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Tweet Share Share Comment When I asked veteran New York City reporter David Freedlander to lay out one moment that encapsulates what’s going on with New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, right now, he knew exactly what to say.
“He was leaving an event in New York a couple of weeks ago with his security detail, and FBI agents stopped the vehicle and ordered Eric Adams to turn over his phones, tablets, devices,” Freedlander said. “This is the kind of thing that really feels like it’s out of a movie. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
We don’t know exactly why the FBI was after the mayor’s phone, but we can make some educated guesses. The district attorney in Manhattan is investigating the Adams administration over campaign finance irregularities. The home of a top aide was just searched. There are allegations that the mayor’s team was getting paid to do favors for the Turkish government. To be clear, the mayor insists he is not the target of any of these investigations. But the news is not great. It also isn’t getting better. Over Thanksgiving, Adams was slapped with a sexual assault allegation in civil court.
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In the past, David Freedlander says, Eric Adams has always been able to brush of this kind of controversy. He’s been a sort of Teflon politician, with a megawatt smile. And when he took office less than two years ago, many thought of him as the future of the Democratic Party.
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“If there has been a consistent criticism of him, it’s that he sometimes isn’t always paying a lot of attention to the running of the city. And he’s the ‘nightlife mayor’ in a way we haven’t quite seen before,” Freedlander said. “He’s out a lot at clubs and parties, living his best life.”
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At the same time, the polls are not particularly kind to Eric Adams. A Marist Poll just found that his job approval with New Yorkers was 37 percent. It’s a pretty precipitous fall from grace. And Freedlander says that he’s heard of private polling that’s even lower. It isn’t helping that the mayor just announced deep budget cuts. Freedlander says that Eric Adams is worth paying attention to right now because he’s in a tight spot, facing local and federal investigations into him personally, facing political pressure from voters. And no one seems to know what happens next.
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On Thursday’s episode of What Next, we asked: How much longer will New York City Mayor Eric Adams be “living his best life”? Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary Harris: The first thing to know about Eric Adams is that scandal is not new to him. If you look back at his political career, he’s been making ethical trade-offs for a while now. Adams’ background is humble: He was a transit cop. But he always had a taste for the spotlight. In 1995, Adams and others formed 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group fighting racial profiling. He used that experience as a platform to vault himself into politics.
David Freedlander: He ran for Congress in the 1990s—very unsuccessfully, against an incumbent. I can’t remember now if he ran as a Republican or Democrat, but he was briefly a Republican. He was a Republican when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.
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His congressional run, though, is important because it was a long-shot bid. He was gathering signatures to get on the ballot. And he accused the incumbent of stealing his signatures, right? Without evidence.
Yeah, correct. It was the congressional run that someone who is just a gadabout of local politics would do. People run for Congress like that where they don’t really have a constituency but they’re in the news a little bit.
They’re just trying stuff out.
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Yeah, they just want a bigger platform. He traveled to Indiana to shepherd Mike Tyson out of prison after Tyson was in prison for rape, something that actually earned him a rebuke from the police department.
So, he’s always tilting the camera toward himself, which is a political move.
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Yeah, with a bit of outrageousness, doing things that his base of support—voters of color in Brooklyn—is going to look favorably on. He then eventually decides to run for the state Senate. He’s successful there. It was a little bit of an undistinguished record in the state Legislature. One of his first major speeches was calling for pay raises for lawmakers. He would start campaigns dedicated to having young people pull their pants up.
Respectability politics.
Yeah. He cut PSA videos teaching parents how to search their kids’ rooms and backpacks for drugs and guns.
Was he a good state senator? Did he get stuff done?
They were in the minority, so there wasn’t really like much to do. He got into a lot of trouble—his first corruption allegations—where he was on this committee that was going to vet various bidders who want to bring gaming slots to a horse-racing track out in Queens. And he was seen as giving favoritism to the group that ultimately won that contract. For example, he went to the victory party that they held after they won. And it was the first of many red flags that would follow him throughout his career.
