Just hours after Mayor Eric Adams was hit with a multi-count federal indictment, his newly retained celebrity attorney Alex Spiro sought to discredit the corruption charges against him.
Spiro, in a Thursday afternoon news conference outside Gracie Mansion, painted the federal charges of conspiracy, bribery, soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations, and wire fraud against Adams as frivolous and flimsy.
The attorney, who also represents Adams in a separate civil sexual misconduct suit, described the indictment and subsequent press conference by Manhattan US Attorney Damian Williams as theater supported by little actual evidence.
“You can almost picture them trying to cobble together, trying to tell a story so that they could corruption, corruption at this press conference and they do that to tarnish him in your eyes,” Spiro said.
The 57-page indictment accuses Adams of engaging in a scheme for nearly a decade in which he accepted illegal campaign donations and unreported gifts from Turkish nationals in exchange for expediting a fire inspection of a Manhattan Turkish consulate tower in 2021. Furthermore, Adams is accused of hiding the illegal foreign contributions with straw donations and using that money to attain $10,000,000 in public matching funds for his 2021 mayoral campaign.
Spiuro alleged that the investigators misconstrued the free Turkish Airline flight upgrades, contending that they were perks afforded to VIPs such as Adams, as a borough president and mayor.
“Those were upgrades on airlines with open seats,” Spiro said. “That’s what airlines do. They do it every day. They do it for VIPs. They do it for Congress people. They’re empty seats. They cost the airlines nothing.”
The attorney also tried to downplay how much money the mayor’s campaign raised from illegal foreign donations. He took issue with the indictment citing the $10,000,000 raised by the mayor’s 2021 campaign overall, noting that just $26,000 of that money came from Turkish donors.
“They say $10,000,000, fraud, $10,000,000, fraud, and they’re doing that to mislead you,” Spiro said. “You look closely at the indictment, you know how much money we’re talking about from the people of Turkey? Twenty-six thousand dollars … That’s not fraud, that’s not $10,000,000.”
Spiro also claimed that he has emails from Mayor Adams showing that the mayor told a campaign unnamed campaign staffer mentioned throughout the indictment not to accept foreign donations.
“There are emails with Mayor Adams telling them, telling this staffer, telling all of them, do not take foreign money, period,” he said. “That’s in emails. You will see those.”
