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TRUMP SAVED ERIC ADAMS’S BACON—AND PUT THE COUNTRY UP FOR SALE  
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Casey Michel
February 18, 2025
The New Republic
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_ The quid pro quo deal between the president and the mayor of New
York City will throw open the foreign corruption floodgates. As the
Trump administration moves to drop the case and gut any remaining
independence out of the DOJ, damn the consequences _

New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaks to reporters as he leaves a
news conference Feb. 18, 2025., Photo credit: Seth Wenig/AP

 

The ongoing saga of the cancelled prosecution of Eric Adams contains
multitudes. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect is the way it highlights
the new, renegade Department of Justice that Donald Trump is running
and his administration’s overarching attempt to eliminate any
remaining independence among federal prosecutors—the better to
weaponize the agency’s considerable resources against the
president’s political enemies. Naturally, it’s also about a mayor
allegedly abusing his office so that he could remain in power for yet
another term—and how that corruption led to the current arrangement,
where the Trump administration has essentially purchased a big-city
mayor and the municipal government he runs.

But there is an undersung aspect to this whole affair that represents
an unfolding threat against democracy. The Adams flap was always about
far more than simple airplane upgrades
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or about a White House bending American prosecutors to its will. It
is, at its core, about whether or not foreign regimes and foreign
actors can personally bankroll American politicians—and about
whether or not an administration as drenched in shady foreign funding
as Trump’s will remove the last, best block against foreign
dictatorships directly financing American officials.

After all, this is what Adams himself stood formally accused of:
soliciting, accepting, and even directing the payments of foreign
monies into his personal kitty, all so that he could continue as New
York mayor. Just look through the federal indictment
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the Trump administration is now casting into the dustbin. According to
federal prosecutors, Adams scrabbled high and low in an attempt to
obtain as much Turkish funding as he could. When a Turkish national
offered to bankroll Adams–despite the fact that, as the foreign
funder told an Adams staffer, “Fundraising in Turkey is not
legal”—his staffer initially demurred, saying they thought Adams
“wouldn’t get involved in such games.”

How wrong they were. Once the staffer relayed the funding plot to
Adams, the mayor “directed” that his staffer “pursue the
[Turkish national’s] illegal scheme.” As the indictment details,
Adams “welcomed the offer of foreign contributions.” Nor was Adams
especially far into his tenure when he allegedly decided to toss the
door open to foreign monies; according to the federal indictment, this
all took place a mere 10 days into his stint as New York mayor.

It’s not difficult to see why Adams’s Turkish contacts allegedly
funded him. In addition to green-lighting the biggest Turkish
consulate in the world—burnishing the reach and reputation of
Turkish autocrat Recep Erdoğan in the process—one of Adams’s
Turkish contacts, who agreed to “contribute $50,000 or more” to
Adams’s mayoral campaign, said he “believe[ed] that Adams might
one day be the President of the United States and [was] hoping to gain
influence with Adams.”

Given that Adams is hardly guaranteed reelection as New York mayor,
his likelihood of someday ascending to the presidency seems a stretch.
But you can see the logic of Adams’s Turkish contacts at play: For
pennies on the dollar, they could pocket a rising political star,
getting in on the ground floor with someone who, by all appearances,
did not care one bit that he was crossing the reddest of red lines for
American politicians.

The better question is why Adams himself allegedly went along
with—and even personally steered—these foreign funding operations.
Part of it was surely related to the lack of prosecutions in this
space; before Adams, no mayor in America had ever been indicted on
federal charges of foreign funding. But then again, maybe the answer
is obvious. As Adams told a supporter, “You win the race by raising
money.… Have to raise money. Everything else is fluff.”

In that sense, the Adams case isn’t just about foreign regimes
suddenly eyeing new ways to flood American campaigns with
cash—it’s about the fact that American campaigns can be flooded
with cash, period. Perhaps this was always inevitable. Given
the _Citizens United_ decision
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2010, which effectively lifted spending caps on American elections,
perhaps it was always just a matter of time before candidates and
foreign officials alike realized there were even more campaign dollars
to be tapped abroad, instead of just among deep-pocketed Americans.

This is the trajectory that other elements of America’s kleptocratic
transformation have followed. Anonymous shell companies in Delaware
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trusts in South Dakota
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initially geared toward American clients—before foreign regimes
realized they could take full advantage, injecting billions (if not
more) in illicit wealth directly into the American economy. Lobbying
firms in Washington
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initially geared toward American politicos—before foreign regimes
realized they could take full advantage, steering American lobbyists
toward whatever the regimes footing their bills needed to remain in
power, and shift American policy to their advantage.

With Adams, as well as the Trump administration’s moves to drop the
case and gut any remaining independence out of the Department of
Justice, damn the consequences, we have perhaps arrived at the logical
endpoint of these arrangements. Trump is, as everyone is fully aware,
the American president with far and away the most foreign financial
entanglements, from his Trump Organization inking new deals in places
like Oman
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the Saudi-backed LIV Golf
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tournaments at Trump properties, to all of the ways foreign regimes
can back Trump’s new memecoin
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And that’s not even including all of the ongoing questions about,
say, whether the Egyptian dictatorship plowed millions of dollars
into Trump’s first campaign
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launch Trump to the White House in the first place.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever get an answer to the latter point because
Trump, in less than a month into his second term, has decimated
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of the United States’ remaining anti-corruption credentials. But it
would hardly be surprising if Cairo did so, not least because the
Egyptian dictatorship was recently outed as secretly bankrolling
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of America’s most prominent senators—a man who realized, allegedly
alongside Adams, just how much boodle could be made by opening the
doors of American politics to foreign regimes’ dirty money.

This is a reality that American politicians, led by Trump and Adams,
will only rub in Americans’ faces more and more in coming years. And
a vicious cycle may be slouching toward Washington to be born, as
other American politicians realize that, moving forward, in order to
keep up with their opponents’ spending, they’ll have to look to
non-American sources of their own just to keep pace. It will be an
accelerating downward spiral, with no bottom in sight.

Lifting any consequences for Adams’s alleged
malfeasance—eliminating any costs for Adams allegedly succoring
foreign regimes and tapping into the bottomless pool of dirty money
sloshing around the world—means that other politicians around the
country, and regimes around the world, will only come to one,
inescapable conclusion. The days of prosecutors targeting American
officials who accept foreign funding are over. The days of American
elections being funded, and decided, by Americans are done. A new era
is dawning, all thanks to Eric Adams, and the corrupt president who
came to his rescue.

_[CASEY MICHEL is the author of Foreign Agents: How American
Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World
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* Eric Adams
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* Mayor Eric Adams
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* Donald Trump
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* corruption
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* Foreign corruption
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* Recep Tayyip Erdogan
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* Turkey
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* Kleptocracy
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* campaign finance
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* Citizens United
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* New York City
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* MAGA
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