This Guy is the Future of the Democratic Party?
Rudy Giuliani, I guess, but I could be unfair to our Giuliani here. (I cannot f%$#ing believe that I just f%$#ing wrote that last bit.)
We already knew that Eric Adams was in the pocket of corrupt cops, and that he tried (in a barely legal way) to bribe city council members, had his chief fundraiser raided and had had his personal electronics seized by the FBI, made Rikers Island even more brutal, turned a blind eye to police overtime fraud, a Nixonesque devotion to illegal secrecy for his office, close ties to corrupt developers, violated or avoided the laws against nepotism, and has tried to ram a casino down the throats of New Yorkers.
I feel obliged to note here that this is not a complete list, it doesn’t come close, and I am not including his catastrophically bad policies, nor things like his statements implying that he is God’s anointed Mayor.
It’s no wonder that he is less popular than the human stain known as Andrew Cuomo.
Now, on top of everything else, we have a systematic program of straw donors to funnel money into the 2025 campaign for Adams' reelection: (Full disclosure, after I maxed out my donations to Howard Dean in 2004, I donated an additional $50.00 through a straw donor)
Three contributors to Mayor Eric Adams’ 2025 re-election campaign recounted in interviews in the past month how they — and in two cases their spouses — were reimbursed for a total of more than $10,000 in donations by hotel and construction executives in violation of state law.
The interviews came during a joint investigation by THE CITY, Documented, and The Guardian US into the presence in the mayor’s current campaign of illegal “straw” donations — contributions paid for by undisclosed sources in a way that masks their identity. Suspicions of such donations spurred the indictment by the Manhattan district attorney of a fundraising group involved in Adams’ 2021 race, which has led to two guilty pleas, and are part of an ongoing federal investigation into whether they’ve been used to veil illegal donations from the Turkish government.
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Three of the five reimbursements were linked to the owners of a hotel in Fresh Meadows, Queens, where the mayor’s director of Asian Affairs, Winnie Greco, lived for a number of months in late 2022 and the early part of 2023 — even as the site was operating under a city government subcontract as a shelter for formerly incarcerated individuals.
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She is the target of an ongoing probe by the city’s Department of Investigation following reporting by THE CITY in which two people alleged she used her position in the Adams’ administration for personal gain.
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The interviews with the three Adams donors took place in person at their homes and showed them to be seemingly unfamiliar with the rules governing donations. They each said they were paid back, in cash or by check, for contributions made last year of either $2,000 or $2,098.
An architect assistant from Long Island said that she and her husband were reimbursed by one of the owners of the Fresh Meadows hotel, Xiaozhuang Ge, for the $2,000 donations each made to Adams. A nurse from Bayside, Queens, said that a woman named Lan Mei, a relative and business associate of Ge’s wife, Weihong Hu, requested that his family donate $2,000 to Adams’ campaign and then reimbursed them in cash.
Another Adams donor, Sunny Yau, an employee for a heating and air conditioning company in The Bronx, said that he and his wife were reimbursed by his “boss” for contributions of $2,098 they each made last May. The employee declined to name his boss, but state records list the CEO of the small firm, SB HVAC Services Corp., as a Queens businesswoman named Hung Yau, who also donated to Adams. It is unclear whether or how the Yaus are related, but anti-straw donor regulations prohibit relatives from reimbursing donors.
Less than six months after the employees made the donations, SB HVAC Services Corp. and another HVAC company led by Hung Yau enrolled in New York City’s government contract portal — the first step toward applying for business with the city.
(emphasis mine)
I would note that these donations got taxpayer matching funds as well.
Needless to say, until the FBI raids late last year, many in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) were touting him as the future of the party because he spent so much time hippie punching.
Fail.
BTW, here is a quick picture of the connections:
