Ronald L. Kuby: No, politicians don’t all do this

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In New York City, a “bombshell” indictment is announced almost every week, and we have a “trial of the century” once a year. We have grown accustomed to, and even expect, corruption and depravity on a grand scale to be charged by federal prosecutors. Through this lens, many allegations against Mayor Eric Adams listed in his indictment this week may appear to be curiously small.

Essentially it is alleged that, for close to a decade, Adams, a Democrat, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Turkish government and private, wealthy Turkish businesspeople with close ties to the government. One would be forgiven for expecting the payoff, for Adams, to be massive offshore accounts and perhaps a luxury home along the Bosphorus. Instead, Adams (both as borough president and mayor) received free airplane tickets and upgrades to business class and free fancy hotel rooms and meals. Has he never heard of points or airline miles?

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The alleged “quo” for the alleged “quid” was similarly unspectacular. According to the indictment, Adams interceded with the city fire department to rush through an inspection and undeserved approval for a building that would house the Turkish Consulate. In another example, he fixed a problem that a Turkish businessman was having with the Department of Buildings. This is strictly small-time, precinct-captain-level “constituent outreach.”

Had it been just these things, this indictment almost certainly would never have been brought. New York City mayors and other electeds have a long history of receiving questionable benefits for themselves and their friends while doing questionable favors for their donors, without criminal prosecution.

But other allegations in the indictment are far more serious. Prosecutors say Adams conspired with foreign officials to receive massive, illegal campaign contributions, including ones from foreign nationals, from foreign governments and from “straw” contributors who were reimbursed from foreign sources. This enabled Adams to obtain huge piles of money under New York City’s “matching” program. These illegal contributions partially funded his 2021 mayoral run, and have, according to the indictment, continued in anticipation of Adams’s reelection bid. The last mayoral election was quite close at the primary level, and next year’s is shaping up to be highly competitive as well.

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Direct foreign interference in American elections is, of course, something the government takes much more seriously than upgrades from economy class. As it should. This case is about a direct assault on basic principles of democracy and sovereignty. And though the airline upgrades may grab a lot of the attention, the behavior alleged here is not politics as usual.

Ronald L. Kuby is a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer based in New York City.

Ruth Marcus: Why do a foreign mayor favors? To invest in your future.

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There’s always an ask, always a quo for the quid. If not right away, then down the road. The bill comes due. The moment arrives when your benefactor announces, as a Turkish official allegedly did in the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, that it’s your “turn to repay.”

It’s easy to be distracted, reading the five-count federal indictment unsealed Thursday, by the pathetic seediness of the favors Adams allegedly received from his Turkish benefactors. At least Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) got gold bars. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the far more serious matter of the illegal campaign cash that allegedly flowed Adams’s way, in the form of banned contributions from foreign and corporate sources disguised through straw donors.

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Let’s consider, instead, the ask, and the larger question of what the Turkish officials and business executives allegedly involved in the bribery scheme were up to — why they invested the money and energy in cozying up to Adams even when he was only the Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial role.

According to the indictment, the inevitable request arrived in September 2021, after Adams had won the Democratic mayoral primary and was on the verge of becoming mayor. The Turkish Consulate in New York City was desperate to obtain city approval to open a swank new diplomatic building in time for a visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

But the fire department was balking, according to the indictment, “citing numerous reported fire safety defects, some of which were serious.” So Turkey’s consul general in New York — known as “the Turkish Official” in the indictment — asked Adams, directly and through a staffer, to intervene.

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He didn’t mince words. Turkey had helped Adams, the official told an Adams staffer. Now it was “his turn” to help Turkey. Adams’s response, according to the indictment: “I know.”

And so the mayor-in-waiting turned up the heat. He contacted — repeatedly — the fire commissioner, who was lobbying to keep his job in the new administration, emphasizing that he was “loyal and trustworthy.” When a lower-level employee reiterated that “this building is not safe to occupy,” the fire department brass got real. “The Chief of Department informed the Fire Prevention Chief, in substance, that if the FDNY did not assist the Turkish Consulate in obtaining a TCO [temporary certificate of occupancy], both the Chief of Department and the Fire Prevention Chief would lose their jobs.”

You know what happened next. “You are a true friend of Turkey,” the consul general wrote Adams, complete with thank-you-hands emoji.

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If this seems like a small-bore favor, think again. On one side of the transaction, public safety officials were dissuaded from doing their jobs out of fear of losing their jobs. On the other side, Turkish officials who desperately wanted to please the country’s autocratic president got the response they needed. Their investment paid off.

And investment it was. Some of those who allegedly plied Adams with benefits had in mind, according to the indictment, that he might end up being president. And when a construction company executive from a “different ethnic community” was arranging to make illegal donations to Adams’s mayoral campaign, the indictment states, Adams employees didn’t mince words: Donating $10,000 would give the businessman influence with Adams when he became mayor, and “gaining such influence with Adams would be more expensive at a later date.”

Get in on the ground floor. Make your ask down the road. The turn to repay always arrives.

