If l’affaire Eric Adams wasn’t looking fishy enough already, there’s potentially another Adams involved in the New York Democratic establishment’s attempt to engineer the New York City mayoral race — courtesy, in part, of the New York state attorney general who went after President Donald Trump.
According to a Politico report on Wednesday evening, New York Attorney General Letitia James is among those trying to recruit retiring New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams to run for City Hall.
The move comes as New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is intimating she may remove Mayor Eric Adams after the Department of Justice dismissed corruption charges for the moment and he started cooperating with the Trump administration’s border czar on deporting illegal immigrants.
However, that move comes with a potential backside for both Hochul and James: the potential return of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned amid multiple scandals regarding sending COVID patients back into nursing homes and alleged sexual harassment of employees.
If Adams is taken out of the picture by Hochul, that could open the door to Cuomo making a comeback as New York City mayor — something James, who led the investigation into Cuomo’s alleged misdeeds and then ran (unsuccessfully) for the position he was forced to resign from (not a shady look at all), doesn’t want to see happen.
Hochul, who took over for Cuomo after his resignation and became the nominee, also likely doesn’t want to see him take over — although she’s not part of the effort to get Adrienne Adams onto the ballot.
Instead, the question is whether or not she can or will remove Adams from office before he can start cooperating in earnest with the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement; as Politico noted, the current mayor “appears to have a near-impossible path to re-election,” although never say never.
However, Hochul still says she’s willing to consider using a provision of the state constitution never invoked against a sitting mayor to get him out of office after several of her allies quit after Trump’s DOJ dismissed the charges until at least after the election.
“In the 235 years of New York State history, these powers have never been utilized to remove a duly-elected mayor; overturning the will of the voters is a serious step that should not be taken lightly,” Hochul said in a statement.
Will Eric Adams be removed?
“That said, the alleged conduct at City Hall that has been reported over the past two weeks is troubling and cannot be ignored.”
As Dan McLaughlin of National Review noted, it’s funny that she decided to take this step now that he’s cooperating with ICE on enforcing federal law as opposed to, say, when he was charged:
Note that she didn’t even contemplate this when he was indicted for corruption for being on the Turkish payroll. Only when he agreed to cooperate with the enforcement of federal law. https://t.co/WOPlPnoHXt
— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) February 18, 2025
Nevertheless, this leaves everyone in a pretty problematic position, considering that no matter what happens, the lawfare campaign against the law-and-order Adams has left an opening for a comeback for Andrew Cuomo.
“Cuomo — who resigned from the governorship in 2021 amid sexual misconduct charges that he denies — is leading the polls and expected to jump into the race in the coming weeks,” Politico noted.
“He has a $7.7 million state warchest he can hand over to a PAC controlled by an ally. But while he remains the best known candidate in the race, recent polling shows he has both relatively high positive and negative numbers with voters. He is already the target of every other candidate, and many Democratic leaders privately shudder at the prospect of dealing with his aggressive style of governance.”
That likely includes James — which is why she’s “among those making phone calls promoting the council speaker’s potential candidacy, according to nine people familiar with the outreach.”
So, too, are public labor unions.
“Leaders of District Council 37, the largest municipal union in New York, are also supporting the effort, according to three people familiar with the conversations who were granted anonymity to freely discuss private strategy,” Politico noted.
“Union president Henry Garrido would only say the labor organization will undergo a standard candidate endorsement process.”
That being said, James’ involvement is the most troublesome. Lest we forget, this isn’t just the woman who spearheaded the Cuomo investigation that eventually hounded him from an office she wanted. She also managed to secure a ludicrous $454 million fraud judgment against the Trump Organization in a sham of a last-minute campaign-year trial regarding the alleged overvaluation of assets — although it was mostly a design to disrupt the candidate’s finances.
Now that that’s failed at precluding that, she’s part of the effort to disrupt the Trump administration’s efforts, ordering hospitals in the state to continue transgender procedures on children in defiance of the president’s executive order banning them for all facilities receiving grant funds, and she’s one of 22 state attorneys general to sign on to a document pledging resistance to any challenge to birthright citizenship.
And now, she suddenly realizes that now that one of her top enemies is back in power at the White House, she wants to make life harder for another one of her targets.
Not to say that either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams has clean hands — I’m very much sure the first doesn’t, and the second will likely be for a court to decide, eventually — but Kathy Hochul potentially removing Adams from office and Letitia James recruiting candidates to make sure Cuomo doesn’t make a comeback isn’t a good look, either.
It’s enough to make you wonder what it would take for New York to vote for a real Republican for New York City-wide or statewide office. Naturally, they’d probably be charged with murdering Julius Caesar the next day by James’ office, along with accomplices Brutus and Cassius — the last two being dead, of course, but probably still regular New York Democratic voters.
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