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New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted on federal bribery and fraud charges. At least now he knows what the FBI has been fishing for. Everyone in his inner circle has been under investigation without anyone actually being charged. That changed on Wednesday. Word leaked that the mayor had been indicted for something but it was sealed, so nobody had a clue what it was.
Adams charges unsealed
After the charges against him were unsealed on September 26, Eric Adams “vowed to fight” while strongly denying any wrongdoing. The New York City mayor stands accused by federal prosecutors of bribery and fraud.
The feds say he was up to his ears in a “long-running” scheme. BBC notes the scandal “has upended politics in America’s largest city.”
Adams, the indictment alleges, abused his power. Apparently, he “accepted illegal gifts worth over $100,000 from Turkish citizens and at least one government official.” The quid-pro-quo for Turkish officials was “favors from the mayor, including help skirting safety regulations to open a consulate in New York.”
The mayor is also a former police captain. He swears up and down he did absolutely nothing wrong and can’t wait for his day in court to prove it.
Assumed innocent until proven guilty, the grand jury saw enough to open a few files. Mayor Adams is looking at “five separate criminal counts.” Prosecutors start out by alleging conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
That’s linked up with federal program bribery, and receiving campaign contributions by foreign nationals. Then, there’s the actual wire fraud itself. To wrap things up, they add two counts of “solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national and bribery.”
Free luxury travel
The prosecutors use a full 57 pages to lay out their indictment. Adams, they allege, “accepted more than $100,000 in luxury travel.” That includes things like “hotel stays, lavish meals and airline upgrades.” All those perks were provided by “Turkish nationals.”
They allegedly started bribing him back in 2016, “when he still served as president of the New York borough of Brooklyn.” Nothing in his indictment appears to have anything at all to do with anything that anyone in his inner circle have been investigated for. That means there could be more charges coming for the Democrat mayor.
For now, the feds are concentrating on the Turkish connection. Adams managed to score a “heavily discounted” stay at the “Bentley Room” of Istanbul’s St. Regis hotel. His cut of the approximately $7,000 bill was $600 for a two-day visit.
“This was a multi-year scheme to buy favor with a single New York City politician on the rise,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams snarls. We’ve learned to take what he alleges with a whole shaker of salt. He’s also persecuting Donald Trump on Trumped up charges.
In case that falls through Williams and his team accused Adams of seeking out “campaign contributions from Turkish sources for his 2021 mayoral election campaign.” They say the mayor got away with it by using “straw donors” to hide the true cash sources. If they had to his minions created “fake paper trails” that “suggested he paid, or intended to pay, for the gifts.”
For the wire fraud, he allegedly “devised a scheme” to raise funds “by making false and fraudulent pretenses” in his dealings. For instance, the money he allegedly got from Turkey “allowed him to qualify for a public financing program that provides eligible political candidates with funds to match donations from New York City residents.” Adams got “as much as $2,000 in public funds for each illegal contribution.“
