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It is time to play a game of Corruption Mad-Libs with New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Again.
Let’s see, this time the Adams campaign is accused by the federal government of accepting illegal campaign donations from the government of Turkey that may have been laundered through a Brooklyn construction company and also a small university in Washington DC run by Turkish nationals. Also he has a stinky butt.
On Thursday the FBI raided the Brooklyn home of one Brianna Suggs, the chief fundraiser for Adams’s mayoral campaigns. (Yes, campaigns plural, he’s already running — or at least fundraising — for re-election in 2025.) According to the New York Times, investigators are also looking into whether the Adams campaign sent kickbacks to executives at the construction company, KSK Construction Group, along with Turkish government officials.
Suggs was also served with a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury, so we hope she had some of this kickback money set aside for lawyers’ fees.
There is so much that is weird about this story, which, as best we can tell from outside of New York City, is pretty much par for the course with any Adams story. For starters, Adams has a bit of a history with the nation of Turkey. He has visited it six or seven times by his own count, and various private and public Turkish officials have been sucking up to him for almost a decade:
Investigators specified documents relating to Bay Atlantic University, a tiny Turkish-owned institution that opened in Washington, D.C., in 2014. The following year, Mr. Adams visited one of the school’s sister universities in Istanbul, where he was given various certificates and was told that a scholarship would be created in his name.
Adams was the Brooklyn Borough president at the time, which raises the immediate question of why on Earth Turkish businessmen who run a tiny Washington DC college with all of five bachelor degree-granting programs would feel the need to cultivate a fairly obscure New York politician whose career at that point consisted of a few terms in the state legislature before his election as borough president. We suppose they could have had an instinct that he would become the next great moderate hope of the sorts of Republicans who own The Bulwark, which would have made them very prescient observers of American politics in 2015.
It also raises the question of how a 25-year-old woman, Suggs, managed to become the largest fundraiser for the mayor of the nation’s largest city. She’s still young enough to be padding out her LinkedIn profile with her high school stint as a camp counselor. Yet by her early twenties she was getting paid six figures to raise millions of dollars for a New York City mayoral campaign. That’s … a lot of responsibility to hand over to a relatively inexperienced neophyte. New York City isn’t George W. Bush-era Iraq.
Adams has of course denied wrongdoing. Still, this story hit close enough to home for him that he canceled meetings at the White House on Thursday morning to discuss the migrant crisis he has been loudly blaming for destroying New York so that he could rush home to “deal with a matter.” This must thrill his constituents:
— Mr. Mayor, we don’t have the resources to handle the flood of migrants that Southern governors have so kindly shipped to us with no notice for months on end. Can you, the alleged future of the Democratic Party who has claimed this surge of migrants will destroy New York City, use your visibility and connections to ask the federal government for help?
— Funny story, I was in the middle of doing that, but finding out if my 25-year-old fundraiser might be telling federal law enforcement about all manner of crimes I may or may not be implicated in takes precedence. No worries, White House meetings are easy to get. In the meantime, maybe more of you could open restaurants for which you need off-the-books kitchen staff?
And this isn’t even the first Adams corruption scandal this fall. In September his former buildings commissioner was indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, on charges of conspiracy and accepting bribes, among others. Before that, in July Bragg indicted half a dozen people, including a friend of Adams from his days in the NYPD, on charges of funneling illegal donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.
If the pattern holds, in January we can expect some other criminal charges against someone in Adams’s circle for a straw donor scheme or cutting the line at Zabar’s or something. We should get a pool going.
At this rate, in two years Adams will have New Yorkers longing for the relative moral uprightness of Jimmy Walker’s mayoralty. Of course there’s just as good a chance they will re-elect him anyway, because American politics are stupid.
And to think, you people could have had Andrew Yang as your mayor. Which would have been entertaining in a hilarious, Mr. Magoo-esque way, as opposed to Adams being entertaining in a high-blood-pressure-inducing “Can you believe this fucking guy” way.
Wonkette also takes bribes…er, donations. You don’t even need to speak Turkish.