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You’re underlining something else too, which is that until becoming mayor, maybe he didn’t have a ton of responsibility. He was a politician, but as a Democrat in the state Senate, the Democrats didn’t have power, so he could just be noisy and kind of be there. But he didn’t have to govern really. Is that fair?
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Yeah, and also, no one would pay attention to a lot of this stuff that was happening. He then became Brooklyn borough president.
For those who are outside of New York, I think we should just explain what the borough president is, because it’s mostly a ceremonial role.
Yeah. It is. It sounds kind of impressive, but they have less power than a City Council member. And he started a nonprofit when he was there that was soliciting donations from people with business before the borough.
That doesn’t seem right.
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It seemed like a way to get around campaign finance laws potentially.
And borough president was never the goal. Even as a cop, Eric Adams said he would one day be mayor of New York. In the 2021 race, one issue in particular, one he had a lot of personal experience with, became his campaign centerpiece.
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His focus was really on crime and cleaning up the city. He used to say that New Yorkers weren’t getting what they paid for with their taxes. And as someone who is both a Black man and a former police officer, he could really talk about crime and justice in a way that few New Yorkers could.
It’s a very traditional way to run for mayor in New York City.
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Everybody thought of him as a front-runner but wondered if he would stumble because there are all of these questions around him. When he was usually written about, it was for saying nutty stuff. For example, after the shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue, he encouraged people to bring firearms to church and places of worship to protect themselves. He said that if he were mayor of New York, he would carry a firearm and he wouldn’t have a security detail. At one point, he cut the ribbon on an LGBT senior housing building in his district, and he castigated the people there as being interlopers and gentrifiers.
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Adams had his advantages, but these gaffes made him a risky candidate. In the Democratic primaries, he only won the nomination by 7,000 votes. That’s nothing in New York City. But he seemed to be the man of the moment.
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There was a post-COVID crime spike and crime became the central issue in the race. And he was the only person who was talking about crime. And he talked about crime incessantly and really leaned on his history as a police officer. Whenever there was a major crime in New York, a high-profile crime—I think there was a shooting in Times Square, a stabbing on the subway, this kind of thing—he would show up to the crime scene and host a little press conference about it. And he was positioned to say, “I’m going to keep you safe.”
It was funny to me how as soon as Eric Adams cinched the Democratic nomination for mayor, he began talking about himself as the future of the Democratic Party.
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Back in the 2020 primary and afterward, there was a concern that the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left and didn’t care about crime. It didn’t care about quality of life. It didn’t care about middle class homeowners. He was saying, “I’ve figured this out.” A big issue among Democrats is they’re losing support among working-class voters, especially working-class voters of color, and even more especially male working-class voters of color. And here’s a guy who is a working-class man of color who has won election in a supposedly liberal progressive city.
Who did Eric Adams become once he assumed office as mayor?
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In some ways he has approached the office as still someone who’s a state lawmaker. He calls on other political figures to do things.
As opposed to doing things himself.
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Exactly. Which is what people want your mayor to do. He’s been castigating Joe Biden, for example, for not providing aid to the city to handle the migrant crisis. And there’s been a lot of that—calling on federal officials, calling on state officials to do stuff.
You characterize Adams as a mayor as setting himself up against the city, fighting the city. He’s also fighting the Democratic Party a bit, too. One of the major things that’s happened under his watch is this influx of migrants from the Southern border. Initially, there were these buses that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was sending north. Then it ballooned because New York City has this right to shelter for people who are in the city and don’t have a home. Can you describe how the migrant crisis has shaped Eric Adams as a mayor, and how it’s also shaped his relationship with people who you would think would be his colleagues, like the party that helped get him into office?
