New York Mayor Eric Adams dismisses his indictment—alleging bribes and fire code violations—as politically motivated, blaming it on his criticism of Biden’s immigration policies, which he says cost NYC $6.5B while forcing the city to house 40,000 migrant children with just $138M in federal aid. He contrasts his tough-on-crime stance with de Blasio’s failures, defending crackdowns on subway violence and encampments while warning that progressive policies alienate working-class voters. Adams praises Trump-era collaboration but insists his focus remains on fiscal responsibility, not anti-immigrant rhetoric—though critics like Carlson frame his views as indistinguishable from Trump’s base. The episode reveals a mayor clashing with both elites and progressives, betting re-election on a message of order over chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
So you get a call from the Turkish government and they say Turkish officials want to occupy their own consulate, which is being built in New York, hasn't received a fire inspection yet.
You call FDNY and say, hey, the government wants to occupy their own building.
The mayor is another country.
They want to occupy their own building.
Can you go ahead and do the fire inspection?
There's no evidence that the building was a fire trap or out of compliance with any fire regulation.
And not only weird to be indicted for, when you look at, you know, being a former law enforcement person, pushing public safety, living your life a certain way, it was painful.
It was extremely painful to go through this, you know, millions of dollars in legal bills and just...
Not being able to response.
The hardest part about this for me, anyone that's followed my career, they know I'm a straight fighter.
And this is the first time in my life that you have to sit here and be punched on and you have to allow your attorney to fight the fight.
I know how to fight and I like to fight to defend myself.
Well, the weird thing is, from the Washington perspective where I'm from, is that you're...
Under indictment for allowing foreign governments, Turkey, not North Korea, by the way, or Iran, but like a member of NATO, allowing them to upgrade your flights.
Pretty much every member of Congress takes, almost every single 535 House and Senate takes flights to other countries hosted by foreign governments and are given, in effect, tens of thousands of dollars of goods and services by those governments every single time.
Well, many people would dismiss when we stated that we felt we were a target.
They wanted to dismiss that.
And then you heard the president state...
That his Justice Department was politicized.
You heard the incoming president stating that it's politicized.
I think that there were those who were in that orbit that felt I was not a good Democrat because I watch my city, a city that I love.
Go through an onslaught of the migrant and immigration policy, a failed border policy, and after 10 trips to Washington, stating that this is a problem.
It was costing us a great deal of money, $6.5 billion that went out of our tax dollars.
I think that there were those who were just angry about it and thought I wasn't a good Democrat.
Because you complained about allowing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of illegals from foreign nationals who have no right to be here to come to your city and you have to pay for it, and you complained, and this indictment was punishment for complaining.
I spoke with Julie Chavez, who's one of the personnel.
Perez, another personnel.
I spoke with the president himself.
I spoke with the president first.
Then the president came here to New York City.
The governor and I sat down with him.
I said, Mr. President, I'm not sure what they're telling you about this problem, but this is a terrible problem that's playing out on the ground that we need to fix our border and we need to just stop allowing people to come into the country with no destiny.
We don't know what we're doing with them.
And there was some that were coming here.
That were almost six months to a year, in some cases two years, without any work authorization.
Like, what do you do with someone that cannot provide for themselves for that long period of time?
We have to feed, close, house, educate 40,000 children, hold them into a shelter system, the complete package of what you would do for an adult that can't take care of themselves.
And then what many people didn't understand, because people believe that, okay, you're down 170,000.
We were able to cycle out of our care.
We still have about 52,000 that are in our care.
And they say, well, okay, you know, the damage is behind you.
That is not true.
We took 6.5.
Billion dollars out of paying for chronically absent students we could have paid 200 million dollars for.
We could have paid for housing, older adults.
The long-term impact of what's happening to New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Houston, the long-term impact has yet to materialize what this crisis has done to our cities.
We're facing, after COVID, we're dealing with a severe mental health issue just throughout the entire country.
