On Wednesday night, as prosecutors prepared to unveil a five-count criminal indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams for allegedly soliciting and receiving illegal foreign campaign contributions and doing favors for the government of Turkey, the first-term Democrat released a statement accusing investigators of a vast conspiracy of their own.
“When the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system,” Adams said, in a taped address recorded somewhere in Gracie Mansion, he “put the people of New York before party and politics.” The investigation and subsequent criminal charges, Adams implied, were an act of retribution from on high. “I have been facing these lies for months,” he said, “since I began to speak out for all of you.”
Adams—who has now proclaimed his innocence of all charges—suggested he was being prosecuted by the Biden regime, in other words, simply because he spoke the truth about immigration.
That is false at the most elemental level. According to the New York Times, the investigation began before Adams was mayor, “and continued in secret until this past fall.” Adams’ big break with the Biden administration over the migrant crisis—which ultimately led to him traveling to Mexico to encourage residents to stop coming to “Puebla York”—came well after he took office. (At first, Adams preferred to criticize Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for bussing tens of thousands of migrants to the city, although Abbott did not actually start sending buses until after Adams had incorrectly blamed him for it.)
Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story.
To the extent the investigation and the city’s handling of the influx of migrants are linked at all, it is in the way that Adams’ focus on the investigation has directly affected his ability to do his job. When the FBI raided his fundraiser’s home last November, Adams was on his way to a long-awaited meeting at the White House. According to the indictment, the aide placed five phone calls to the mayor before answering her door. Adams canceled his White House meeting and returned to New York to manage the fallout.
Still, a lack of factual foundation has never stopped the New York Post, which laundered Adams’ excuse with the splashed words “I am a target” in extra-large print on its cover.
Others have since picked up the Adams line. “It sounds like if you don’t fall in line with the Biden family or this White House or this administration or the top Democrats, your life can be ruined,” Ainsley Earhardt said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, conveniently eliding the Justice Department’s recent prosecution of the President Biden’s son.
Trump-backing hedge-funder Bill Ackman, never one to say nothing when saying something is an option, expressed his support for Adams’ “bravery” on immigration and added, “I am that much more skeptical when indictments are announced against someone whose views are not welcomed by the party in charge.”
On Thursday night, at a press conference at Trump Tower, Trump himself made the comparison as directly as he could. Per Politico:
I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city, and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn’t have to take them. And I said: You know what? He’ll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right. Because that’s what we have—we have people that use the Justice Department and the FBI at levels that have never been seen before.
This is not correct in almost any way. For one thing, many of the migrants that Adams has complained about have come to the United States as asylum seekers. Their particular legal status has made the job more logistically difficult for bureaucrats. But Trump is driving at something important: The Adams indictment is a particularly sour one for the right because the story Adams has been telling for more than a year is one that many conservatives are betting their electoral fortunes on in 2024.
Although Adams is a Democrat who has endorsed Harris, he represents something powerful for the MAGA movement—a leader of a diverse and largely Democratic-voting city who turned into JD Vance when faced with an influx of migrants. Like Vance, Adams has said that newcomers are driving up violent crime in a community where violent crime has actually been going down. Like Vance, he has treated the arrival of migrants as an existential threat to a way of life. If the arrival of new residents did not slow, he said at a town hall last year, they “will destroy New York.” Adams is the highest-profile case of what these conservative really believe—that once you experience what they’ve experienced, you’ll realize what they realize. It’s that old Barry Goldwater saying: Deep down, you know he’s right.
Republicans want to make this into a story about Eric Adams and immigration. But in the process, they are stirring up a different sort of story—one that also says something important about this political moment. Because so many of its biggest figures have themselves been indicted, the MAGA movement requires a tortured logic to keep going. When the state is coming after you for civil or criminal offenses, it must be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something right. This belief in a vast conspiracy is the bedrock of Trump’s third campaign.
But the Adams indictment—like many of the lawsuits and criminal cases that Trump has ended up as the defendant in—actually suggests a far less paranoid alternative: When the state is coming after you for accepting tens of thousands of dollars worth of favors from a company controlled by the Turkish government, it might be a sign that you’ve actually been doing something wrong.
The problem for Trump, and Adams, is that lots of people see through this. You don’t have to conjure up images of a plotting and sinister Joe Biden to figure out why the mayor who asked to be paid in Bitcoin, got city jobs for his friends and family, and spent much of his waking hours holding court in the back of a restaurant ended up in someone’s legal crosshairs. From the day he took office—31 years after God told him he would—Adams has walked around with a big flashing sign saying “investigate me.” No one was really surprised the indictment happened. People were placing bets on when it would drop. Adams might still beat the charges, or turn up exculpatory evidence—perhaps after he remembers the six-digit passcode to that cell phone the Feds seized way back when. But there’s no point casting around for a sinister explanation if he doesn’t. Because despite what Adams and Trump might say, sometimes a crook is just a crook—and a crime is just a crime.