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I forget the sheer numbers of migrants that have arrived in New York so far. It’s a lot. But it’s also not a lot of people for New York City. New York City is a really big place. It’s a place where to this day, close to 40 percent of New Yorkers were born in another country. People come here all the time. But his administration has done a pretty fantastic job of managing what is a difficult crisis. There are not a lot of great options here. There’s not a lot of empty space, empty buildings, empty rooms to house people. And they’ve managed to pretty much house everyone, creatively. These aren’t great places. They’re not permanent. They’re not places you probably want to be in winter or in a bad storm. But the city is managing this under very difficult circumstances. But the mayor doesn’t talk about that that often. What he does talk about is how these migrants keep coming, and if they keep coming, they’re going to destroy New York City. It can be pretty ugly rhetoric. It’s really unfamiliar rhetoric to hear from a Democrat. It’s very familiar to Fox News or the New York Post.
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Mayor Adams’ personal troubles started back in the summer. That’s when the Manhattan district attorney charged six of his donors, one of whom was an old friend from the NYPD, with campaign finance violations. Here’s what they’re accused of: Since the city matches small, first-time political contributions at a rate of 8-to-1—you give $1, you get $8—these individuals made many additional donations under falsified names of relatives, employees. This made it rain for the mayor—and curried favor with him, allegedly.
Eric Adams, at the time, said he wanted to let law enforcement do their jobs, and that he had no knowledge of the scheme. But that was just the beginning of the finger pointing.
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Fast forward a couple of months and Eric Adams is flying down to Washington, D.C., to meet with White House officials to talk about the migrant crisis and how the city can get money from them, get help from them. He shoots a video where he’s on the plane prepared to take off from LaGuardia or wherever it was to go down to D.C. Then, later in the day, we find out, in fact, he never made it to the White House. He was on his way down and abruptly turned around and came back to New York because federal law enforcement agents had raided the home of the chief fundraiser of his campaign for very similar allegations to what the Manhattan D.A. was investigating involving straw donors. Only this time, the straw donors were seemingly coming from Turkey. So now we have a little bit of international intrigue. Also, federal law enforcement raiding the home of a top aide to the mayor of New York City, that’s an escalation.
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Over Thanksgiving, Adams was hit with yet another scandal: A woman accused the mayor of sexually assaulting her in 1993, when he was a police officer and she worked for the city. So now, he’s facing assault allegations and campaign finance violations. But that’s not even the most worrying thing about Adams’ political future.
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The thing that put more blood in the water was actually when he announced the budget cuts. There was supposed to be a 3-K program for 3-year-olds in city schools and that was going to be cut. Library service is going to be cut on Sundays. There will be less trash pickup.
You could say, “Look, there may be all this stuff going on in my personal life and political life. But at least the city is thriving.” But now there’s austerity budget cuts. The deal here was that if you can manage a city, we’ll look past some of this other stuff going on. But if now we’re all going to have to hunker down to weather this storm, that’s going to get political opponents very interested in taking the city in a new direction.
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It’s important to say here that Eric Adams has been dogged by ethical allegations since the beginning of his political career. And the man’s a phoenix. He’s just kept going. Is there any sign that what’s happening now is somehow fundamentally different from what he’s encountered before when people who have questioned his ethical wherewithal?
He’s always been questioned about cutting ethical corners, but this feels different. Federal agents stopping your vehicle and seizing your phones for several days, that’s an escalation that we haven’t seen. What’s flummoxed a lot of people like me is that we just don’t know what this is all about. It just seems like if this is a straw donor scheme, even a straw donor scheme from Turkey, even a straw donor scheme where essentially you can give money to the mayor’s political campaign and they will push projects on your behalf, that’s not super ethical. It’s not clear that it’s super illegal either. And it’s not the kind of thing that usually draws the interest of federal agents.
I think what you’re saying is you don’t think the last shoe’s dropped here?
No one knows what’s going on. We just know that this massive escalation happened, and it’s unclear what it is all about. It’s mystifying.
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