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Ruth Marcus is an associate editor and columnist for The Post.

Matt Bai: Another off-year savior falls from grace

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If we’re going to ponder the question of how New York Mayor Eric Adams could fall so quickly from the peak of political celebrity to the nadir of trying to stay out of jail, then maybe we should ask ourselves another question, too.

How was he able to ascend that peak to begin with?

Sure, the newly elected Adams had plenty of roguish charm — no argument there. But even during his campaign for mayor, Adams seemed to exist in shadow; there was that weirdness about him supposedly sleeping on his office couch, no one being quite sure where he actually lived. He had little political experience and no discernible philosophy.

But he was also elected in 2021, the off-year after a presidential election, and you shouldn’t underestimate how much that matters. Had Adams been running in 2020 or 2022, he might have been little more than a passing curiosity. But there’s a tendency in both parties, fueled by the outsize news coverage that a sudden vacuum creates, to take off-year candidates for governor or mayor and transform them into Marvel heroes.

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Which is in large part why Adams was hailed as the future of his party, brought before President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers to advise them on reaching working-class voters and encouraged to think about seeking national office. He packed fundraising events in Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. Political swami Nate Silver proclaimed that Adams was in his “top 5 for ‘who will be the next Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden.’” Maybe not.

But, you know, a lot of Republicans said the same things about former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell, elected in 2009 and immediately called upon to deliver the State of the Union response. His career went down in a blitz of federal corruption charges (although the Supreme Court threw out his conviction). Chris Christie was elected governor of New Jersey in that same year and became even more of an overnight icon — a status he lost after his own administration became mired in “Bridgegate” during his second term.

The point here isn’t that no one elected in an off year is ever as promising as we think; Sen. Mark R. Warner, for instance, became a Democratic celebrity when he won Virginia’s governorship in 2001, and he remains a senior figure in the party. The point is that we ought not to make saviors of untested politicians simply because we need someone to exalt in the moment.

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Too often, the only ones they end up saving are themselves.

Matt Bai is a contributing columnist for The Post.

Elif Batuman: From Venice, trading influence for luxury looks very familiar

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Late Thursday afternoon, I arrived in Venice for a quick research trip related to Ottoman-Venetian relations. On the vaporetto from the train station, I received a WhatsApp message from my partner with photographs of news crews gathering near our apartment in New York, a few blocks away from Gracie Mansion: “Eric Adams has been indicted and the news has come to Yorkville.”

“I leave NYC for five minutes and something interesting happens,” I thought, as I rushed to the headquarters of Italy’s public broadcasting company, RAI — which turned out to be housed in a 17th-century baroque palace — to record an episode of the BBC’s “World Book Club.” The palace and its art had been commissioned by a Catalan family who had bought its way into the Venetian nobility during the Ottoman-Venetian wars.

It was a long studio session. When we got out, around 8 p.m., the sound engineer escorted me down various empty halls and staircases to a dark room; he turned on the light to reveal a ceiling fresco by Tiepolo.

I took out my phone to take a picture, and found an email from The Post, asking whether I, as a person acquainted “with both NYC and the Turkey of Adams’s dreams,” as well had any reaction to the indictment.

I stared in some perplexity at the email, and then at the fresco, which showed Bellerophon riding Pegasus toward Glory. New York Mayor Eric Adams had been indicted on a charge of … dreaming about Turkey?

Sitting at a nearby cafe, I scrolled through the indictment. Oddly, the first thing I had thought of[ when I read the phrase “the Turkey of Adams’s dreams” had been the business lounge of Turkish Airlines in Istanbul, where chefs in tall hats prepare made-to-order versions of regional and Ottoman specialties. No small part of my retirement savings has gone into business upgrades on Turkish Airlines, of which 49 percent is owned by the Turkish government. I could understand why Adams was a fan.

I found myself contemplating the vagaries of history, global power, luxury and politics. Today, as in 18th-century Venice, politics is largely about enforcing order — and about the exchange of favors and consolidation of influence among the order-keepers. Political order, theoretically, benefits everyone, saving us a perpetual violent free-for-all; it enables science and the production of luxury goods, including art. Without politics — without politicians — there would be no great cities, no Tiepolo ceilings, no BBC “World Book Club,” no Turkish Airlines lounge. Thus the keepers of order, even while they are (for example) paying nominal sums of money for $30,000 vacations, can tell themselves, and believe, that they are the creators of the benefits they enjoy and that they are therefore serving the public. As Adams put it: “I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you, that I would be a target.”

But there are moments, if you are lucky enough to experience them, when it’ş possible to glimpse, on the other side of the politics of control, a politics of freedom. Think of the Adams indictment from the perspective of the 17th century. A local ruler got to stay in a fancy palace because he helped expedite the approval of a civic building in time for a visit from a foreign ruler? An utter non-story. Now, however, it’s in the news; and Jumaane Williams — a very different politician from Adams — is waiting in the wings. Let’s see what happens in the next 400 years.

Elif Batuman is the author of two novels, “The Idiot” and “Either/Or.”