Opinion | Eric Adams Should Resign

The indictment of Eric Adams, unsealed Thursday by federal prosecutors, describes a dispiriting and profound violation of the trust New York voters once placed in the mayor to lead the nation’s largest city.

This is the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted. The charges against Mr. Adams are serious, including allegations that he misappropriated more than $10 million in public funds for his 2021 campaign. The mayor will have his day in court and is entitled to make a vigorous defense, but that does not mean he must force New York City to wait for him to prove his innocence under the law. To serve the city that elected him, Mr. Adams should immediately resign and turn City Hall over to someone untainted by criminal charges and endless investigations.

According to a federal grand jury, Mr. Adams accepted more than $100,000 worth of luxury travel benefits from the Turkish government for the better part of a decade, including discount air tickets and free hotel rooms and meals, and then used city resources to hide them from public view. He solicited and received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Turkish sources — though foreign donations are prohibited by law — and then conspired to cover his tracks by falsifying the names of the donors. He used the straw donors to improperly receive $10 million in public matching funds from the city for his campaign, the indictment says.

And when the Turks asked for payback, he is accused of providing it. The indictment says he used his influence, after he had won the mayoral primary in 2021, to set aside public safety regulations to allow a Turkish consular building to open without a required Fire Department inspection.

It added up to five federal criminal charges, including bribery, fraud and solicitation of illegal foreign campaign contributions. In the words of Damian Williams, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York: “These are bright red lines, and we allege that the mayor crossed them again and again for years.”

The challenge of governing the city is daunting for even the best mayors, and the specter of widespread corruption in the Adams administration has little precedent. There are nearly one million students in the school system, the nation’s largest, but the schools chancellor, under federal investigation, has submitted his resignation. There are about 34,000 officers in the nation’s largest Police Department, but the police commissioner resigned after federal officials seized his phone. The interim commissioner had his home raided by federal agents in an unrelated case after a week on the job.

Law enforcement also seized the phone of the deputy mayor for public safety, whose former security firm allegedly received a windfall in city business after Mr. Adams appointed him, The Times recently reported.

Other top city officials have also resigned, apparently no longer willing to associate themselves with the Adams administration. A further exodus of competent city administrators will only add to the chaos.

If he stayed in office, Mr. Adams would have to guide a City Hall that is now adrift, while facing a monthslong prosecution that will consume his attention and time. Concerns about his ethics and integrity would surely give potential replacements grave doubts about being a part of his administration. It is a task that would be a struggle for any elected official, but especially for one who has never been able to demonstrate a command over the city’s sprawling work force or point to major successes in the first three years of his term.

Mr. Adams began making his defense in a video on Wednesday night and at a news conference on Thursday. His performance, full of platitudes, was anything but reassuring. “Everyone who knows me knows that I follow the campaign rules and I follow the law,” he said. It’s an empty claim undermined by longtime associations with shady characters, including close friends with records as felons, and the constant swirl of misconduct that has plagued his administration from the start. His claim that he is the target of some undefined cabal with a grudge, rather than professional prosecutors, rang equally hollow.

The work of those prosecutors and investigators, who included the F.B.I. and the city’s Department of Investigation, is the only good news to come out of this sordid day in New York City history. The diligent work of these public servants showed that the mayor is not above the law, and that there remain strong institutions to hold public officials accountable for corruption.

Mr. Adams himself seems prepared to dig in.

“My day-to-day will not change,” he said, indicating that he would leave the legal case to his lawyers. “I will continue to do the job for 8.3 million New Yorkers that I was elected to do.”

Considering the weight of evidence against him, this is not believable. He would better serve his own case and the needs of the city’s 8.3 million residents by stepping down as mayor.

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