Eric Adams once maintained friendly relations with a nonprofit Turkish Cultural Center in Brooklyn. As a state senator, he met with its executive director in Albany. He attended the group’s annual dinner gala. As Brooklyn borough president, he worked with the center to distribute 1,500 pounds of meat to food pantries.
But around 2016, he suddenly stopped associating with it.
By that year, Adams had started accepting free travel from groups tied to the Turkish government, according to a criminal indictment against the mayor brought last week by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A senior Turkish diplomatic official told Adams that if he wanted to keep receiving those kinds of perks, he could no longer associate with the center, according to the indictment, which accuses Adams of bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions.
The reason for the ultimatum? The community center is dedicated to promoting the teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a cleric living in exile whom the Turkish government blames for fomenting an attempt to overthrow Turkey’s president in 2016. (Gülen has denied involvement.)
According to the indictment, Adams acquiesced.
Turkey’s extensive courting of Adams might seem odd. The Brooklyn borough president has little power, even in New York City government. When Adams ascended to the mayoralty eight years later, he still had no direct power over foreign policy.
But experts on foreign influence in the US said that efforts to curry favor with local officials are not unusual.
“Foreign governments try to influence people who are so much less influential than Eric Adams,” said Ben Freeman, director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “They would go so much lower than Adams to try and garner influence in the US.”
It’s the second time in the past month that a local or state official in New York has been accused of accepting payoffs from and taking action on behalf of a foreign government. In early September, federal prosecutors accused Linda Sun, then an aide to Governor Kathy Hochul, of accepting substantial economic and other benefits from China and the Chinese Communist Party, along with her husband.
Over the past decade, the federal Department of Justice has revitalized enforcement of a once-forgotten law that targets foreign efforts to influence domestic politics. That renewed focus began during the presidency of Donald Trump, when federal prosecutors brought a raft of cases against the former president’s aides.
Since then, the prosecution of such cases involving federal public officials have been on the rise. The cases against Adams and Sun could signal that prosecutors are expanding their sights to the local level.
“All of the previous indictments have been predominantly for folks in DC,” said Casey Michel, author of a new book on foreign agents in American politics.
But it’s likely there are “plenty of other local officials around the country that have been doing something similar,” Michel said. “And this is very much a shot across the bow for those officials.”
Adams became the first sitting New York City mayor ever indicted last week, when he was charged with five federal counts. He allegedly accepted over $100,000 in luxury travel benefits from wealthy Turkish businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official. Those benefits included premium seats on Turkish Airlines, which is partly owned by the Turkish government.
Adams has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has suggested the case is a politically motivated response to his criticism of the Biden administration.
Since his alleged 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, Gülen has been a major target for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Turkish officials have tried to make inroads at multiple levels of US government.
The year after the Turkish diplomat gave Adams an ultimatum, Trump aide Michael Flynn was federally prosecuted for lying to investigators about his own relationship to the country. Flynn was paid more than $500,000 to advance Turkey’s interests while he was simultaneously advising Trump’s 2016 campaign on national security issues. In 2021, Trump’s former counsel, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, reportedly faced a federal inquiry into whether he’d improperly lobbied for Turkey. Flynn and Giuliani were reportedly involved in Turkey’s unsuccessful efforts to have Gülen extradited from Pennsylvania.
The Adams indictment indicates that the Turkish government’s efforts to combat Gülen’s movement extended beyond the federal US government.
In 2016, Erdogan’s government hired the law firm Amsterdam & Partners to lead a “global investigation into the activities of the organization led by the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen.” That firm lobbied state lawmakers and attorneys general to investigate the network of charter schools operated by Gülen in the US, including in New York.
Groups supportive of Gülen had honed in on local government. In state legislatures across the country, nonprofit groups affiliated with the cleric have extensively sought support from state lawmakers. At least 151 state legislators from 29 states toured Turkey between 2006 and 2015, according to the Center for Public Integrity. The trips were sponsored by more than two dozen nonprofits associated with the Gülen movement.
Former Assemblymember Steven Cymbrowitz, who represented the large Turkish-American population in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay neighborhood, was among the Albany lawmakers who went on such a trip. Sheepshead Bay is home to the Turkish Cultural Center that Adams is said to have shunned.
In 2011, Cymbrowitz introduced a resolution honoring the 11 Turkish Cultural Centers across New York. Those centers, according to his resolution, “were first created by Fethullah Gulen, who has devoted his life to an altruistic service of encouraging open dialogue and peace amongst the nations.” The resolution had 13 other co-sponsors, including several from Brooklyn.
Adams is also facing a bribery charge for allegedly pressuring city fire department officials to open a high-rise embassy, constructed by the Turkish government, in time for President Erdoğan’s 2021 visit to New York. The opening was ultimately approved, despite significant concerns in the department over outstanding fire safety issues.
