Eric Adams’s Reelection Campaign is off to a Janky Start

New York City Mayor Eric Adams experienced some awkward technical difficulties on Wednesday while phoning in to NewsMax from his car to offer criticism of Democratic Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. 

“Yes, can you hear me now? Hello? I can hear you fine, can you hear me?” Adams said in response to a question from the anchor about how “terrifying” Mamdani is. 

After almost 30 seconds he figured it out. 

“And you’re correct, when you think about [Mamdani’s] comments about our law enforcement officers who … they put their lives on the line all the time, and every day, His comments towards them were extremely offensive.” 

This was the second stop of Adams’s anti-Mamdani fearmongering campaign. The embattled mayor also made a chummy appearance on Fox & Friends that morning. 

“He’s a snake oil salesman. He will say and do anything to get elected,” said Adams.Think about this one moment. He wants to raise tax on the 1 percent of New Yorkers, higher income earners. As the mayor you don’t have the authority to do that. You know who has the authority to do that? An assemblyman, which he is. He wants to do free buses, he could’ve done it at assemblyman. He doesn’t understand the power of government and how you must make sure you improve your economy, raise the standard of living, and this is what we’ve done in the city … I’m never going to quit for the city that I love.”  

The current mayor has absolutely no ground to stand on here. He became embroiled in scandal after he was federally indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting political donations from a number of foreign nationals connected to the Turkish government. The only reason he isn’t still being investigated, on trial, or even in prison is because he bent over backwards to make himself useful to President Trump and ICE. 

Adams is running a campaign that no one in New York City wants. All he can do is talk about how scary MAmdani is because his own platform is devoid of legitimacy. 

Adams and Mamdami, among others, will face off in the general election on November 4th. 

Donald Trump is now targeting journalists by name as he spirals about the leaked Pentagon report undermining his claims about the U.S. military strikes in Iran.

Trump called out CNN’s national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand in a post on Truth Social Wednesday, after she reported on an “early assessment” that found that the American military strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities had only set the country’s capabilities by months—not years.

“Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out ‘like a dog,’” Trump railed.

In his post, the president claimed Bertrand had “lied” in her reporting about Iran, because she had also lied in her reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

In 2020, Bertrand had reported on a letter signed by more than 50 former senior intelligence officials who said that the allegedly leaked emails from Biden’s computer had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Since it was first reported on, the laptop has proved to be authentic, but many of Republicans’ allegations that it tied the Bidens to corrupt foreign business dealings have not been proven. But Bertrand wasn’t lying. She accurately and dispassionately reported on an official document—it just happened to say something with which Trump disagreed.

Now, Trump claimed that Betrand was “attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit ‘pay dirt’—TOTAL OBLITERATION!”

“She should not be allowed to work at Fake News CNN. It’s people like her who destroyed the reputation of a once great Network. Her slant was so obviously negative, besides, she doesn’t have what it takes to be an on camera correspondent, not even close. FIRE NATASHA!” Trump wrote.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also took a swipe at Bertrand in a post on X. “This CNN story was written by the same ‘reporter’ who wrote the very first FAKE NEWS story claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation,” wrote the preternaturally antagonistic Leavitt.

CNN released a statement Wednesday defending Bertrand and her reporting. “We stand 100% behind Natasha Bertrand’s journalism and specifically her and her colleagues’ reporting of the early intelligence assessment of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities,” the statement said. “CNN’s reporting made clear that this was an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence. We have extensively covered President Trump’s own deep skepticism about it.”

The president, who was quick to claim that the mission was a complete success, had been fuming about the report all day at a NATO summit, claiming that the intelligence had been “very inconclusive.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth dismissed the report as “low assessment,” meaning there was low confidence in the data. Hegseth, who oversaw the agency where the leak originated, was also quick to blame the media who reported on it.

The White House is planning on getting less transparent under Donald Trump’s watch.

The Trump administration is planning to limit the amount of classified information it shares with Congress, four sources told Axios Wednesday. That will involve posting less on CAPNET, a system used to share information between the White House and Congress, as part of a “war on leakers,” one senior White House official told the publication.

The decision follows an intelligence leak Tuesday that revealed the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities was less successful than the president had advertised.

The attack, conducted Saturday without the express approval of Congress, damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. A battle damage assessment by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm determined that the missile barrage only set Iran’s nuclear program back by a few months, rather than the “years” that Trump had advertised, CNN reported. The report was put on CAPNET late Monday, and by Tuesday afternoon, several outlets had already written about the back-channel evaluation.

