Mayor Eric Adams on Monday sought to rebuff reports last week on a city Campaign Finance Board (CFB) draft audit that found his 2021 campaign failed to report over $2.3 million in expenses.
Hizzoner vented in frustration that the press got a hold of and reported on the audit given that it was a draft. Furthermore, he insisted his campaign should have been given a chance to respond to its findings before they became public.
“Imagine writing the first rough draft of your news story and it shows up in the paper,” the mayor said during an unrelated Monday news conference. “You’re gonna say, ‘Give me a break, let me go through my draft.’ How did a draft report get leaked? Give us an opportunity to look at, we’re missing a person’s name, we’re missing an address, give us an opportunity to respond to that.”
Adams went so far as to suggest the CFB “did not follow the proper procedure” in releasing the draft report to news organizations that requested it. CFB spokesperson Tim Hunter declined to comment for this story on the mayor’s remarks.
News outlets that obtained the audit, which was first reported on by the website Gothamist, made it clear they did so via a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. The state’s open records law requires state and city agencies to release specific documents to members of the public who request them, but government bodies can make exceptions for entire records or sections of records.
Additionally, Adams took issue with reports stating that the audit was 900 pages long. Instead, he suggested the audit is just 45 pages, given that those pages focus on the issues to which the campaign must respond.
“It was not 900 pages of report,” Adams said. “Forty-five pages dealt with what we had to respond to, 850-something were documentation with the requests. So, it wasn’t 900 pages of infractions, we have to be very clear about that.”
Adams’ 2021 campaign raked in close to $20 million in total, $10 million of which it raised through the city’s public matching funds system.
The matching program, which the CFB runs, provides $8 for every $1 donated by a city resident up to the first $250 of their contribution. Candidates who accept public matching funds must abide by strict reporting standards around their fundraising and spending practices.
The CFB draft report flagged 22 categories of issues with how Adams’ campaign reported its fundraising and spending, according to the Gothamist report. Additionally, the board highlighted over 70 expenditures it found the campaign failed to properly document.
Those include a $35,000 2021 payment to Suggs Solutions Inc. — the consultant firm operated by Brianna Suggs, Adams’ former chief campaign fundraiser whose home was raided by the FBI last November in connection with the federal probe into his 2021 campaign, Gothamist reported. They also covered 2021 payments to both Adams’ Chief Adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin and his Deputy Chief of Staff Menashe Shapiro, according to a Monday report from the Daily News.
Yet, when pressed by a reporter Monday, Adams declined to respond to the audit’s specific findings. He insisted that the press is making too much out of the draft report, which he suggests will be ultimately revealed as “a lot of noise,” and not much else.
“You have to go through the whole process,” Adams said. “Far too often we get caught up in the beginning of the process and the middle of the process and all of the noise that comes with it … Trust me, whatever the report states, we’re going to answer and respond to it.”