According to the indictment, the cost of building the so-called “Turkish House” became significant and was the topic of political debate in Turkey. But the glossy, 36-story building across from the United Nations was a symbol of Turkey’s growing influence for Erdoğan, who allegedly stated at a ceremony in 2017 that it was “a place worthy of our growing and developing country whose reputation is increasing in every field.”
Turkish officials continued courting Adams after he won the 2021 mayoral election. According to the indictment, an unnamed “Promoter” — who allegedly arranged straw donations for Adams’s campaigns — allegedly told the mayor-elect that he would “soon be President of the United States.” An unnamed senior official in the Turkish diplomatic establishment allegedly wrote to an Adams staffer that the foreign minister of Turkey “is personally paying attention to him.”
“This is another pattern we have seen play out,” Michel said. “You have this cultivation of local officials, with the expectation that they’re going to go on to do bigger and better things. And it’s good to get them when they’re at a local level, because no one’s paying any attention, and cultivate them early on.”
Turkey isn’t the only country keen to influence New York politics.
Federal prosecutors last month accused Sun, Hochul’s former deputy chief of staff, of taking substantial benefits from and acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party. She allegedly blocked Taiwanese officials from meeting with the Hochul administration and removed a reference to China’s mass detention of Muslim Uyghurs from a Hochul speech, among other alleged acts. Sun had previously held more junior positions in former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration. (The Hochul administration fired her and reported her to the authorities after it discovered misconduct.)
An attorney for Sun told CNN the charges were “inflammatory and appear to be the product of an overly aggressive prosecution.”
In Chinese foreign and domestic policy, there’s a major emphasis on “Taiwanese reunification, playing down concerns about what’s happening in Xinjiang with the Uyghurs, or in Tibet with the Tibetans,” Michel said.
“I’m sure they saw an opportunity in Albany with Linda Sun to expand that kind of playbook,” he said. “And then the folks in Beijing can go to their own higher ups and say, ‘Look, we’re having success in Albany. We are implementing President Xi’s vision. This is a model we could potentially replicate with other American states or other governments around the world.’”
Among some scholars, China is known for playing the long game in its efforts to sway foreign hearts and minds.
Turkish or Chinese officials may not have known exactly what Adams or Sun could do for them, said Zephyr Teachout, a former New York candidate for governor and professor at the Fordham University School of Law who has written extensively about corruption. But they were in position to make a difference.
“The quid is the payment — and the quo is when opportunities arise,” Teachout said. “I don’t know that the [foreign] governments beforehand would have individual actions targeted, as opposed to recognizing there’s going to be a lot of little moments where a thumb on the scale is going to matter.”
Concerning foreign policy, Teachout said, what federal officials think can often be “shaped by the locals.” Though they targeted lower rungs than Washington, DC, these campaigns still allegedly aimed their efforts at the country’s largest city and one of its biggest states.
Adams was not charged with acting as an agent for a foreign government, as Sun was.
Sun was charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires lobbyists and other people attempting to influence the government to disclose when they are being paid by foreign governments or political parties.
When fara passed in 1938, Michel argues in his book, it was the most progressive piece of lobbying legislation the country had ever seen. But over the decades, the law languished due to a lack of government resources. Enforcement focused on warnings, not prosecutions — until Donald Trump ran for president in 2016.
“It wasn’t until then,” Michel said, “that folks realized, ‘Oh, we might have an issue here.’”
Since then, there’s been a major uptick in federal criminal prosecutions regarding foreign influence. In the five decades leading up to 2016, the Justice Department made just seven indictments under FARA. In the eight years since, there have been more than 20.
Some scholars say this increase is due to an increase in foreign influence itself. “What you’ve seen in the last 10 years is a massive ramping up of foreign influence campaigns,” Teachout said.
Freeman pointed to an increase in influence operations disclosed in FARA filings and foreign government funding of think tanks as evidence of an upward trend. “All these different influence mechanisms that foreign governments use to gain a foothold in the US, across every single one, we’re seeing an uptick,” he said.
Others are less sure. “It’s hard to say if more foreign influence operations are happening in this way, or if there’s just more of an effort to actually address it,” said Anna Massoglia, who studies foreign influence at OpenSecrets, a nonprofit research organization.
During the special counsel investigation conducted by the former FBI director Robert Mueller — which focused on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — FARA became a revamped tool for federal prosecutors. Two of Trump’s campaign chairs were charged with failing to register as foreign agents.
Though Adams allegedly used American “straw donors” to accept illegal foreign contributions, in many instances, American lobbying firms or foreign agents are paid significant sums by foreign governments and then make significant donations to American politicians.
As long as the foreign payments aren’t made for the purpose of turning them into campaign donations, the latter practice is legal.
“There are dozens of ways, maybe hundreds, for these regimes to get funding to officials,” Michel said. “That’s what I hope is one of the upshots of the Adams indictment: To highlight just how easy it is for foreign regimes to get money directly into the pockets of American officials.”
