Trump Laughs at ‘Thirsty’ Eric Adams for Kissing Up
He’s pushed Donald Trump’s talking points, defended him against Hitler comparisons, and even met up with Trump briefly at ringside at an ultimate fighting brawl. Embattled New York City Mayor Eric Adams sure seems to be looking to get on friendly footing with the president-elect; many observers believe it’s part of an attempt to get Trump to pardon him on his five-count federal indictment.
Those observers include Donald J. Trump himself, as well as members of his inner circle, who find Adams’ approaches to be rather amusing. On Friday, the Democratic mayor took his latest step, refusing to rule out a switch to the Republican Party. “It’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?” says a member of Trump’s presidential transition team, one of three sources familiar with the situation who talked to Rolling Stone about Mar-a-Lago’s attitude towards the mayor. “How long until the actual begging and love letters start?”
Adams hasn’t explicitly asked for a pardon from Trump, who takes office next month. (In fact, the mayor’s defense attorney has pushed to accelerate his trial, now set for late April.) But Adams’ apparent positioning for one won’t just impact his own future. It could impact the lives of the tens of thousands of migrants now living in New York City — not to mention the million-plus New Yorkers who aren’t U.S. citizens.
In September, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York indicted the mayor on bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges — all of which, Adams insists, are bogus and politically motivated. The mayor was an early Democratic critic of the Biden administration’s immigration policies; he claims he was prosecuted in retaliation, and that Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter proves that that legal game was rigged. “President Biden and President-elect Donald Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized,” Adams told reporters on Tuesday. “Does that sound familiar? Rest my case.”
The Hunter Biden example is certainly a tempting model for Adams. Joe pardoned Hunter for all crimes he “has committed or may have committed” going back a decade. Trump could, in theory, issue an equally sweeping pardon to a mayor whose closest associates are the subject of five separate federal investigations, and a sixth by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Illicit influence over City Hall by foreign governments from Turkey to China to Qatar to South Korea is being investigated. More than a dozen members of Adams’ team have been forced out in recent months, including his schools chancellor, his deputy mayor, and two police commissioners.
“I think that Adams’ public statements are not-so-subtly positioning himself as someone who might want to get pardoned,” says Jarrod Schaefer, a former prosecutor in the Southern District’s public corruption unit. “Trump has shown no hesitation in issuing pardons to people being prosecuted by the Southern District of New York. At last count, it was 14 people prosecuted by SDNY that he had issued pardons to, including people like [former top aide] Steve Bannon, who had yet to face trials. So I think that’s a very real possibility.”
City Hall referred questions for this story to Adams’ legal team, which did not respond to a request for comment. Whatever the mayor’s intentions or motivations, his public posturing in recent weeks has garnered a fair share of attention — and laughter — within Trump’s tight orbit, according to three sources familiar with the situation.
It’s become a running inside joke among some of Trump’s senior staff that Adams is angling for a pardon. One incoming Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone that they and several of their colleagues have chuckled about how “thirsty” Adams has seemed lately, with the Trump presidency on the horizon and with Adams’ federal corruption charges still hot.
The president-elect, who himself was criminally charged in multiple federal and local cases, has gotten in on the joke. During this presidential transition, Trump has made sardonic references to how Adams seems to “really like” him nowadays and has specifically mentioned that the mayor is acting like someone who wants a pardon, according to two of the sources.
It was not lost on these sources that, during the recent presidential race, Adams not only criticized the Kamala Harris campaign for calling Trump a fascist; the mayor could barely bring himself to utter her name in public. At one point, Trump joked that maybe Adams will start wearing a MAGA hat at press conferences, a source with direct knowledge says.
Such an alliance, between a mayor who rose to political prominence fighting police brutality and a president who has championed it, might seem like an ironic development. But the two men have more than a little in common. Both are outer borough showmen and party switchers with a flexible approach to the truth and ideology. Both have a love/hate relationship with what they see as Manhattan’s liberal elite. If Adams, who used to call himself the “Biden of Brooklyn,” cements his union with the president-elect, it has the potential to help solidify Republican gains in New York’s working-class neighborhoods, and lend some support to a deeply-unpopular mayor as he heads into a crowded primary this summer. The Trumpist New York Post, which has bashed Adams for months, hailed MAYOR ADAMS UNLEASHED on the front page this week after he pledged to work with the incoming administration as it preps mass deportations.
“You commit crimes in our city, I’m always going to be of the belief in a position that you don’t have the right to be in our city,” Adams said, before implying, erroneously, that constitutional due process protections only apply to U.S. citizens. “I’m an American. Americans have certain rights. You know, the Constitution is for Americans.”
It was a particularly shocking statement in New York City, where more than three million people — about 40 percent of New Yorkers — were born abroad, and more than a million of those people are not U.S. citizens. And Adams quickly walked it back on Friday. His political opponents weren’t exactly satisfied. “Donald Trump has clearly indicated that he’s going to be aiming to do mass deportations of people who have not been convicted of serious or violent crimes, and Eric Adams seems only too eager to help him,” City Comptroller Brad Lander, who’s running against Adams in the mayoral primary, tells Rolling Stone.
How Trump might help Adams is a matter of intense speculation in New York. Trump could hand Adams a wide-ranging pardon, like the one Joe Biden gave his son. Lander cautions his rival not to campaign too hard for it: “Trump likes to dangle people on a string … dangle the mouse in front of the cat. That’s what brings him joy.”
Jessica Ramos, a Democratic state senator from Queens who is also running for mayor, delivered a similar warning on X, formerly Twitter, in response to this story: “If you see Eric Adams holiday shopping over the next few weeks, tell him that Donald Trump doesn’t usually return the favor.”
What’s less likely is that Trump’s pick to lead SDNY, the well-regarded Jay Clayton, would pull the plug on his current case there, even at Trump’s command. (“He’s not someone, in my view, who would be willing to throw their career and reputation away by taking a political directive to tank that case,” says Arlo Devlin-Brown, who previously led SDNY’s public corruption unit.) But as it currently stands, that indictment — which alleges Adams paid back illegal campaign donations with municipal favors — is considered in legal circles to be something short of a blockbuster. Clayton has far more freedom to prevent the case from becoming one, to strengthen it with additional charges; that was widely expected after FBI agents searched Adams’ residence and seized his chief adviser’s phones within a day of his indictment being announced.
Immediately afterwards, that adviser, Ingrid Martin-Lewis, went on a radio show. “We are not thieves,” she insisted. And if the Adams team committed any crimes, they were small-scale. “We have not done anything illegal to the magnitude or scale that requires the federal government and the DAs office to investigate us,” she argued.
The host of that show was her defense attorney, Arthur Aidala. Earlier this week, he was floated as a possible Trump pick for the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. That office is probing what appear to be illegal donations harvested by a top Adams fundraiser and, separately, suspect transactions between Adams’ former chief of staff and a Brooklyn Catholic parish made infamous by Sabrina Carpenter. Aidala is also representing the priest in that investigation.
Presumably, Aidala would recuse himself from those cases. And Adams’ aides might not find much legal relief at all, even if the mayor himself receives a pardon from Trump. During his previous term, Trump was willing to pardon high-profile allies like Bannon. His co-conspirators, a former federal prosecutor notes, were hung out to dry.
“The past track record of pardons with Trump were either close confidants or people who had some utility. I think Adams is well positioned as the mayor of New York City and a Democrat and like a prominent politician to be of use to Trump. But someone who was an Adams deputy,” the prosecutor says, “won’t necessarily be in the same position.”
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