The News
Federal prosecutors charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams with bribery and fraud, accusing him of accepting illegal contributions, bribes, and travel perks from foreign nationals, including at least one Turkish government official.
Adams has denied the allegations. He is the first sitting mayor in the city’s history to face federal criminal charges.
In an indictment unsealed Thursday, the Department of Justice alleged that “a senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment” set up straw donations to Adams’ campaign, and that Turkish officials and other organizations had gifted him free flights, “rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants and free luxurious entertainment while in Turkey.”
In exchange, Adams reportedly pressured city fire department officials to expedite the approval of a new building for the Turkish consulate after he became mayor. A Turkish official also allegedly asked Adams to not make a statement on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in 2022 — something the mayor did not do.
“As Adam’s prominence and power grew, his foreign-national benefactors sought to cash in on their corrupt relationships with him, particularly when, in 2021, it became clear that Adams would become New York City’s mayor,” the indictment stated.
The allegations suggested that Turkish government officials believed Adams could be a future US presidential candidate. At one point, a Turkish official wrote to an Adams staffer that Turkey’s foreign minister “is personally paying attention to [Adams],” according to the indictment.
SIGNALS
Turkish opposition voices say indictment is proof of government’s shortcomings
While the indictment has so far received little attention from Turkey’s mainstream press, some opposition voices quickly seized on the charges as the latest proof of corruption within Turkey’s government. One Turkish commentator wrote that, while President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s administration “has become accustomed to all kinds of illegality in Turkey,” similar efforts in the US were bound to catch the attention of an independent justice system and free press. The case demonstrates, he wrote, that the Turkish government poisons even “those who stand next to them.”
Turkey has long sought influence in US politics
Turkey has been implicated in several major political scandals in Washington in recent years, Stephen Cook, an expert in Turkish politics, wrote in Politico. He noted that Turkish officials and organizations have been repeatedly caught giving money to former officials and US politicians. “In all of these cases, whether graft, corruption or influence-peddling, Erdogan and his advisors have imposed the way they do business in Istanbul and Eskisehir onto municipalities here,” Cook wrote. According to an analysis by the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning Washington think tank, firms lobbying for Turkey spent almost half a million dollars on campaign contributions in the 2020 elections in an effort to shift US policy in a more favorable direction.