 "Taking down of New York City mayor Eric Adams reveals ruthlessness of Biden-Harris administration")
Indians have probably not noticed that a huge scandal is rocking New York City. When I came across the news of New York’s high-profile mayor Eric Adams being slapped with federal corruption charges, with some so grave that he may be put away for 45 years if convicted, I was impressed at first by the resilience of America’s noisy democracy. This is, as they say, a really big deal.
Here is a Black leader and a Democrat, I thought, who has been indicted despite being a member of the ruling party and from a demography crucial for the Democrats, and is facing calls for resignation from his own party members bang in the middle of a tense election season. There is a possibility that the Adams indictment may even hurt Democrats’ chances in November of regaining majority in US House of Representatives where the Republicans hold a slender majority.
Prominent Democratic leaders such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia M Velázquez have called for his resignation while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has said “no one is above the law”. On the face of it, the development speaks of the strength of American institutions and rule of law.
The 64-year-old former cop Adams, who was elected in 2021 to combat surging crime in New York, strengthen law enforcement and improve public safety, earned the dubious distinction of becoming the first sitting NYC mayor to face criminal charges.
The indictment unsealed by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) Thursday alleges that Adams, who rose from humble background, solicited and accepted illegal campaign contributions and over $100,000 in luxury travel benefits from Turkish businessmen and allegedly pressured the NYC fire department to bend the rules and facilitate the opening of a Turkish consulate, a skyscraper in Manhattan.
He was indicted on five counts of federal charges related to wire fraud and bribery, conspiracy and seeking campaign contributions from foreign nationals. According to a 57-page indictment by the Joe Biden administration’s DoJ, “Mayor Adams abused his power and position for nearly a decade, obtaining personal benefits and illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals… and this illegal conduct compromised his integrity as an elected official.”
Impact Shorts
More ShortsPrima facie, the charges appear damning. There is, however, more to the case than meets the eye. There are layers that need exploring.
The first thing worth noting is that the charges are related to alleged illegal actions dating back to almost 10 years old, from when Adams was a Brooklyn borough president aspiring to be a mayor. A legitimate question arises. Why did it take so long for the prosecution to make its case? If the prosecutors, as alleged in the indictment, had irrefutable evidence that Mayor Adams “abused his power and position for nearly a decade”, why wait until 2024 to nail him? What explains the timing?
Second, a closer look at the indictment reveals that despite the seriousness of the allegations, a clear case of quid pro quo has not been established. Instead of authenticating the details of the payoff that Adams supposedly imparted in return for the gifts he received, in terms of government contracts or legislative actions, what we have in its place are insinuations and innuendoes. There is no “this for that” beyond perks and courtesies that automatically accrue to a man in his position of power.
The core of the indictment is an allegation that Adams provided enhanced access and even influence in exchange for donations and benefits, a fact that is par for the course in American politics.
James Burnham, a former DoJ attorney and White House official, and lawyer Yaakov Roth, write in Wall Street Journal that “the indictment spends many paragraphs discussing benefits received —many of them travel and entertainment—but is light on official actions promised in return. Stripped of its innuendo, the indictment recounts a man who lived the high life while serving as Brooklyn borough president and mayor. Color us shocked that the celebrity mayor of the Big Apple encounters wealthy benefactors eager to pick up the check. As in Mr. McDonnell’s case (Gov. Bob McDonnell vs US, 2016), there is a sense of benefactors seeking the prestige attendant to appearing publicly with the mayor. But if hosting famous politicians for prestige constitutes bribery, Martha’s Vineyard will need to become Martha’s Federal Correctional Institution.”
The third point worth noting is the reaction of the Republicans. Ordinarily, the indictment of a prominent Democratic leader would invite scorn and barbs from Adams’s political rivals. In this case, MAGA Republicans led by Donald Trump have sprung to Adams’s defence. Why?
Trump, at a news conference in New York on the very night that Biden’s DoJ unfurled the charges against Adams, said the mayor’s tribulations were easily predictable. “I remember NYC Mayor Eric Adams, a year ago, criticizing the federal government for the migrant crisis,” said Trump, adding, “And I said, ‘within a year, he’d be indicted.’ And I was right. That’s what happened. And I noticed the indictment is very old. I have the same thing. I wish him well.”
