By the time Eric Adams addressed reporters under a rain-soaked canopy outside Gracie Mansion yesterday morning, the biggest question about his tenure as mayor of New York seemed to be how soon it would end. Fellow Democrats started calling on him to step down even before federal prosecutors formally accused Adams of defrauding the city and doing the bidding of the Turkish government. And in recent weeks, the leaders of the nation’s largest police department and public school system had resigned from his administration amid a series of investigations.
Adams, who has denied the charges and vowed to stay on, already had at least four serious challengers to his reelection bid next year. Now a much larger number of Democrats—including former Governor Andrew Cuomo—are salivating at the prospect of a special election if Adams steps down.
But don’t assume he’s going anywhere.
“He is not going to resign,” predicted Mitchell L. Moss, a longtime observer of New York politics who has advised, formally and informally, some of its biggest stars over the past four decades. Moss, an NYU professor, has seen the scandals that have taken down governors such as Cuomo (sexual harassment, which he denied) and Eliot Spitzer (prostitution), members of Congress like Anthony Weiner (sending explicit photos to minors), and dozens of elected officials at lower levels of government. With few exceptions, New Yorkers accused of wrongdoing have left neither quickly nor quietly. Some have stayed in office quite a while. And that was true before a New Yorker convicted of 34 felonies won the Republican nomination for president. “We’re living in a different world from the one where you would be disqualified for a divorce,” Moss said. (In 2022, Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Moss to an economic-development committee, but he said he has no other ties to the mayor. “I met the guy once in a restaurant,” he told me. “That’s it.”)
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The charges against Adams are significant, and more could be on the way; FBI agents searched his official residence yesterday morning, hours after news of the imminent indictment had come out. Prosecutors say that for the past decade, Adams has been soliciting illegal campaign donations and taking bribes from foreign businesspeople and at least one official of the Turkish government. Because he used the contributions to receive public matching funds through New York’s campaign-finance system, the government says he essentially stole $10 million from city taxpayers.
New York has had more than its share of corruption and scandal, but Adams is the first sitting mayor to be indicted. (Coincidentally, one of his predecessors, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred yesterday in Washington, D.C., for helping Donald Trump try to overturn his 2020 election defeat.) Yet the details of the 57-page indictment against Adams still pale in comparison to the government’s recent accusations against former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey; the FBI recovered gold bars and envelopes filled with cash in his home. Nor are the allegations as shocking as those leveled against expelled Representative George Santos of Long Island, who made up his résumé to win a seat in Congress. Moss contends that, as far as Adams’s constituents are concerned, the most damning allegation is that the mayor leaned on the fire department to approve the opening of a skyscraper housing a new Turkish consulate that had not passed a safety inspection. “That is serious,” Moss said.
Democrats who have called for Adams to resign argue that the charges imperil his ability to govern the city. Moss doesn’t think so. “People care about the mayor, and they want the mayor to succeed, but the city functions no matter who the mayor is,” Moss told me. Emulating other scandal-tainted leaders, Adams will likely “double down on the job” to prove he can still lead, which could allow him to retain the support of his base of Black and Latino voters who helped him win a crowded Democratic primary, and then the mayoralty, in 2021. “They are not going to abandon him,” Moss said.
Under New York City’s charter, Hochul could remove Adams as mayor, but Moss believes that possibility is inconceivable—not least because of the governor’s own deep unpopularity. “She’s not going to fire an African American mayor. No way,” he said. “She’d get defeated within an hour.”
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Moss predicted that Adams would even start as the favorite in next June’s primary in spite of his legal troubles. Cuomo, who is reportedly eying a run for mayor after resigning as governor in 2021, is “damaged goods,” Moss said, and the four candidates who have declared their interest—the current city comptroller, Brad Lander; the former comptroller Scott Stringer; state senators Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos—could struggle to unify progressive voters.
Adams has said he wants a speedy trial, but the legal process could play out for months or longer. (He’s not even the highest-profile defendant that the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Damian Williams, is currently prosecuting.) The next president will have the power to replace Williams if he or she chooses. When Trump took office in 2017, he moved quickly to oust the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara. That could happen again if Trump wins in November, Moss noted, with potential ramifications for Adams’s case. “There’s more uncertainty here than people realize.”