Some Eric Adams scandals may have been avoided if New York tightened up its laws on travel expenses.
When Eric Adams went on vacation less than a month before his mayoral inauguration, the trip raised a few eyebrows. Few members of his staff knew exactly where Adams was going. Some officials believed the New York Post that he was headed to Europe. Others guessed he was going “off the beaten path.”
Adams ended up flying to Ghana on a “spiritual journey” where he visited historic sites significant to the transatlantic slave trade and tweeted a photo of himself performing a cleansing ritual. A spokesman said the excursion was a family vacation and occurred without any press or campaign officials.
But West Africa wasn’t his original destination, according to the mayor’s federal indictment. That fall, Adams had an aide book a pair of round-trip tickets to Pakistan through his contact at Turkish Airlines, a company part-owned by the Turkish government. The economy class tickets at the time reportedly cost $1,436.
Four days before his trip, Adams switched destinations to Accra and scored a business class upgrade, which Turkish Airlines provided at no extra cost. Those tickets would have cost Adams $14,000 if he had paid for them out of pocket.
The flight included a nine-hour layover in Istanbul, where Adams was chauffeured to an expensive restaurant with a Turkish government leader. Adams wanted Turkish officials to keep the Turkey leg of his trip confidential; they agreed not to take any photos.
Reyhan Özgür, consul general of Turkey to New York, reminded Adams’ aide of who was footing the bill, writing, “We will take care of the layover in Istanbul. Don’t let the [airline manager] confuse [Adams]. We are the state.” After the trip, Özgür checked in again, asking, “Was Eric satisfied?... It’s okay if he is happy. Is Eric happy then?” The staffer responded, “He is very happy. He is sending you his thanks.”
The charging of Adams with federal crimes this fall was a shocking political moment, but at the heart of the case is an unexceptional perk that many politicians enjoy: trips abroad paid for by foreign governments or by groups with vested interest in particular policy priorities.
On September 26, federal prosecutors charged Adams with conspiracy, bribery and wire fraud for accepting foreign campaign donations and $123,000 in luxury travel expenses on Turkey’s national airline in exchange, they say, for expediting fire safety approvals for a Manhattan skyscraper that housed Turkey’s diplomatic missions. Prosecutors assert that since Adams was Brooklyn borough president, he cultivated relationships with Turkish officials to expand his donor network and to fly to multiple international destinations at a steep discount.
Federal law is very clear that foreign nationals cannot give campaign donations to politicians, because that’s allowing non-Americans to meddle in American elections. But state and city ethics laws regarding travel, hotels, meals and other gifts are more permissive, and nebulous.
Both laws have given New York politicians enormous leeway with who pays for their travel expenses. Under state law, elected officials and state employees are barred from accepting gifts above $75 from an “interested source,” or someone who does business with the state or hopes to in the future and wants to affect decisions. (Statewide elected officials must submit a request for their travel expenses or reimbursements from third parties to the state commission on ethics and lobbying.)
According to the convoluted law, a gift is “presumptively prohibited unless it is not reasonable to infer that it was intended or expected to influence you or intended as a reward for official action.” Or it is “ordinarily permissible unless it could be reasonably inferred that the gift was intended or expected to influence you or intended as a reward for official action.” In other words, if the gift is not an obvious attempt at bribing a government official, then it can be allowed.
Elected officials and staff members who allow a third party to pay for their travel and lodging can consider those gifts part of the job of public service, as long as the trip is for a city purpose and is not longer than necessary.
Government watchdogs say that’s preposterous.
“There’s no such thing as free money,” John Kaehny, executive director of the Albany-based ethics reform group Reinvent Albany, told me. “These gifts of travel all come with strings attached. They are intended to influence.”
City laws and rules are even more permissive when it comes to travel expenses. Elected officials and staff members who allow a third party to pay for their travel and lodging can consider those gifts part of the job of public service, as long as the trip is for a city purpose and is not longer than necessary. City employees who are not elected officials must get approval for any trips in advance by the head of their agency.
