After months of speculation and reports that federal investigators were circling Gracie Mansion, the Department of Justice this morning unsealed an indictment against New York City mayor Eric Adams on five charges, including bribery and fraud. The specifics are familiar to everyone who has been following his case. Adams is alleged to have solicited campaign contributions from foreign entities and accepted benefits, such as business-class flight upgrades and luxury hotel stays, in exchange for expediting building approvals for the new Turkish consulate building in Manhattan.
News of the indictment was met by a chorus of calls for Adams’s resignation from the city’s hard Left. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the mayor should step aside “for the good of the city.” State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal claimed that it’s “untenable for Mayor Adams to continue in office while under federal indictment.” And Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, said that “[t]he most appropriate path forward” is for Adams to resign.
But the chances that the mayor will quit his job are slim. To stick, the charges against him will have to cross the high bar for official misconduct that the Supreme Court set in McDonnell v. United States (2016). In that case, the Court unanimously vacated former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell’s honest-services-fraud and extortion convictions on the grounds that the alleged quid pro quo did not constitute an “official act.” Now, to sustain a bribery charge against a politician, prosecutors must link specific gifts to “a formal exercise of government power”—a daunting task. Consider the fact that multiple donors to former mayor Bill de Blasio’s campaigns went to prison for bribery, yet de Blasio himself avoided prosecution. It’s just not that easy to convict an elected official for taking bribes.
And Hoylman-Sigal is wrong: it’s not “untenable” for an indicted mayor to continue to serve. American municipal history is filled with scandal-plagued mayors who bore their federal indictments as a badge of honor, refusing to step down until they were convicted. Sharpe James of Newark, Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit, and Marion Barry of Washington, D.C. each resisted demands that they resign after their indictments; Barry was even reelected mayor after his conviction and prison stint. While Providence mayor Buddy Cianci resigned in 1984 after pleading no contest to assault, he was reelected in 1990, 1994, and 1998. When Cianci was federally indicted in 2001 on 27 charges, including extortion, witness tampering, racketeering, and mail fraud, however, he didn’t resign until his conviction the following year.
It’s also plausible that federal indictments no longer have the same moral weight among the public that they once did. The multiple prosecutions of Donald Trump have been widely perceived as politically motivated, even by people who don’t like him. In fact, the pile-on of indictments against the former president seems to have helped him, giving credence to his claims of being an enemy of undemocratic forces.
This is clearly the tack that Mayor Adams plans to take. Having annoyed the Biden administration with his complaints that the migrant crisis would “destroy” New York City, Adams can at least plausibly claim that he is now a political target. A raucous press conference the mayor held after the indictment was unsealed set the tone for his public defense. Surrounded by a group of supporters—almost all African American, like him—a smiling Adams insisted that he looks forward to “defending myself and defending the people of this city.” He introduced 93-year-old Herbert Daughtry, a noted reverend, civil rights activist, and prominent supporter, who spoke of Adams in prophetic terms, casting his indictment as “one more battle we have to fight,” and insisting that “We’re not about to quit . . . we will be there to the end.”
It’s true that Eric Adams is the first sitting mayor in New York City history to be indicted, and this is nothing for anyone to be proud of. But it’s unlikely that these charges will rattle the confidence of one of our era’s first-rate political egoists.
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