Before we go into the link between Adams’s stance on migrant crisis sweeping New York City and his indictment, we should note that Adams has pleaded “not guilty” to the charges. The NYC mayor has not only denied any wrongdoing and rejected calls for resignation, but he has also vowed to fight the charges and claimed that the allegations were politically motivated, and he is the victim of political vendetta from the Biden administration.
This is where the rubber meets the road.
In a defiant statement, Adams, a vocal critic of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policy that has become a hot button political issue for November’s presidential elections, indicated that he has been targeted unfairly for criticising the White House’s ineffectiveness in helping NYC deal with a massive influx of migrants.
“I have been fighting injustice my entire life”, Adams, said via a video address on Wednesday. “That fight has continued as your mayor. Despite our pleas, when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics.”
“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target, and a target I became,” Adams said in his statement.
The complexion of the Adams indictment changes when we look at the context. Adams has been a severe and relentless critic of the Biden-Harris administration since 2022 for its botched immigration policy that has led to a serious border crisis, the repercussion of which has seen New York saddled with more than 210,000 migrants into its five boroughs since last spring, and more than 65000 (or 68000 in some counts) in shelters.
In September last year at a town hall event in Manhattan, Adams had issued a dire warning that the crisis will “destroy New York City.” He said that there are already 110,000 migrants in the city, and about 10,000 are arriving every month. The problem became even more acute because NYC is a so-called ‘sanctuary city’ and is legally obligated to provide shelter to anyone who asks.
Under sanctuary laws, local law enforcement is not duty-bound to cooperate with federal immigration officials, which means local police may not share detention information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The laws were meant as an insurance to migrants who were encouraged to report crimes without the fear of getting deported.
However, in effect, the sanctuary laws ended up shielding “criminals who don’t belong in the US from removal. Eleven states and some 600 towns and cities, mostly controlled by Democrats, have them”, according to New York Post. The laws were codified in 2017 under Adams’s predecessor, mayor Bill de Blasio.
To add to Adams’s woes, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, not a fan of Biden-Harris’s open-door immigration policy, began bussing migrants to New York by the thousands, stretching the Empire State’s resources even further.
The beleaguered New York mayor ran into frequent frictions with Biden, criticising the US president for turning a deaf ear to repeated calls for more federal funds to deal with the crisis.
“We have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut,” he said at the September town hall event. “Every service in this city is going to be impacted.”
In December, a frustrated Adams even called on New Yorkers to march to Washington DC to stop the flooding of NYC with asylum seekers and stop the reckless opening of American borders. He was effectively painting a target on his back.
According to New York Post, the “spent at least about $5.5 billion on the migrant crisis as of August, which has gone toward housing more than 250,000 migrants since 2022. The crisis is expected to cost the city upwards of $12 billion by 2026, but the count by July was already hundreds of millions of dollars more than the predicted budget.”
What’s more, that amount is reportedly 69 per cent of the total cost for the migrant crisis, of which the Empire State will absorb 30 per cent while the federal government at Washington DC is expected to cover only one per cent.
Instead of paying any heed to Adams’s requests, with New York already struggling with over 37,000 migrants bussed in alone from Texas – an eventuality that Adams failed to stop through preliminary injunction, the Biden administration further exacerbated the mayor’s issues. The US Department of Homeland Security directly flew in around 33,000 illegal immigrants – 22 per cent of the city’s migrant influx – in “secret flights” that included a Haitian man accused of raping a specially abled teen girl, reported New York Post.
Adams was also rubbing the Biden administration the wrong way through other equally significant means. In February 2024, Adams declared that given a chance, he will take New York City off the sanctuary list so that he may work closely with ICE officials to deport migrants who were accused of serious crimes.
When asked about “due process” at a news conference, the mayor said “They (the accused) didn’t give due process to the person that they shot or punched or killed… There’s just a philosophical disagreement here,” according to the New York Times.
Adams also took a pro-Israel stance in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, massacre that triggered campus unrest including violent demonstrations from students inside university campus and a volley of antisemitic incidents targeting Jewish students.
In his piece for Tablet magazine, titled ‘The Jews Should Stand With Eric Adams’, Liel Leibovitz writes, “Adams also struggled to fight crime as his party increasingly deemed the very act of policing inherently racist, and he stood for New York’s Jews as his party increasingly snuggled up to their pogromists. The federal government, which has the power to uphold laws and deport foreign students who support terrorism, say, or withdraw funding for universities that coddle antisemitic mobs, many of which appear to have direct links to the foreign terrorist organizations they support, did nothing. Mayor Adams, on the other hand, sprung to action as soon as he could, breaking down the Tentifada encampment at Columbia and repeatedly advocating a zero-tolerance approach to the Hamasniks in our streets.”
