New York Billionaires Have Found Their Savior: Eric Adams

New York City’s plutocrats are coalescing around defamed Mayor Eric Adams in a frantic, last-ditch effort to stop recently victorious Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani from taking office.

Semafor has reported that the city’s wealthiest citizens are throwing their money and support behind Adams after Mamdani thoroughly trounced their first vessel of centrist neoliberalism, former Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Kathy Wylde, CEO of Partnership for New York City, noted that all of these rich guys are unsurprisingly “struggling to understand the implications of Mamdani’s victory,” because he accurately touched on “the financial insecurity young people feel and their anger that the established political class has done nothing to fix it. It’s not an endorsement of socialism but rather a rejection of the status quo, which threatens to bring on the kind of political instability that business hates.”

Now these businessmen are casting Adams as their last hope. Last month his popularity was at 20 percent, an all-time low.

“There is going to be overwhelming support in the business community to rally around Adams,” said Richard Farley, a partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP who said he’s organizing a fundraiser for the mayor and has been speaking with some of Cuomo’s biggest donors. “This will be a street fight all the way to November.”

Trump supporting billionaire Bill Ackman (who wasted $500,000 on Cuomo’s campaign) also joined in with on the Mamdani derangement syndrome, ominously positing that he found someone to challenge in the general election.

“I have a great idea on NYC. I will share it as soon as I can. I was a bit depressed when I woke up this morning, but I am now optimistic. We are looking into legal issues,” Ackman wrote on X the morning after Mamdani’s victory. “Legal issues concerning the potential for another candidate to run now. Not me.” The New York Post reports that Ackman will line up behind Adams, but the billionaire says it’s fake news and he’s still undecided.

While predictable, it’s troubling that the ultra-rich, from Bloomberg aides to Bill Ackman, are more opposed to a young, charismatic candidate who identifies as a democratic socialist then they are of two candidates who are embroiled in shameful scandals, with Cuomo having countless sexual assault allegations and ethics violations, and Adams being federaly indicted on charges of bribery, wire fraud, and soliciting political donations from a number of foreign nationals connected to the Turkish government. Expect more libel and Islamophobia all the way until November.

Trump has fired off his first two social media posts about Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Until Wednesday afternoon, the president had been mum on Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary handily Tuesday evening against front-runner and former Mayor Andrew Cuomo.

On the campaign trail, the 33-year-old progressive proudly styled himself as “Donald Trump’s worst nightmare, as a progressive, Muslim immigrant who actually fights for the things that I believe in.” During his victory speech, Mamdani vowed, if elected, to use his power to “reject Donald Trump’s fascism, to stop ICE agents from deporting our neighbors, and to govern our city as a model for the Democratic Party.”

Though the president has in the past been known to concoct catchy epithets and lines of attack against his opponents, Trump’s reaction to Mamdani fell flat—amounting to stale red-baiting and an absurd attempt to argue that Mamdani is not the sharp, telegenic candidate that even many of his ideological foes have recognized him to be.

“It’s finally happened,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday afternoon, “the Democrats have crossed the line.”

Calling the democratic socialist candidate “a 100% Communist Lunatic,” Trump wrote, “We’ve had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous,” before fixating on Mamdani’s style, writing, quite unconvincingly, “He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he’s not very smart.” (One odd part about this line of attack is that Mamdani, like Trump, is rarely pictured not wearing a suit.)

Trump also tried to lump Mamdani in with some of MAGA’s bêtes noires—noting that he is endorsed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive lawmakers. Trump added that Senator Chuck Schumer is “groveling over him.” (On Wednesday, Schumer congratulated but stopped short of officially endorsing Mamdani.)

Moments later, Trump shared a follow-up post, in which he daydreamed about a future Democratic presidential ticket headed by progressive Representatives Jasmine Crockett and Ocasio-Cortez. And Mamdani was there too—“Added together with our future Communist Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and our Country is really SCREWED!” Trump wrote.

Prior to Trump’s social media posts, the most notable reaction to Mamdani’s victory from the White House had been that of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who accounted for Mamdami’s victory and vast popularity by invoking the white nationalist “great replacement theory.”

If you don’t support MAGA “values,” you might not be allowed to stay in this country.

The official social media account for the office of Citizenship and Immigration Services threatened visa and green card holders Wednesday, declaring that permanent residence in the U.S. is a “privilege” dependent on an applicant’s alignment with Trumpian politics.

“Coming to America and receiving a visa or green card is a privilege. Our laws and values must be respected,” the agency wrote. “If you advocate for violence, endorse or support terrorist activity, or encourage others to do so, you are no longer eligible to stay in the U.S.”

It was not clear from the statement if that meant every possible legal infraction—from parking tickets to loitering or seatbelt violations—could lead to deportation. Further still, it was even less clear what “values” the agency was referring to, or how an immigrant might be able to work within those in order to stay in the country.

Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein noted that the administration’s new, principle-based directive is not required by law.

“For one thing, we’d have to define them, which I don’t think we’ve done,” Gerstein wrote on X. “Australia does require it and they’ve laid them out.”

But the Trump administration has so far attempted to boot non-citizens out of the country for unconstitutional reasons, likening their First Amendment-protected political dissent rights to a vague national security risk, or by forcing out tattooed immigrants without due process under the Alien Enemies Act by claiming that they were gang members.

In April, a U.S. circuit judge stated that the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to force immigrants out of the country had treated asylum-seekers worse than prior presidents treated actual German Nazis during World War II.

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.