But specifically here in New York, we have a substantial number of chronically absent young people who were just traumatized from COVID and other things.
And they just stopped coming to school.
If I had $200 million that I can go out and go find those young people and place them back on the correct course...
I'm preventing the long-term problem.
If you don't educate, you're going to incarcerate.
That's the common denominator in all of our prisons, the lack of education.
I could have put hundreds of millions of dollars in what I'm doing around dyslexia screening and other learning disabilities.
So those $6.5 million that I didn't put into housing, I did not put into senior care, we're getting ready to excuse medical debt for New Yorkers that are dealing with severe medical debt.
All of these dollars could have gone into dealing with the long-term fixes that we were projecting to correct.
It appears to me that there was a bigger focus on the national election and not what it was doing to the cities.
And we started to build a coalition of other mayors because when I was standing alone talking about this, it appears as though that, well, Eric, why are you complaining and no one else is complaining?
And then other mayors started to see what was happening in their cities.
And I started meeting with the mayor of Chicago and Denver and other mayors and said, we have to be uniform around this issue.
Again, I think they used the terminology, you are not being a good Democrat.
I think that was their philosophy, that I was supposed to silently watch what happens to this city.
And I love this city.
This is a city that I gave my life to protect.
And I was watching the erosion.
We were getting almost 8,000 migrants and asylum seekers a week.
16,000 every two weeks.
We were being compelled by the Legal Aid Society to find them housing within a short period of time until we had to go back to court and fight that this humanitarian crisis is not what is normally someone has the right to have shelter within the city.
I'm just confused by why that's the responsibility of the taxpayers, the citizenry of New York, and your responsibility.
Someone comes into our country illegally from another nation, not invited, here in violation of our laws, and it's your responsibility to make sure that they're dealt with?
And, you know, Tucker, listen, if it means fighting for this city, I'm going to fight for this city.
And I was clear on that.
I never told anyone I was going to do anything other than that.
I was going to fight for this city.
And I saw the long-term impact.
Remember, what inspired me to run for office was watching an 11-year-old boy arrested several times for robbery and just to learn that he was not in school for months.
And no one was checking up on him.
His dad was in jail for a serious crime.
His mother was on crack cocaine.
And this 11-year-old boy is sitting inside my precinct.
I said, damn it, I'm at the end of the line here.
I need to go to the top of the line.
I was seeing that again when we were not able to provide services for the people of this city.
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A way in which this is incredibly unfair to New Yorkers, so you're from Brooklyn, there are a lot of American-born Brooklyn people, a lot of Caribbean people, hardworking, not making much money.
They're not getting free hotels.
They're not getting housing vouchers or free cell phones or free airplane tickets.
I got to admit, I'll just admit it, I thought it was pretty funny when they started trucking illegals here, because I don't live in New York, so I have to deal with the consequences, because it is such a liberal city, but mostly because it's a sanctuary city, which basically committed an act of insurrection against the federal government by ignoring federal law, kind of what the Confederates did at Fort Sumter, except even more outrageous.
And so isn't there a sense in which New York kind of deserves this?
You could say that of anybody breaking federal law.
There could be someone indicted on terror charges or a murderer on the lam.
And if New York harbors him, it's harboring a criminal.
It's violating federal law.
And that is a form of insurrection, right?
You're saying we're not following the laws of the United States of America.
So, like, why shouldn't Washington send troops here, like, immediately and make you obey, as Eisenhower did to Central High School in Little Rock in the 50s when they ignored Brown v.
Board?
You can't be out of compliance with federal law without getting the 101st Airborne, don't you think?
And if you want to come, if we control the border and make sure prior to people coming in, That you know where you're going and what you're doing, and not this free-for-all that we're seeing right now.
That is where the crises lie.
Real immigration reform is securing our borders, and I said it over and over again.
So rather than just say, well, we're just going to import people from Honduras or Paraguay or whatever, why don't we say, let's get our people working instead?
Here in New York, we've cut unemployment in those communities that you're talking about by over 20%.
