Editorial: Eric Adams, mayor and defendant: The federal indictment and his future

Over the course of the past nearly three years, Eric Adams has managed to do some lasting good for the city, and for these things New Yorkers owe him gratitude. Now, Adams must decide if he can effectively carry on as mayor while he fights federal felony charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, bribery, and pocketing campaign contributions by foreign nationals.

Thursday, with calls for his resignation growing, Adams was defiant, proclaiming his innocence and vowing to stay on at City Hall. He and his lawyers may be able to mount an effective defense against the five count indictment brought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and prevail.

Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court’s horribly lax attitude toward official bribery, all but requiring signed and notarized agreements to commit a crime by the briber and bribee, makes it difficult for prosecutors to have their convictions hold up on appeal.

However, in this instance, prosecutors also allege that not only did Adams take more than $100,000 in free or discounted trips on Turkish Airlines, but that his 2021 mayoral campaign solicited contributions from non-Americans, which is a federal crime, and that there were also phony, or straw, donors, granting his campaign public matching funds from the New York City Campaign Finance Board, which is the same as stealing money from New York City taxpayers.

Adams was adamant Thursday that there were no foreign contributions and no straw donors among his campaign receipts. Those two questions should be easy enough to answer.

As for taking government action on behalf of his alleged Turkish benefactors, Williams says that as the soon-to-be-mayor, Adams pushed the FDNY commissioner to fast-track safety approvals of a new Turkish consulate, a Manhattan high-rise used by hundreds of people. Were any inspection steps compromised because of that?

And there is the episode as detailed in the complaint, how, in response to a subpoena for Adams’ personal smartphone, the mayor said that he had changed the password on the machine the day before, shortly after his chief fundraiser was raided, in order to preserve the phone’s contents, but had forgotten the new password, making anything on the phone permanently inaccessible to the feds.

Still, all that as laid out in the indictment speaks only to Adams’ legal hurdles, for which he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. He will have his day in court. He will get to face his accusers and see the evidence. He will get to make his own arguments about the facts. He will have a jury of his peers decide his case.

Adams will soon appear with his lawyers in federal court downtown. One of them, Alex Spiro, says, “There’s no corruption, this is not a real case,” dismissing the flight upgrades as cost-free to the airline and pointing out that the campaign allegations center on a handful of contributions, totaling a few thousand dollars, which account for a tiny fraction of the campaign’s millions. As for foreign funds, Spiro said “that are emails with Mayor Adams telling this staffer, telling all of them, ‘Do not take foreign money, period.’ ”

That’s all for the judge to evaluate.

Adams will have all his rights as a defendant, but he is not any defendant. He is the mayor of the greatest and most important city in the world, 110th in a line of men that goes back four centuries. And he is first to be charged with a crime, a terrible new precedent. FBI agents searched Gracie Mansion Thursday, another awful first and an image sure to stick in New Yorkers’ minds

His political opponents do a poor job of masking their glee as sorrow, as they demand he quit and turn over City Hall to Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to become acting mayor and quickly schedule a nonpartisan special election.

But the loss of confidence won’t just be among Adams’ long-time foes, particularly as prosecutor Williams says that there is more to come on this case as well as burgeoning other scandals around Adams’ top aides in office and their brothers out of office, the family Caban and the family Banks.

Adams insists that the criminal case will not interfere with his public duties, but such a defense against the Department of Justice is a complicated and time-consuming task that has already weakened him politically.

Just hours before word of the charges were published by the Daily News and others on Wednesday, the City Planning Commission approved the monumental change in the outdated 1961 zoning rules to allow for more housing to be built across all neighborhoods of the five boroughs.

In less than two months, these crucial zoning and regulatory proposals must be acted on by the full City Council. This set of rule changes are intended to pour some much-needed water on the city’s raging fire of housing shortage and cost, yet it faces hurdles in the Council on account of the usual NIMBY complaints.

We hope the 51 councilmembers, many who have now declared that Adams must resign, will have the clarity to realize that this is the best opportunity on the imminent horizon to contend with what everyone understands to be a big problem.

It’s not about Adams, who will be mayor for the next five years or the next five days, but about the future of this city of more than 8 million people crowded in by our archaic zoning rules. Those lawmakers must separate Adams’ personal and legal problems from the zoning plan.

The housing expansion plan is just one of the many challenges for the mayor. With the resignation of Eddie Caban, he now has a new interim police commissioner, Tom Donlon. The career FBI man has to guide the nation’s largest police force to keep New Yorkers safe on our streets and our subways.

Soon there will be a new schools chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, a deputy to the departing David Banks. Mayoral control means that Adams is responsible for the education of more than 900,000 students.

And there’s more and more and more for the mayor to do.

As Adams weighs what his next steps are, his decision should be driven not by the question of whether he is innocent, as he says he is, but by the question of whether he is going to be able to do the job he was elected to do for the people of New York. What’s important right now is that the ball keeps moving forward. Not who moves it.

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