NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- Mayor Eric Adam's legal team continues to try and move up his trial on corruption and bribery charges by a few weeks. It's an attempt to get the trial over with sooner so he can focus on his re-election campaign. We've heard a lot about the federal charges against the mayor, but 7 On Your Side Investigates is delving deeper into the indictment and the role prosecutors say others played in the alleged crimes.
In the indictment, prosecutors don't use the specific names of people to describe them, they use job titles instead. There's a host of characters from "Businessman 1" to the "Adams Scheduler" to the "The Promoter," but there's one person mentioned more than anyone else: the "Adams Staffer." It's peppered through the indictment more than 130 times.
It's someone prosecutors claim Adams directed to obtain illegal contributions and who helped devise and execute a plan to funnel money into his campaign "knowing full well that these donations would violate the law," according to the indictment. They describe the staffer as someone who started working as a volunteer at Brooklyn Borough Hall, who was then hired as the mayor's liaison to Eastern Europe, including Turkey, and who went to Turkey with the mayor in 2015. The job descriptions, duties and dates match former staffer Rana Abbasova whose official title was Director of Protocol for the Mayor's Office of International Affairs.
She was placed on leave last fall after the feds searched her home and was .