New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal donations from foreign campaigns. The indictment comes three years after authorities opened an investigation against him in 2021, with primary charges coming from allegations that he may have received funds from the Turkish government in exchange for official actions on Ankara’s behalf.
The indictment said that a “senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment” sent illegal donations to Adams’s election campaign in 2021. After he won the elections, a Turkish official allegedly wrote to one of Adam’s staffers that the foreign minister of Turkey was “personally paying attention to him.”
The day he won the elections, he allegedly received a text from a Turkish businessman, which read, “I’m going to go and talk to our elders in Ankara about how we can turn this into an advantage for our country’s lobby.”
As per allegations, in April 2022, a Turkish official won assurances from Adams that the mayor won’t speak about the Armenian Genocide as the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day was approaching.
“Adams did not make such a statement,” the indictment said. Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day commemorates the killings of more than 1.5 million Armenians by Turks more than a century ago.
The indictment alleged that Adams was awarded with free trips and airlines upgrades worth more than $100,000, which also included a trip from New York to India back in 2016.
In March 2019, when Adams was planning another trip to Turkey, his staffer allegedly told him to “delete all messages you send me” to be on safer side, to which the mayor responded, “Always do.”
Following his indictment, Adams addressed a conference in which he said, “Everyone who knows me knows that I follow the campaign rules and I follow the law,” something that he has said numerous times in the past.
Before the indictment, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) seized Eric Adams’s phone early Thursday.
Earlier, federal agents arrived at the mayor’s official residence, Gracie Mansion, at about 6 am local time and entered the building to conduct a search.
Despite massive allegations and indictment, Adams said ‘no’ when he was asked whether he is considering stepping down.
“I was elected by 700,000 people.”
