New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has found himself in hot water over the last couple of weeks due to circumstances that were totally within his control, namely, how he chooses to interact with critics including those on the left who make the mistake of hitting a little too close to the mark.
For instance, there was the community meeting in Washington Heights that Adams attended last Wednesday, where he was confronted by longtime NYC resident Jeanie Dubnau over the city’s Rent Guidelines Board recently approving rent increases for the second time in Adams’ tenure, something Adams – who is in charge of appointing members to the panel – indicated he supported.
After Dubnau, who is 84 and white, pointed fingers at Adams at about 100 or so feet away from him, Adams inexplicably pulled the race and power cards, calling her a “plantation owner” and demanding she respect the mayor’s office.
As it turned out, Dubnau and her family are Holocaust survivors, and she’s been a low-income housing advocate for people from all backgrounds for over four decades. When Adams was told this information during an interview, he instead doubled-down and refused to apologize.
Unfortunately for Adams, the hits keep on coming, as now the New York Times has come after him over a fallen officer photo story he has frequently told, finding a core component of the story – that he has been carrying around a photo of the officer in his wallet for over 30 years – isn’t true:
But the weathered photo of Officer [Robert] Venable had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet. It had been created by employees in the mayor’s office in the days after Mr. Adams claimed to have been carrying it in his wallet.
The employees were instructed to create a photo of Officer Venable, according to a person familiar with the request. A picture of the officer was found on Google; it was printed in black-and-white and made to look worn as if the mayor had been carrying it for some time, including by splashing some coffee on it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
Two former City Hall aides, who asked not to be identified, said they were informed about the manipulated photo last year, not long after it was created.
Watch Adams talk about Officer Venable (who was killed in the line of duty in 1987) below during the NYPD Medal Day Ceremony in June 2022:
When asked about the story he has often shared with voters, Adams told the Times that the photo was “always in my wallet until my wallet got too bulky.” So he lost the photo he had supposedly held so dear all that time and as a result his staff had to find another one via a Google search and make it appear old? Right.
Though the Times interviewed some of Venable’s family members as well as colleagues of both Adams and Venable and pointed out that the story of them being friends was true, they also noted that Adams has a Joe Biden-like tendency to embellish or make-up stories out of whole cloth, which is extremely problematic for a guy who has told New Yorkers in so many words to simply trust him not just to get the job done but also to keep it real when he communicates with them:
As mayor, Mr. Adams frequently shares personal recollections, helping him connect to his working-class base. Many of his stories are difficult to verify, and at times, he has been caught stretching the truth. The mayor, for example, said he was vegan before being forced to admit that he eats fish; he said that a story he told in a 2019 commencement address about intimidating a neighbor was true, but acknowledged it did not happen to him.
More recently, Mr. Adams’s claims to have sold his stake in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn were once again contradicted by recent financial disclosure forms that show he still retains ownership.
Already, Adams is taking hits on social media, with the New York Communities for Change tweeting out an altered Playbill image of Eric Adams as “The Lying King”:
— New York Communities for Change (@nychange) July 6, 2023
As I’ve said before, Adams won the New York City mayoral election in 2021 based in part on his portrayal of himself as a sane, common-sense Democrat, but all he’s done since taking office is to prove that such a thing is pretty danged close to extinction, something that was further confirmed by the Times report.
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