Because you're right.
We need to make sure...
While we're filling those jobs, we need to make sure that we're looking after those who are in this country, for whatever reason, have barriers to unemployment.
We have been removing those barriers to unemployment, and it's still not filling the demands that we have in need of workers.
Not only here in New York.
You go across the country in those cities where you have a population problem, we need workers.
I care about when I sit down with my business leaders and my business leaders are saying, Eric, I have to close down a restaurant because I can't get workers.
So I believe that there's a solution and answer that starts with securing our borders, real immigration reform, removing those who are committing serious violent actions in our country, and continue the pursuit of the American dream.
The conflict, like, big picture, I know you feel this every day, I don't know if you'll admit it, is the conflict between the people who pay for everything in politics, not just on the Democratic side, by the way, also Republican side, but they're all rich white liberals, just to be honest, and then everybody else.
And it does seem like the values are just in conflict, like the people who pay for campaigns, not just yours, but everybody's, could care less, like what the subways are like.
And they could care less about the downstream effects of education, like public schools, they don't send their kids to public schools, they don't care.
Do you see that maybe this isn't a coalition that can continue?
I like that because people looked at particularly the real estate industry that was extremely supportive of my campaign.
They said, okay, listen, these are just rich real estate guys.
No.
When I walked in the room and I explained to them that if we don't fix our school system, the first thing someone will do when they go to buy property, they ask two questions.
How good are the schools?
How safe is the community?
I ran on better schools, safe communities.
And so, yes, maybe that affluent real estate owner is not sending his child to public school, but no one wants to bring their company here if you have bad schools and unsafe communities.
And so there is this symbiotic relationship, even if they're not directly connected to it.
They need safe streets.
Good schools in order to bring in those employees, those workers, those renters, those buyers.
What's overshadowing our success is how people are feeling because of random acts of violence.
You have to go back to 2009 when you take out the two COVID years to see our subway system safer.
We have over a billion riders.
4.5 million a day.
We have an average of six felonies a day out of those 4.5 million a day.
But none of that means anything when someone is burned to death on your subway system.
Or someone shoved you to the subway track.
But when you do a correlation of what's causing that fear, that anxiety, it's those with severe mental health issues.
We have been fighting with our state lawmakers as well as those advocates, again, that are trying to stop us from taking those with severe mental health illness off our streets.
And we have been successful in doing that.
8,000 people.
With mental health illness, we were able to remove off our subway system and put them into what we call safe haven.
So the real battle is dealing with the anxiety that people are feeling.
But this city has recovered.
More jobs in the city history, second largest tourism in city history.
Our subway system is safe back to the 2009 days of 20,000 illegal guns removed off our streets.
Our cops have stepped up.
No matter how bad they've been treated by some, they've stepped up and they've produced for the people of the city of New York.
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So here's, tell me what you think of this vision.
This is a liberal vision.
You want to do weird stuff at home, we're not going to bother you, we're not going to ask any questions, but it's kind of up to you because it's your life.
That's kind of the liberal idea.
Don't do it on the street.
You want to have a parade, put your junk away at the Pride Parade.
Don't have sex with people in ATMs.
Don't smoke weed on the street.
If you're a violent, crazy person, don't bark at people on the subway or push them in front of trains.
I mean, I'm, just for the record, I'm kind of against all immigration right now.
We have too much of it.
But I will also say...
I've never seen an African immigrant do anything like that.
Like, they're not marching around with their junk out in parades or whatever.
Like, we've buttoned down people coming into the country, and the longer they stay here, the more they decide, like, I've got to do this stuff on the sidewalk.
I mean, it's a very specific, affluent liberal culture that promotes doing all that stuff in public.
And I'm wondering why, like, why are they in charge of everything?
Have you ever wondered that? - Well, what happens is that if you push back on that that's the norm and that's what working class people want You get demonized.
Well, he hasn't announced, and I'm a firm believer, I'm not running against anyone.
