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Washington, D.C., for a full day of meetings about New York’s migrant
crisis “We are headed to D.C. to meet with our congressional delegation
.
and the White House to address this real issue,” Adams said in a video
posted on his X account at 7:41 A.M. “We’ll keep you updated as the day
goes on.”
For more than a year, without much success, Adams had been calling on
the federal government to defray the astronomical costs of housing tens
of thousands of immigrants in city-run shelters. He had gone as far as
suggesting that without federal help the migrant crisis would “destroy”
New York. Though the dispute had damaged his public relationship with
President Joe Biden the Mayor was getting an audience at the White
,
House. But Adams never made his meetings. That same morning, news
broke of an F.B.I. raid at the home of one of his campaign fund-raising
officials, Brianna Suggs. Already on the ground in D.C., Adams caught
the first plane home, in order to “deal with a matter,” as a City Hall
spokesperson put it.
Back in New York, Adams avoided reporters, and put off public
appearances. News outlets began combing through his campaign-finance
records, paying close attention to the fourteen thousand dollars in
donations made by employees of a Brooklyn construction company
reportedly owned by Turkish New Yorkers, and to the ten thousand
dollars in donations made by employees of a small private university with
ties to Turkish institutions. Adams is not the world’s most disciplined
public speaker, and City Hall reporters have learned to take him
seriously, if not always literally. (“Adams doesn’t just polish anecdotes,”
my colleague Ian Parker wrote in a profile of Adams earlier this year. “He
is unusually ready to repeat things that are confirmably untrue.”) Yet
Six days after the raid, Adams convened a press conference to address
what was going on. He told the assembled reporters that he wanted to be
“completely transparent,” and then refused to detail what exactly he had
done or whom he had spoken to after returning from Washington. “I did
not want to be sitting inside a meeting somewhere when there was
something playing out here in the city,” he said. When asked if he was
worried that he himself might face criminal charges, he laughed. “I
would be shocked,” he said. “WilmerHale . . that’s the law firm that I’ve .
former police captain, he knew right from wrong. “I cannot tell you how
much I start the day with telling my team we’ve got to follow the law,”
he said. “Almost to the point that I’m annoying.” Here was a new crisis
for the city to grapple with: Could the Mayor be believed?
and bad acts in office. He’s generally stuck by them, valuing loyalty over
any other political consideration, even at the risk of appearing personally
compromised. In July, the Manhattan District Attorney brought
campaign-finance charges against several donors to Adams’s 2021
mayoral campaign, two of which have pleaded guilty. Adams waved it off,
saying he was totally uninvolved. “I follow one rule: follow the rules,” he
said. In September, his former Department of Buildings commissioner,
Eric Ulrich, was indicted on allegations of favor trading and bribery.
According to the Daily News Ulrich, who has pleaded not guilty, told
,
investigators that Adams had warned him to “watch your back and
watch your phones.” Adams denied saying this. He has long suggested
that he faces more scrutiny than other politicians because he is Black.
“My face will show up on front pages of, ‘Is there unethical and immoral
behavior?,’ ” he said last week, speaking to a Brooklyn church
congregation three days after the F.B.I. raid. “We’re going to be all
right.”
When he took office, Adams embraced the title of “the night-life mayor.”
His club-going, flashy clothes, and self-described “swagger” have invited
comparisons to Jimmy Walker, the flamboyant Tammany man who held
sway as the city’s “night mayor” in the Roaring Twenties. Walker
resigned, in 1932, in a corruption scandal, after accepting bribes from
businessmen who wanted municipal contracts. According to the Times ,
place in 2021, after Adams had won the Democratic Party’s mayoral
primary, when he was Brooklyn borough president and the de-facto
mayor-elect. And yet all of this commotion, over just tens of thousands
of dollars in donations and a “temporary certificate” of occupancy
negotiated by someone who had not yet taken office?
When you eat a dried fig, you’re probably chewing wasp mummies, too .
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