Dec. 16, 2024, 2:54 p.m. ET
New York City’s campaign finance system is one of the best of its kind in the nation at reducing the influence of big money in local politics, and the best way to ensure it stays that way is to keep Mayor Eric Adams and other shady politicians as far from it as possible. The Campaign Finance Board did just that on Monday when it barred Adams from receiving any public matching funds for his re-election campaign, after he was accused of blatantly abusing the system in a federal indictment in September.
But Adams never should have received matching funds for his initial campaign in 2021, and the city still has a few steps to take to prevent that kind of mistake from happening again.
The board’s action on Monday — which it attributed to “conduct detrimental to the matching funds program” by Adams — deprives the Adams campaign of as much as $4.3 million in matching funds, which could be a crippling blow in a race in which competitors are already lining up to challenge the mayor. In 2021, he received $10 million in public funds, and the federal indictment said some portion of that was improper, because Adams solicited illegal foreign campaign donations that were falsely attributed to local straw donors to get the city’s match.
If the finance board had agreed to Adams’s request for a match this year, it would have sent a pretty clear message to other politicians that there are no consequences for straw-donor fraud and that the city’s treasury is open for looting. “Access to public dollars is not an automatic privilege,” said Joanna Zdanys, who works on campaign finance issues at the Brennan Center for Justice, in a statement. “It must be earned through compliance with strict standards of accountability and transparency.”
But the board needs to improve its own accountability. In 2021, it spotted some questionable donations to the Adams campaign and asked the campaign for documentation. Adams ignored the request but got the matching funds anyway. City Councilman Lincoln Restler has proposed a new law that would cut off matching funds for politicians who ignore requests and would require the board to look more closely at money raised through intermediaries. The Council should make that a priority, even if it has to override a veto by Adams.
The mayor, meanwhile, is more occupied with bending the knee before Donald Trump than he is with leading the city, seemingly in the hopes that Trump will pardon him. On Monday, perhaps sensing a kinship with someone with a similar contempt for good governance, Trump said he would consider such a pardon. That may leave Adams free to run again without legal encumbrances, but at least the taxpayers won’t have to foot the bill for it.
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