Eric Adams Is Accused of Taking Foreign Bribes. But the Bigger Scandal Is How Much Foreign Influence Is Legal.
The reality is foreign countries are constantly influencing our officials -- and it's all totally legal.
New York City politics was thrown into chaos this week when Mayor Eric Adams was indicted by federal prosecutors. The allegations, which you can read here, include bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting illegal campaign donations.
The charges revolve around an apparent influence operation by the government of Türkiye (he’s also under investigation for his ties to as many as five other countries but so far charges have only been brought for one).
As part of that operation, Adams benefitted from luxury travel arrangements made by a mix of Turkish businessmen and “at least one Turkish government official,” according to the indictment, which you can read in full here.
Although Adams, like anyone else, deserves a presumption of innocence, these are serious allegations. Circumventing U.S. laws designed to prevent foreign campaign donations and the disclosure of foreign gifts are serious crimes. We have these laws for a reason, and it’s reasonable to expect public officials to follow them.
For instance, one of the allegations against Adams is that he accepted free or heavily discounted airfare from Turkish Airlines as well as “free rooms at opulent hotels, free meals at high-end restaurants, and free luxurious entertainment while in Turkey.”
The quid pro quo alleged here is that the Turks sought, among other things, a promise that Adams would make no statement about the Armenian Genocide (and indeed he didn’t).
But looking over the indictment, one thing that struck me was how unusual it is for an American public official to actually run afoul of the law for accepting foreign gifts and being influenced by foreign actors.
In my fifteen years working in and around politics and journalism, I’ve encountered on all kinds of foreign influence that is perfectly legal.
As one example, the D.C. think tank where I once worked, the Center for American Progress (CAP), regularly solicited funds from foreign countries like the United Arab Emirates. Not only would the UAE fund CAP’s budget, but it would fly senior staffers at the think tank — people who once worked in government and regularly communicated with people staffing the presidential administration — to wine and dine in the Emirates. CAP then argued for the Emirates’s positions in Washington. (After enough critical press, including by yours truly, CAP finally disowned Emirates money in 2019.)
CAP was no outlier. Many major think tanks in Washington were doing the same thing — taking money from foreign governments, arranging lavish overseas travel with them, and then arguing for their policy positions before the government. Not only was this legal, but there is no requirement for these organizations to disclose their foreign funding. Journalists typically rely on whistleblowers to trace the flow of foreign dollars.
During the dispute between Gulf countries between 2017 and 2021, Qatari, Emirati, and Saudi money was flying everywhere in Washington, but most of it was never officially disclosed.
But there is a flow of foreign influence that’s right out in the open. Foreign-funded nonprofits regularly pay for Members of Congress and their staff to fly all over the world as part of educational trips. Unlike funding to think tanks and other nonprofits, this funding does have to be disclosed.
In the past year (Sept. 2023 through Sept. 2024) I found a little over 2,000 entries for gift travel filings from the House of Representative’s online disclosure system.
Many of these trips are domestic flights paid for by organizations interested in domestic issues, but many other trips are conducted overseas and paid for by interest groups who lobby on foreign policy.
One of the most popular destinations is Israel. There are 109 filings over the past year related to trips sponsored by groups interested in Israel policy. Most of these trips were sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), which operates on behalf of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Benny Stanislawski, who works as the Communications Director for New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres, went on one of these trips alongside other House staffers over the summer. Torres, if you’ll recall, is one of the House Democrats most supportive of the current U.S.-Israel relationship (maybe someone can send him this article, he blocks me on Twitter).
In the related filing, Stanislawski noted that he is “often helping” the congressman “craft his messaging regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Having a greater understanding of the situation on the ground since October 7 will help me advise the Congressman.”
The breakdown of expenses shows you that the trip cost AIEF a pretty penny.
Why would AIEF spend this kind of money to send House staffers overseas to Israel? If you dig through the filing you’ll also find the trip itinerary. You’ll see that staffers who took this trip were being shuttled from one location to another to hear from Israeli lawmakers, military officials, media figures, and think tanks. During the week-long affair, there is one hour that staffers get to meet with a Palestinian. In this case, it was Ibrahim Dalalshe — a consultant in Ramallah who previously worked for the U.S. government.
There are no human rights organizations, not even Israeli ones like B’tselem or Breaking the Silence who are included on these trips. Participants don’t go to segregated cities like Hebron in the West Bank, and there is no Palestinian voice offered besides those who are carefully vetted by Israeli or U.S. government officials to offer a very specific point of view.
In recent years, the progressive group J Street has started doing its own trips that take Members and their staff to meet not only with Israeli establishment officials but also with Palestinians and human rights activists, but J Street has a tiny budget compared to AIPAC and is easily outgunned.
It’s easy to brush this off as a nothingburger. OK, an interest group sets you up with a foreign government and sends you on a vacation complete with fancy hotels for a week where you hear that government’s perspective. Does this really influence your beliefs?
Well, the interest groups and foreign governments that arrange these trips sure seem to think they do. If you want to make sure you a member of the most powerful legislative body in the country is amenable to your point of view, just get a friendly nonprofit to send them on an all-expenses paid trip where they’re a captive audience for your government. And while Israel is one of the most common locations for these luxury lobbying trips, it is hardly the only one.
Another way that foreign countries legally influence American officials is by handing them jobs or other favors after they leave office. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a former Trump administration official, famously helped negotiate the Abraham Accords, where Israel was able to normalize relations with a range of countries including the United Arab Emirates.
After leaving office, Kushner’s private equity fund benefitted from an investment of over $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, one of the countries he spent time negotiating with as a Trump official.
When asked about the investment, Kushner was defensive. "If you ask me about the work that that we did in the White House, for my critics, what I say is point to a single decision we made that wasn't in the interest of America," he said.
It’s possible Kushner really believes that everything he did on behalf of foreign countries who later ended up paying him was really in the interest of the United States. Maybe Members of Congress and their staff jet-setting around the Middle East believe the same thing. Perhaps Adams really does think it’s in New York City’s interest to deny the Armenian Genocide.
This calls into mind that old quip from Upton Sinclair: “It's difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
The fact is, when people in politics are rewarded for saying or doing something, they tend to stay the course. It’s good to be loved, let alone lavished with gifts from foreign interests.
I’ve been offered similar foreign-sponsored trips myself, and I always turned them down. I’m not saying that to brag. Admitting that you are capable of being influenced by money and the comforts associated with travel, lodging, and delicious food is admitting your fragility. I’m fragile, and I don’t pretend otherwise.
There are a million ways foreign interests legally influence American officials. Maybe Adams’s sin was less that he was influenced and more that he was just a bit too sloppy in the way he went about it.
I have to wonder if this is selective prosecution based on Adams' willingness to challenge the administration re illegal immigrants. In any case, anything he did/took is of almost no consequence. On the other hand, when foreign leaders get standing ovations in congress and $Billions to take home, that is extremely consequential.
>It’s possible Kushner really believes that everything he did on behalf of foreign countries who later ended up paying him was really in the interest of the United States.
Yeah, getting 2 billion dollars from a foreign country is pretty questionable no matter what you did. Still, it's hard to see how getting Saudi Arabia and Israel to make peace is bad for America. At worst it's neutral. I would just call that payment for a job well done and move on. Definitely much more suspicious than anything Adams did though.