The extent of the migrant crisis, that has emerged as a central point in the election battle, can be gauged from the latest data released by ICE. The immigration authority, in a letter to Republican lawmaker from Texas Tony Gonzales, revealed that over 662,566 non-citizens with criminal histories are on ICE’s national docket, of which 663,000 have criminal histories, 13,000 were convicted of homicide, 16,000 of sexual assault, and 1,845 face homicide charges.
Short point, more than 13,000 immigrants convicted of murder — either in the US or abroad — are living outside of ICE detention triggering an intense political battle with presidential candidate Trump taking aim at vice-president and rival candidate Kamala Harris.
All this may end up making life difficult for the Democrats. What has riled up the Democrats even more when it comes to Adams is that the NYC mayor’s persistent focus on the migrant crisis is resonating with the public, leading to internal frustrations within the party. At least two recent surveys point to the fact that New Yorkers are worried over the influx of illegal immigrants many of whom are accused of violent criminal acts.
As the mayor mandated steep cuts to public services such as school and sanitation, a December Quinnipiac poll found 85 per cent of NYC voters were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” the city would “not be able to accommodate the surge of migrants”, a figure that’s up from 63 per cent in February 2023, reports Politico, a Democratic party-aligned media outlet.
A Siena College survey conducted in August 2024 found that “82 per cent of voters believe the influx is a serious problem, including a majority—54 per cent—who say it is a very serious problem”, reports Newsweek.
The Politico report mentioned above sounds worried that Adams’s “ceaseless, dire messaging is threatening Democrats in a pivotal election year,” calls the mayor “an anomaly in Democratic messaging” and quotes a Democratic party campaign manager, as saying, that Adams’s comments “on the migrant crisis in recent months have ‘affected the way Democratic voters thought about it and made it more conservative how they were thinking about it’, and ‘there were definitely times on the campaign when we were like, will he shut up already?’”
In the backdrop of these realities, suddenly Adams’s proclamations that he has been the victim of political vendetta, do not sound so implausible. In fact, his case has remarkable similarities with lawmakers Henry Cuellar and Bob Menendez, both Democrats, who faced federal investigation soon after taking on the Biden-Harris administration. Cueller gained unpopularity by criticising the handling of illegal immigrants while Menendez was critical of Biden’s Afghanistan exit strategy.
Mike Davis, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, was quoted, as saying in Washington Examiner, “Eric Adams did his job by daring to put New Yorkers first, in the face of Biden and Kamala’s migrant invasion… So, he now faces Biden and Kamala’s politicized and weaponized Justice Department.”
The abusive misuse of law enforcement and legal system to target a political opponent through prosecutorial overreach may also be termed as ‘lawfare’. The Democrats have been accused of weaponizing the justice system to take down Trump through orchestrated lawfare, but it seems he isn’t the only target.
As Leibovitz writes in the Tablet article mentioned earlier, “all available evidence suggests that Mayor Adams is now the victim of a lawfare campaign, in which deliberately loose legislation is weaponized as a tool for settling scores with political foes. This, if you’ve paid any attention, is precisely what New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, another (George) Soros protégé, did to Donald Trump…”
It is nobody’s case that Adams is innocent. But does his indictment pass the ‘reasonable doubt’ test? Adams may have potentially violated some laws, though his ‘crimes’ appear more to be a case of prosecutorial overreach instigated by a stricter interpretation of legal provisions. The response of Biden administration’s DoJ, to send SWAT teams at his doorstep and snatch his mobile phone, certainly seems disproportionate to the severity of his ‘offences’.
A more likely explanation is that prosecutorial powers were exploited to target and take down a man who has been a virulent, tireless and obstinate critic of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of America’s broken immigration system. The malevolence and severity with which the Biden DoJ has pursued Adams’s case, that rests on thin gruel, point to the ruthlessness so typical of Democrats. The party just needed to get Adams out of the way. He was generating far too many negative headlines.
Biden himself got a taste of it when he was bullied and ambushed into withdrawing his presidential bid for a second time. Useful to remember that Biden administration, that has brutally purged a popular Democratic leader for daring to stand against it, has been regularly taking potshots at India over its internal affairs. For instance, the arrest of former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal came in for multiple mentions by the US Department of State.
Will the ministry of external affairs take note of Eric Adams saga?
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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