DISPATCHES FROM FUN CITY: Eric Adams’s Turkey trot.
“Brooklyn is the Istanbul of America,”* now-Mayor Eric Adams told a pair of Turks on camera after they asked him for political favors in a cameo he made in a Turkish romcom. Now, in real life, Adams is accused of doing just that, following a sweeping indictment unsealed by prosecutors in Manhattan who allege that he fraudulently obtained $10 million in public campaign funds and accepted over $100,000 in bribes in order to facilitate a new Turkish consulate.
“In 2014, Eric Adams, the defendant, became Brooklyn borough president. Thereafter, for nearly a decade, Adams sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the fifty-seven-page indictment reads; it marks the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted.
The indictment includes multiple outright absurd allegations, including that Adams changed his iPhone password, only to claim he forgot “the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone” and that his staff asked a businessman to lie to the feds about obvious straw donations his employees made in return for him securing a city sponsorship for events.
For his part, Adams, who has called the charges “false,” has suggested that they are politically motivated, and based off of his opposition to the Biden administration’s open borders policies. They come after multiple members of his inner circle had their homes searched.
The hours leading up to and following the indictment saw a series of strange comments from Adams allies and enemies bubble up. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a potential mayoral candidate down the road, called on him to resign — even before the indictments were unsealed. On the other hand, Liel Liebovitz took to the pages of Tablet magazine to argue that “Jewish New Yorkers have an obligation to stand up against a corrupt Democratic Party lawfare campaign that is targeting the mayor who stood up for us.”
If New Yorkers thought the de Blasio years were bad, just make AOC mayor. But then again, even she might be slightly better than Adams’ possible direct successor, Jumaane Williams.
* “We call New York City the Port-Au-Prince of America,” Adams tweeted in March in regards to the Haitian immigrant crisis, if we’re keeping track of crazy pandering stuff that only Adams says about New York.