NYC Mayor Eric Adams charged with wire fraud, bribery, and solicting money from a foreign national.

So, a large number of our best minds got together decades ago and tackled tough questions like this one about US blacks and minorities.

The result of their work is heralded and is refined and taught, to this day.
 

Ruth Marcus: Why do a foreign mayor favors? To invest in your future.



There’s always an ask, always a quo for the quid. If not right away, then down the road. The bill comes due. The moment arrives when your benefactor announces, as a Turkish official allegedly did in the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, that it’s your “turn to repay.”

It’s easy to be distracted, reading the five-count federal indictment unsealed Thursday, by the pathetic seediness of the favors Adams allegedly received from his Turkish benefactors. At least Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) got gold bars. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the far more serious matter of the illegal campaign cash that allegedly flowed Adams’s way, in the form of banned contributions from foreign and corporate sources disguised through straw donors.

Let’s consider, instead, the ask, and the larger question of what the Turkish officials and business executives allegedly involved in the bribery scheme were up to — why they invested the money and energy in cozying up to Adams even when he was only the Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial role.

According to the indictment, the inevitable request arrived in September 2021, after Adams had won the Democratic mayoral primary and was on the verge of becoming mayor. The Turkish Consulate in New York City was desperate to obtain city approval to open a swank new diplomatic building in time for a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the fire department was balking, according to the indictment, “citing numerous reported fire safety defects, some of which were serious.” So Turkey’s consul general in New York — known as “the Turkish Official” in the indictment — asked Adams, directly and through a staffer, to intervene.

He didn’t mince words. Turkey had helped Adams, the official told an Adams staffer. Now it was “his turn” to help Turkey. Adams’s response, according to the indictment: “I know.”

And so the mayor-in-waiting turned up the heat. He contacted — repeatedly — the fire commissioner, who was lobbying to keep his job in the new administration, emphasizing that he was “loyal and trustworthy.” When a lower-level employee reiterated that “this building is not safe to occupy,” the fire department brass got real. “The Chief of Department informed the Fire Prevention Chief, in substance, that if the FDNY did not assist the Turkish Consulate in obtaining a TCO [temporary certificate of occupancy], both the Chief of Department and the Fire Prevention Chief would lose their jobs.”

You know what happened next. “You are a true friend of Turkey,” the consul general wrote Adams, complete with thank-you-hands emoji.

If this seems like a small-bore favor, think again. On one side of the transaction, public safety officials were dissuaded from doing their jobs out of fear of losing their jobs. On the other side, Turkish officials who desperately wanted to please the country’s autocratic president got the response they needed. Their investment paid off.

And investment it was. Some of those who allegedly plied Adams with benefits had in mind, according to the indictment, that he might end up being president. And when a construction company executive from a “different ethnic community” was arranging to make illegal donations to Adams’s mayoral campaign, the indictment states, Adams employees didn’t mince words: Donating $10,000 would give the businessman influence with Adams when he became mayor, and “gaining such influence with Adams would be more expensive at a later date.”

Get in on the ground floor. Make your ask down the road. The turn to repay always arrives.

Matt Bai: Another off-year savior falls from grace


If we’re going to ponder the question of how New York Mayor Eric Adams could fall so quickly from the peak of political celebrity to the nadir of trying to stay out of jail, then maybe we should ask ourselves another question, too.
How was he able to ascend that peak to begin with?

Sure, the newly elected Adams had plenty of roguish charm — no argument there. But even during his campaign for mayor, Adams seemed to exist in shadow; there was that weirdness about him supposedly sleeping on his office couch, no one being quite sure where he actually lived. He had little political experience and no discernible philosophy.

But he was also elected in 2021, the off-year after a presidential election, and you shouldn’t underestimate how much that matters. Had Adams been running in 2020 or 2022, he might have been little more than a passing curiosity. But there’s a tendency in both parties, fueled by the outsize news coverage that a sudden vacuum creates, to take off-year candidates for governor or mayor and transform them into Marvel heroes.

Which is in large part why Adams was hailed as the future of his party, brought before President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers to advise them on reaching working-class voters and encouraged to think about seeking national office. He packed fundraising events in Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. Political swami Nate Silver proclaimed that Adams was in his “top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden.’” Maybe not.

But, you know, a lot of Republicans said the same things about former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell, elected in 2009 and immediately called upon to deliver the State of the Union response. His career went down in a blitz of federal corruption charges (although the Supreme Court threw out his conviction). Chris Christie was elected governor of New Jersey in that same year and became even more of an overnight icon — a status he lost after his own administration became mired in “Bridgegate” during his second term.

The point here isn’t that no one elected in an off year is ever as promising as we think; Sen. Mark R. Warner, for instance, became a Democratic celebrity when he won Virginia’s governorship in 2001, and he remains a senior figure in the party. The point is that we ought not to make saviors of untested politicians simply because we need someone to exalt in the moment.

Too often, the only ones they end up saving are themselves.
 
The Turkish Consulate in New York City was desperate to obtain city approval to open a swank new diplomatic building in time for a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the fire department was balking, according to the indictment, “citing numerous reported fire safety defects, some of which were serious.” So Turkey’s consul general in New York — known as “the Turkish Official” in the indictment — asked Adams, directly and through a staffer, to intervene.

That clearly is a lie.
A Turkish consulate does NOT have to follow NY building codes in ANY WAY.
Attempting to force a Turkish consulate to follow NY building codes is totally illegal.
 

Forum List

Back
Top