“Go figure: Almost as soon as we put the information on CAPNET, it leaks,” an administration source told Axios. “There’s no reason to do this again.”

The White House immediately rejected the report Tuesday, rebuffing the whistleblower as a “low-level loser,” though it still acknowledged that the report had been classified as “top secret.” On Wednesday, the administration had apparently thrown the U.S. intelligence out the window altogether, siding instead with a narrative pushed by the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission that the attacks had “rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.”

“The FBI is investigating the leak,” one source told Axios. “The intelligence community is figuring out how to tighten up their processes so we don’t have ‘Deep State’ actors leaking parts of intel analysis that have ‘low confidence’ to the media.”

But the decision isn’t likely to sit well with public representatives, who were already frustrated and upset by the president’s decision to keep them in the dark ahead of conducting airstrikes on Iran: Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traded barbs with Trump after she wrote online that the unauthorized attack is grounds for impeachment, while Republican Representative Thomas Massie argued that war with Iran was not constitutional, chastising House Republican leadership for failing to call lawmakers back to Congress at such a critical time.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi considers senior Justice Department official Emil Bove, who attempted to lie to a federal judge to speed up deportations, to be one of the “best human beings” she knows.

On Wednesday, Bondi was questioned by Senator Chris Van Hollen over recent disclosures from Justice Department whistleblower Erez Reuveni, who was fired by the Trump administration after admitting that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was an “administrative error.” Now Reuveni claims that Bove, at a meeting ahead of the invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798, told attendees to tell the courts “fuck you” and ignore any court orders that may stop a plane from taking off or a detainment from occuring.

“[Reuvini] says he was fired because he didn’t want to make an untruthful statement to a court of law,” said Van Hollen. “I have two questions. Number one, I assume you agree that zealous advocacy does not mean telling untruths to courts of law. And second, if that’s not the case, what do you mean by saying he was not a zealous advocate?”

Van Hollen hadn’t even named Bove, but Bondi immediately took it as an attack on her colleague.

“Senator Van Hollen, this is all pending litigation, as you’re well aware, and the timing of it. I can’t discuss pending litigation. This is a whistleblower lawsuit pending within my office, but I will say the timing of it I find suspect,” Bondi replied. “He takes hits at Emil Bove, who is one of the best human beings I know, one of the smartest, brilliant men I know, who will soon become a federal judge, and his hearing happens to be today, and I find the irony of the timing of it pretty remarkable, the lawsuit, but this had to do with attorney-client privilege information that was disclosed. I can’t talk about the substance, but what I will tell you, and you have obviously my word, any zealous advocacy means to be done ethically and honestly, always. And that’s what I mean by zealous advocacy.”

Bove is currently going through confirmation for a lifetime appointment to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Aside from the open corruption he’s accused of by Reuveni, Bove also unsuccessfully defended Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, was key in dropping the multiple corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his loyalty, fired prosecutors who investigated January 6 and accused the FBI of “insubordination” for not turning over the names of other staffers who worked on the investigation, and as a New York state prosecutor was described by colleagues as someone who could not “be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.”

Emil Bove struggled to answer simple questions about his work at the Department of Justice during a hearing before the Senate Wednesday.

Last month, Donald Trump nominated Bove, his former attorney, for a lifetime appointment to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was left fuming that Bove couldn’t provide a single straight answer to a line of questioning about an alleged plan with former interim D.C. Attorney Ed Martin to launch a criminal investigation for the purpose of seizing Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas reduction funds.

“I’m not aware of such a ‘plan,’ but I did participate in the matter that you are referring to,” Bove replied when asked about his involvement. Whitehouse pressed him on his efforts to work with Martin, but Bove continued to dodge his questions.

“Senator, like many nominees before me who come to testify before this committee, and are at the same time simultaneously serving in the department … I’m not going to be able to comment on the specifics of matters like that,” Bove replied.

“My answer is limited to, ‘I participated in the matter,’” he said, adding that he could only confirm what had been publicly reported. He proceeded to answer all of his questions roughly the same way. Eventually, Whitehouse became exasperated.

“Do you see my point now?” Whitehouse asked Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley, who’d seemingly provided Bove with the cover to evade question after question.

“We have an individual who is here seeking confirmation to one of the highest judicial offices in the land. I am asking quite legitimate questions about potential misconduct in office. Some of it has nothing to do with the substance of pleadings but has to do with administrative matters, like seeking the removal of a criminal career chief prosecutor. Some of it has to do with administrative matters like case assignment. And the fact that I can’t get anything resembling a straight answer in the circumstances that we’re in right now, I think signals a really bad moment for this committee,” Whitehouse said.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal also criticized Bove’s invocation of a “so-called deliberative process privilege.”

