GOODMAN: So, are you going to run for mayor of New York?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I am considering doing so. It is something that is, in my mind, a possibility, because of this very fact that New Yorkers are not just suffering from a crisis of faith because of corruption, but also a crisis of faith in their government because of a cost-of-living crisis that Mayor Adams himself has exacerbated. And when they’re thinking about their inability to afford their rent, inability to afford their utilities, their bus fare, whatever it may be, they are looking for affirmative proposals that are clear and explicit. Those are things that I think I could offer in this race. And they’re also looking for someone who understands that this crisis of faith is taking place across multiple levels of government, and needs to have a vision that encompasses all of that.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you do run, that you might be running against the disgraced governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, who was forced to resign and now may run for mayor of New York City?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: Yes. And the issue here that we have to remember is that it’s not just Eric Adams that got us to this point. It’s real estate developers, big donors, the New York Post, all of whom heralded Eric Adams as the savior of our city. Those same people see in Andrew Cuomo the same opportunity to reap benefits. And we know that we do not want to exchange one disgraced executive of New York City for another disgraced executive of New York state. It’s time we turn the page on these kinds of leaders and on the influences that brought them to bear.

AMY GOODMAN: And Mayor Adams claiming that he is a target?

ZOHRAN MAMDANI: I think it’s ridiculous. I mean, he is a target in the sense that he has allegedly committed crimes. That is the reason that he is a target. But what he is looking to do is exploit New Yorkers’ rightful fears about government persecution and exploit them to apply them to himself, when, in fact, he is the only person that brought him to this place.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, George Joseph, what happens next?

GEORGE JOSEPH: So, today, Mayor Adams is going to have his first court appearance, and he’s expected, obviously, to plead not guilty. And then we’re going to have a prolonged court process as the primary starts heating up. So, we’re going to see what happens, whether Governor Hochul does really consider removing Adams from office, whether there’s pressure on her to do so, who else is going to jump into the race. A lot is in the air right now.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us, George Joseph, investigative reporter for The Guardian — his article, we’ll link to, “’A true friend of Turkey’: Eric Adams bribery indictment reveals years of flights and favors” — and Zohran Mamdani, New York state assemblymember.

Next up, an update from Lebanon. Stay with us.