New York City Mayor Eric Adams was charged with taking bribes and illegal campaign funding from foreign sources. The U.S.
attorney’s office in Manhattan alleges in the indictment that Adams "compounded his gains” from the illegal contributions by gaming the city’s matching funds program, which provides a generous match for small dollar donations. FBI agents entered the mayor’s official residence and seized his phone early Thursday, hours before the indictment was made public. The indictment caps off an extraordinary few weeks in New York City, as federal investigators have homed in on members of Adams’ inner circle, producing a drum-beat of raids, subpoenas and high-level resignations that have thrust City Hall into crisis.
Speaking to reporters, Alex Spiro suggested federal authorities waved off his immediate surrender. He also accused them of leaking word of Adams’ indictment to the news media. "We’ve known for some time that they intended to bring a case against the mayor one way or another,” Spiro said, standing with Adams outside the mayor’s official residence.
Spiro said that after having had a chance to read the indictment, "you could almost picture them trying to cobble this together and try to tell a story so that they could say, ‘corruption, corruption’ at a press conference.” He criticized the indictment as a jumble of accusations and innuendo he said was "meant to mislead” the public about Adams. He argued that the conduct described in th.
