City Hall as seen on Sept. 14. (Credit: Eleanor Hildebrandt)
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is facing multiple federal charges and the prospect of a long trial. He is the first sitting mayor of New York City to be indicted while in office.
So, what now? Can he continue serving as mayor during his legal proceedings? Can he be forced to resign? And what about the upcoming elections?
Here are some answers to the questions occupying many New Yorkers today:
Can Adams continue to govern? There’s no law that requires the mayor to step down, even amid a criminal indictment.
“The issue will be about how much these charges act as a distraction in his role as a mayor in terms of the time it will take to fight these charges and his effectiveness in undertaking his responsibilities,” said Prof. Richard Briffault of Columbia Law School, who specializes in campaign finance, and state and local government. “The charges really undermine his ability to be effective. Some of these charges are very straightforward and will be very difficult to fight.”
What happens if Adams resigns? New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams is next in the line. Williams would then be required by the city charter to quickly announce a nonpartisan special election, to be held within the next 90 days. There would be no Democratic or Republican primaries before such an election.
If this happened, it would be the first time a public advocate has taken over for the mayor since the office was created in 1993.
If Adams doesn’t resign, can he be forced out? New York Gov. Kathy Hochul can remove Adams from office through a long process laid out in the city charter. If that happens, the same succession rules would apply; Williams would take over and call a special election. No governor has removed the city’s mayor before.
There is another scenario that involves a “Committee on Mayoral Inability” consisting of the corporation counsel (the city’s top lawyer), the comptroller, the City Council speaker, a deputy mayor designated by the mayor, and the borough president with the longest continuous tenure. If four of the five members of that committee concur, they can declare the mayor unable — temporarily or permanently — to discharge his duties. If two-thirds of the City Council agrees with this committee, the mayor would have to step down and the same succession rules would apply.
Who would be on that committee, and what do they think? City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams on Thursday came close, but stopped short of, calling for the mayor’s resignation: “I ask the mayor to seriously and honestly consider whether full attention can be given to our deserving New Yorkers who need our government to be sound and stable.”
Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor as a Democrat, has called upon Adams to resign.
Muriel Goode-Trufant is the acting corporation counsel, in the absence of a City Council-approved appointee. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards has the longest tenure, dating back to December 2020. Neither of them had made public remarks on the indictment by Thursday evening.
There are seven deputy mayors under Adams. Two of them – Sheena Wright and Philip Banks III – have had their homes raided and electronic devices seized by FBI agents in connection with investigations into the mayor and his staff. Neither has been formally accused of wrongdoing.
What about next year’s mayoral election? The primaries will be held on June 24. If Adams resigns or is removed from office 90 days before the primaries, there would be no special election. Instead, the position would be filled immediately after a winner emerges in the general election on Nov. 4, 2025.
What happens if Adams is convicted? There is no law that would force Adams to exit the mayoral race if he is found guilty of receiving illegal foreign contributions, said Erin Chlopak, senior director of campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center. “Federal campaign finance law does not have the ability to impose, as a consequence, the removal of someone from a position or prohibit them from running for office,” Chlopak said, adding that state and city laws are superseded by federal statutes because the case involves foreign donors.
Another area of concern is the use of the city’s public-financing system which allows candidates to receive matching funds for qualifying small-donor contributions, Chlopak said. The indictment accuses Adams of disguising funds using straw donors – who use their own names to make donations on another’s behalf – to receive matching funds from the government.
When will the trial start? Adams has called for an “immediate trial” to exonerate himself. The case is assigned to Judge Dale E. Ho in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Adams will appear with his attorney Alex Spiro at an arraignment on Friday, where the judge will set bail and a trial date.
How long could the case go on? The timeline for white-collar cases tends to be drawn out, said Robert McCampbell, a former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma and former assistant U.S. Attorney in the office’s financial fraud unit.
“Normally, a defendant agrees to waive the Speedy Trial Act, particularly in white-collar cases like this,” he said. “Then the trial is scheduled to take place months later. It would not be unusual that it would take more than a year to get a white-collar case like this to trial.”
Caleb Burns, a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Wiley Rein, has been retained as an expert in numerous federal prosecutions of state and local officeholders.
“The timeline could be long,” Burns said. “It is now a legal calculation by the mayor’s attorneys to assess how much time they need to mount a vigorous defense versus the political calculation of how long the mayor wants this to hang over his head.”
McCampbell said the defense will need time to catch up with prosecutors, who have been working on the case for a long while.
“It’s not like the movies where a person gets charged and convicted and it’s wrapped up in a neat little bow,” he said. “It’s not unusual to take more than a year to get something like this to trial. In the meantime, Mayor Adams — like any other white-collar defendant — will go about his business.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of matching funds that the Adams campaign was accused of receiving from the city.
About the author(s)
Eleanor Hildebrandt, originally from Iowa, is a Stabile investigative fellow at Columbia Journalism School. She was a Fulbright Scholar and has previous bylines in Iowa Capital Dispatch and PolitiFact.
Deep Vakil is a Stabile Investigative Fellow at Columbia Journalism School, who previously covered global energy markets and companies for Reuters.