I'm running against myself.
You know, Andrew Yang got into the race the last time.
He was 13 points up in the poll, and the team, we were very clear.
We have to run our race.
And so no matter who's in the race, I'm going to run my race, and I'm going to sell to New Yorkers what we did with this city and the reversal of where we were headed and where we're going now.
Well, no, that's exactly, and you're right, and I policed her in that era, and Bill Bratton, who I have a great deal of respect for.
And Jack Maple, as you mentioned.
Many people don't know that name, Jack Maple, but we owe a debt of gratitude to his commitment.
And that whole motto of just not accepting any and everything goals, I know how successful it is.
And that is the methodology that I believe and I live by because I police when you allow any and everything goals.
I was in the subway systems and I saw what our subway systems look like.
And so you have to go to the method, as Bill would say, you have to reclaim the city so that you can make sure it's doing the right thing for New Yorkers.
And we talked about, you know, how do we do things to work together to improve the city?
And as I told everyone, I'm not here to be warring with the president.
I'm here to work with the president.
And everyone should do that.
You have the mayor of Washington reached out and said the same thing after that.
The governor did the same thing.
People realized that you can't spend the next four years fighting.
We need to spend the next four years listening to the American people.
The popular vote, the electoral vote.
We can't be bigger than the American people.
And the American people are saying we need to do something about our borders.
We need to do something to make it easier to do business in the city.
We need to do things differently.
We need to be open to do that.
And, you know, we need to be clear with even if incoming president is talking about with the new visas of getting some of the intellectual talent into this into this country.
I think there's some great opportunities and we need to find out those areas of agreement.
This is the bicycle lobby from the west side who doesn't believe in cars in the first place, exerting undue influence once again on the mayor's office and shafting the people in Westchester, the outer boroughs, just want to drive their minivans into the city to do a day's labor.
And if it was up to me, we would have more waivers if we had to do it.
Because we have to think about our firefighters, our police officers, our teachers.
We were able to get some waivers.
We were able to get $100 million for the environmental communities that would be impacted.
But this was a decision by the MTA. The environmental communities?
Places like the Bronx, because people would be parking their cars there.
They would be trying to reroute themselves.
And some communities have a historical problem with environmental issues because of the Cross-Bronch Expressway and other issues that they had to deal with.
Years ago, because of the way our psychiatric wards, the draconian practices of those psychiatric wards, advocates came in and stated that it's wrong for people to be kept in these locations.
When we shut them down, we put them in the street.
No one thought through, well, what do we do?
Because, listen, we have to be honest with ourselves.
They are those who cannot take care of themselves.
They need complete care.
51% of our inmates at Rikers have mental health issues.
I believe it.
20% have severe mental health issues.
Yet we're closing the jail, open four new jails, just to create four more smaller Rikers.
I say let's turn one of them into a state-of-the-art mental health facility for outpatient, inpatient treatment.
This way we can deal with the population the way we should be.
And I don't know, Tucker, I don't know if it was from COVID. People were traumatized through COVID. I lost a lot of good friends through COVID. And some people lost loved ones and family members who took care of them when they were going through severe problems.
Some families were destroyed.
I've seen an increase after COVID or during COVID. I don't have any empirical data that can state that.
But we do need to look at it.
It's a national problem.
When I go across the country, I'm seeing the same problem.
And there's no real attempt to address it as much as I believe we should be.
What about all the people who were hesitant to take the vax, who didn't know enough or who were aware of, you know, previous incidents of the government lying about public health?
And a lot of them lost their jobs.
At the very least, they were yelled at and scolded by the Biden administration and by public health authorities here in New York.
Those were some real troubling, scary times when we were dealing with COVID. But when you have a scary time, what you can't do is isolate a vulnerable minority and blame them for everything, which is what they did.
Yeah, and I think that, you know, your love of history, that I think that sometimes when you're dealing with emergency, how we respond, we look back later and say, hey, could we have done things differently?
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