“First, this committee and Congress have never accepted that kind of assertion as a basis to evade questioning in this kind of confirmation hearing, but I’d like to point out also that this witness has no right to evoke that privilege. It’s a privilege for the government of the United States to invoke,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal also pointed out that Bove was invoking the privilege “selectively.”

“When he wants to answer the question, no privilege. When he wants to avoid answering the question, he says he’s not at liberty to answer. We’ve never accepted that kind of tactic on the part of a witness,” Blumenthal said.

Fox News’s efforts to make Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani seem like a bad influence for New York City are only making him more appealing.

Following Mamdani’s shock win during Tuesday’s primary, conservatives and far-right influencers worked overtime to frame Mamdani as a “Marxist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” and a “Muslim jihadist.”

But Fox News’s angle on the 33-year-old Queens lawmaker didn’t seem so bad. On Wednesday, the network aired a full screen of Mamdani’s “socialist promises,” including that he supports “no cost childcare” for city residents, wants to provide “baby baskets to newborns,” and plans on expanding New York City’s minimum wage to $30 per hour.

“Nothing says ‘radical’ like being able to eat and have a kid without needing to live in a tent,” responded one X user.

“Up next on Fox & Friends: Why cribs are Marxist and bibs are a gateway to full communism,” quipped another.

Mamdani’s campaign platform offers details on how the prospective mayor plans to implement his policies.

The campaign has argued that offering publicly funded childcare solutions within the city is critical to keeping New Yorkers in New York: “New Yorkers with children under 6 are leaving at double the rate of all others” due to the exorbitant cost of childcare in the city, according to the Mamdani campaign.

The program would offer free childcare “for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years,” the campaign specified.

And Mamdani said he intends to base his “baby basket” policy on “more than 90 similar programs around the world.” His official platform claimed the investment would cost less than $20 million and would provide new parents and guardians “with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books,” as well as a resource guide on the city’s newborn home visiting program that offers help with “breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more.”

Raising the minimum wage to $30 would be another goal for a potential Mamdani administration by 2030, which philosophically argued that “making the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty” and that poverty-level wages paid out by some of the world’s wealthiest corporations only end up costing the public more as social programs have to effectively “subsidize” these low-wage employers.

“When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives,” the campaign pitched.

Reporting by Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, underscores that the effectiveness of Trump’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday remains unclear.

A classified early report by the Defense Intelligence Agency made headlines on Wednesday, with one source telling CNN the assessment suggests the strike set Iran’s nuclear program “back maybe a few months, tops.”

Such reporting put a damper on Trump’s grandiose claims that the U.S. had “completely and totally obliterated” its targets in “one of the most successful military strikes in history.” The White House recognized the DIA report’s existence, but told CNN it was “flat-out wrong.”

On Wednesday, Trump argued that the available intelligence report was “very inconclusive,” but at the same time went so far as to compare the strikes to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

You may be surprised to hear that, of those two claims, the “inconclusive” remark is, for the time being, more on the mark.

Citing a “source familiar with the classified DIA intelligence report,” Griffin wrote on X that the preliminary report was issued with “low confidence,” and is based on just a “day’s worth of intelligence” that was available as of 9 p.m. EDT the day after the bombing.

Reportedly, the assessment was not conducted in coordination with other U.S. intelligence agencies, and it notes that it will take “days to weeks to accumulate necessary data” to compile a full battle damage assessment.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was once again chasing leaks out of the Pentagon Wednesday, after a leaked intelligence report disputed Donald Trump’s claim that his strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities had “completely and fully obliterated” them.

At a NATO summit in The Hague Wednesday, Hegseth fumed at the media after multiple outlets reported on an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that found Trump’s strike had only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months.

“The instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think, they don’t care what the world thinks, they want to spin it, to try and make him look bad, based on a leak,” Hegseth said.

“Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas,” he continued. “And what do they do—do they share the whole information? Or just the part that they want to introduce?”

The Pentagon has descended into utter chaos under Hegseth, who reportedly spends half of his time investigating leaks, according to one former official who was fired as part of one of those investigations.

The secretary dismissed the report as “low assessment,” meaning there was low confidence in the data. Trump, who had also taken shots at the media over the report, said the intelligence had been “very inconclusive.”