While state and city laws open the door to foreign junkets, the Supreme Court has made enforcement of federal laws barring quid pro quos more difficult. In 2016, the high court unanimously vacated former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell’s fraud and extortion conviction, ruling that McDonnell did not seek to give favors to a Virginia businessman after accepting $175,000 in vacations and gifts from him.
Since then, the court has reversed four other convictions, including one involving former Cuomo gubernatorial aide Joe Percoco, narrowing the standard for what constitutes public corruption.
No wonder New York politicians have not been deterred from traveling on someone else’s dime. Nonprofits including the Jewish Community Relations Council and UJA-Federation frequently organize “study tours” that shuttle elected officials on multi-day missions to Israel, which have garnered criticism from leftist Jewish organizations. Four City Council members failed to disclose that JCRC paid for their travel-related expenses to the Holy Land in November 2022, amounting to $5,000 to $7,500 per person.
Other foreign trips have been less polarizing and received less attention. Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute paid a $20,000 tab to send City Comptroller Brad Lander and seven Council members to Denmark to learn about social housing and green infrastructure this spring. The City Council’s Irish caucus has a trip to Ireland in the works this year.
Turkish Airlines wasn’t the only entity that covered Adams’ globetrotting. The nonprofit Combat Antisemitism Movement took care of the mayor’s lodging and flights to Athens, Greece for a conference as well as his flight to Doha, Qatar for the 2022 World Cup. Then last year, the U.S. Mexico Foundation and the Colombian government picked up the bill for the mayor’s asylum-seeker fact-finding journey to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, despite Adams’ insistence that he paid his own way.
To be sure, many trips that public officials take have educational benefits, allowing political leaders to see how infrastructure works in other places, learn governance best practices or attend a conference that addresses complex problems. Politicians are also certainly entitled to go on vacations now and then.
But it’s fair to ask why the job of a mayor or city or state lawmaker should include jet-setting to meet directly with foreign governments and interests on pricey junkets sponsored by those very same governments and interests. This is especially true in a political age when leaders of other countries have tried to leverage American state-level and local leaders' appearances into propaganda victories in their homelands, and dissuade American elected officials from criticizing their human rights records.
The most straightforward way to fix the law is to ban all travel that is paid for by third parties. If a trip is truly necessary for an elected official or their staff’s duties, their office’s budget — meaning, taxpayers — should cover its expense. If and when the public pays for such travel, that would have to go hand in hand with additional transparency and oversight.
Some might say it’s too much to expect taxpayers to cover plane tickets and hotel rooms when there are willing private-sector funders, but it’s a small price to pay to ensure integrity.
Eliminating that “interested source” loophole would prevent well-heeled entities from influencing New York officials. And it might make politicians feel some shame for taking a gift accorded to them because of their position of power in the first place.
The most straightforward way to fix the law is to ban all travel that is paid for by third parties. If a trip is truly necessary for an elected official or their staff’s duties, their office’s budget — meaning, taxpayers — should cover its expense.
There’s reason to believe that could occur. When Gov. Kathy Hochul made a three-day “solidarity mission” to Israel a few weeks after the Oct. 7 attacks last year, the UJA Federation agreed to foot the $12,000 bill for her and her staff’s flights even though the state ethics commission had not approved the arrangement. After several days of questions from the press over who paid for the trip, Hochul changed her mind and announced the state would cover the cost.
Kaehny of Reinvent Albany believes it would be easier for the City Council than the state Legislature to pass a law banning third-party travel. While it’s true that the mayor’s scandal has created a clear opening — and a supermajority of left-wing Democrats could override a veto — the Council has shown little interest in gift bans beyond rudimentary ex post facto financial disclosures with the Conflict of Interest Board.
“Special interests that love to pay for travel are politically influential because they love to pay for travel,” Kaehny said. “A lot of these issues with corruption risk are from public officials and elected officials themselves. They don’t want to curb the opportunities for freebies but this is such an obvious one.”