Over the past five weeks, Mayor Eric Adams has seen his police and health commissioners, his schools chancellor, his chief legal counsel, two deputy mayors, his close friend and senior adviser, and four high-ranking staffers depart amid a shroud of scandal covering City Hall.
Yet Adams claimed on Tuesday that none of the recent spate of resignations from the upper ranks of his administration were connected to his indictment or the deluge of other federal investigations currently underway.
At multiple points during his weekly press conference on Oct. 8, Hizzoner insinuated that several high-level officials have left City Hall in recent weeks because they were worn out from working in city government over the past three years or simply wanted to move on to something else rather than fleeing the embattled administration or getting pushed out.
The mayor, when asked point blank by amNewYork Metro if he thinks the resignations are not connected to federal activity, said that is what he believes.
“Not one person who has decided to do something else with their life said, ‘Eric, it’s because so much is going on,'” Adams said. “I like people to leave when they can’t do their job of delivering for the City of New York. [As] long as you can deliver for the city of New York and hold to the high ethical standards that come with it, you could work for me. But people wanted to go on with their lives. And working in government, it’s hard.”
Adams pointed out his outgoing Schools Chancellor, David Banks, whose exit date Adams suddenly moved up by two months last week.
“David said it best; he said, ‘I ran out of gas,'” Adams said. “When you give everything you have to the job, morning, noon and night, you run out of gas. And David said it best. David said, ‘listen, I’m running out of gas. I couldn’t do it at the level that I’m used to doing it at.'”
However, the mayor’s claim was disproven in the case of former Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who explicitly cited the federal investigations in his resignation letter to the NYPD rank-in-file last month. Caban resigned a little over a week after federal investigators raided his home and seized his phones, reportedly in connection with a federal investigation into an NYPD nightlife protection scheme.
In the missive, Caban said, “News around recent developments has created a distraction for our department, and I am unwilling to let my attention be on anything other than our important work.”
In addition to Caban and David Banks, numerous other top administration officials have also left since the most recent burst of federal investigative activity around City Hall began on Sept. 4. Others include Banks’ brother, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, who resigned on Monday, and his wife, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who stepped down on Tuesday.
City Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn), one of the mayor’s most vocal critics in city government, said he sees the staffing changes as a direct result of the mayor’s legal troubles.
“It seems that the mounting pressure from the indictment and the multipole additional federal investigations has forced Eric Adams to rid his administration of some of its unsavory figures,” Restler said in an interview.
Additionally, numerous published reports have indicated that Gov. Kathy Hochul — who has a little-used power to remove the city’s mayor — has pushed Adams to clean house of those under federal scrutiny in order to keep his job.
But, while Adams acknowledged that he has communicated with the governor over the staffing changes, he denied that she is the one approving them.
“I don’t get authorizations to move around personnel,” Adams said. “Matter of fact, to the contrary, the governor made it clear that you’re the mayor of the city. You have an obligation to continue the success that we have done together.”