Hegseth appeared furious at the suggestion that the strikes could’ve been anything other than a success, and went so far as to suggest that it would be impossible to actually determine the damage to nuclear enrichment facilities like Fordo, which is located deep inside of a mountain.

“So, if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel, and go really deep. Because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense would be coordinating on an investigation with the FBI to discover the mole, claiming that the report had been intended for “internal purposes, battle damage assessments.”

In response to a reporter seeking to demystify the status of Iranian oil sanctions under Trump, the president clarified little—instead opting to casually mention that he could have plundered Iran’s oil but opted not to.

Just days after Trump’s unilateral decision to bomb Iran in hopes of dealing a blow to its nuclear program, the president posted on Truth Social that “China can now continue to purchase Oil from Iran. Hopefully, they will be purchasing plenty from the U.S., also. It was my Great Honor to make this happen!”

Few were sure how to interpret the announcement, which seemed to many to suggest that Trump was lifting sanctions on Iran, thus departing from Washington’s long-standing policy against such trade and terminating the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign on the country.

A White House official sought to correct the record Tuesday evening, saying that Trump’s post did not indicate such an about-face. Per the Financial Times, the official said the U.S. stance remains that China and all countries should stick with U.S. oil “rather than import Iranian oil in violation of US sanctions.”

Trump’s Truth Social post, the official claimed, “was simply calling attention to the fact that, because of his decisive actions to obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities and broker a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, the Strait of Hormuz”—a key shipping route for oil—“will not be impacted, which would have been devastating for China.”

At a press conference Tuesday morning, Trump was asked to clarify whether his Truth Social post had marked a reversal in his “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran. The president gave a response that was far from clear: “Look, they just had a war. The war was fought. They fought it bravely. I’m not giving up. They’re in the oil business. I mean, I could stop it, if I wanted. I could sell China the oil myself. I don’t want to do that. They’re going to need money to put that country back into shape. We want to see that happen.”

Trump then mused that the U.S. could have seized Iran’s oil, continuing, “If they’re going to sell oil, they’re going to sell oil. We’re not taking over the oil. We could’ve, you know? I used to say with Iraq, ‘Keep the oil.’ I could say it here too. We could’ve kept the oil.”

Indeed, going back to 2011, Donald Trump’s position on the Iraq War was that the U.S. should loot the country’s oil, which many observed would constitute a war crime.

Trump gave more noncommittal responses when asked about his current view on Russia’s war against Ukraine at Tuesday’s NATO Summit at The Hague.

“You once said that you would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. You later said you said that sarcastically,” said Austrian reporter Johannes Petrov.

“Of course I said that sarcastically,” Trump replied.

“But you’ve been in office for five months and five days, why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?”

“Because it’s more difficult than people would have any idea. Vladimir Putin has been more difficult. Frankly, I had some problems with Zelenskiy, you may have read about them. And it’s been more difficult than other wars,” Trump said, before listing the various wars he’s had an easier time “ending.”

“Will the United States contribute any more money to Ukraine’s defense this year, to the $5 billion that allies are giving?” Trump was asked next.

“As far as money going, we’ll see what happens. There’s a lot of spirit. Look, Vladimir Putin really has to end that war. People are dying at levels that people haven’t seen before in a long time.”

Trump was then questioned by a Ukrainian BBC News reporter whose husband is currently on the front lines fighting against the Russian invasion. The president took a clear interest in this reporter, asking her a laundry list of questions about where she was from and where her husband was. She then pivoted to ask Trump about Patriot missiles.

“My question to you is whether or not the U.S. is ready to sell Patriot missiles to Ukraine. We know that Russia has been pounding Ukraine really heavily right now.”

“Are you living yourself now in Ukraine?” Trump asked.

“My husband is there … and me with the kids, I’m in Warsaw actually.”

“Is your husband a soldier, no?”

“He is.”

“He’s there now?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow, that’s rough stuff, right?”

Trump eventually got to the question.

“So, let me just tell you, they do want to have the antimissile missiles, as they call them, the Patriots. And we’re gonna see if we can make some available, you know? They’re very hard to get; we need them too. We were supplying them to Israel, and they’re very effective. One-hundred-percent effective, hard to believe how effective,” he replied. “And they do want that more than any other thing.… I wish you a lot of luck; I can see it’s very upsetting to you. Say hello to your husband, OK?”

Trump finally seems to be realizing what the entire world knew months ago: Putin has no interest in ending the war on Ukraine, and the U.S. has much less leverage against him than Trump may have previously thought. Only time will tell if this minor change in tune will be enough to make a meaningful difference in Ukraine.