Eric Adams, Mayor of New York, at a public event on December 20, 2022. Ted Shaffrey (AP)
Shortly after Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was accused of receiving money from Egypt, New York Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat, is being exposed by his campaign’s alleged ties to donations from Egypt tarnished turkey. The federal investigation into the origins of modest donations from an unknown Turkish university in Washington to Adams’ capital has landed like a bombshell on the eve of local elections this Tuesday, clouding the city council’s expectations for re-election in 2025 Pandora’s Box was discovered in an FBI raid on the home of one of Adams’ top fundraisers, Brianna Suggs, 25, last Thursday.
There is evidence that less than two months before the 2021 local elections, Adams’ campaign team received five donations worth $2,000 each from people listed as employees of Bay Atlantic University, a small Turkish institution based in Washington. These contributions will be analyzed as part of the federal investigation. The campaign returned all donations within weeks because, according to a spokesman for the mayor, it had “more money than it could spend.”
In addition to Suggs’ home in Brooklyn, who, despite his youth, has worked with the mayor since he presided over that district, the federal investigation also points to KSK Construction, a construction company owned by a citizen of Turkish origin, who also made more than a dozen donations to the 2021 mayoral campaign. KSK, which specializes in residential buildings and hotels, has a discreet headquarters in Brooklyn and its facade showed no signs of activity at least last week, although according to city records the company has 33 active employees at construction sites in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx.
According to the documentation, accessed by the digital newspaper The City, one of the many excellent local online information media, the company’s CEO, Erden Arkan, years before KSK’s involvement in the alleged conspiracy surrounding the mayor became public, led another company called Kiska Construction. The company was involved in two consecutive corruption scandals in 2007 and 2008 involving bribes to city workers on major public works projects.
At issue is whether the Adams campaign conspired with the university and the construction company to illegally funnel foreign money into the campaign coffers. Under federal law, it is illegal for any federal or local campaign to accept money from foreign citizens or, as Menendez’s indictment shows, those involved will be accused of being “foreign agents.” According to a federal order obtained by The New York Times, investigators are investigating possible collusion between the campaign and the Turkish government, among other illegal activities. The raid comes months after Manhattan prosecutors charged six people with allegedly coordinating illegal donations to the mayor’s 2021 campaign.
Adams, who visited the university’s headquarters in Turkey in 2015, responded in a statement released Friday that he would be “outraged and angry if anyone tried to use the campaign to manipulate our democracy and mislead us.” .” The city council states that it has no knowledge of any abusive fundraising campaigns or the involvement of foreign funds. It is not the first scandal to threaten him, but it is the most serious; So much so that on Thursday he was forced to spontaneously cancel a visit to the White House that had been planned for months and return to the city on the run. His re-election in 2025 seems more doubtful today, although a Democratic mayor in New York is hard to beat. His fundraising machine is in full swing, frightening off potential rivals, but Adams’s clear differences with the left wing of his party, which could deepen in this case, as well as the two criminal investigations, state and local, into his fundraising machine have softened wings to his political enemies, who particularly criticize his handling of the migration crisis.
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