Eric Adams on His Attempt to Fix New York and How Democrats Weaponized the Law to Stop Him

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Mr. Mayor, thank you very much for having us to Gracie Mansion.
Thank you. Thank you.
Historical place, you know.

And you live here.

Yes. Upstairs there's a residency, but, you know, I was getting back to Brooklyn from time to time.

My place of love.

I kind of like this.

I read through the indictment today on the way here.

I read the day it came out.

I'm not, I have no reason to suck up to you.

I thought it was ridiculous.

It was flimsier even than I remember. You were indicted for accepting upgraded flights and for allowing the Turkish president to occupy his own building in Manhattan.
The whole thing's crazy, actually, if you read it. What was your reaction when you found out you were being indicted? Well, I know how I live my life.
You know, former police officer, the one rule, my staff will always tell you, he says all the time, follow rules, follow law, follow law. And so when I heard of this investigation, I was like, what? What could I have done that will cause what I was seeing? And then when I read it, I was like, where the bags of cash? Well, that's what I thought.
Where were these, you know, these secret stash somewhere? And what many people did not read, they saw the presentation that was given. And it was, you walk away with saying, oh my God, what did this guy do? But when you read it and you saw that I didn't open the consulate, I asked the FDNY, can you look into the inspection to get the inspection done? And so it's— So just to be clear for people who haven't read the indictment, you are accused of being bribed by the Turkish government to allow the Turkish president or prime minister, pardon my not remembering.
To allow the council general. Council general.
My apologies. To get an inspection to determine if they could pass a fire inspection.
And if they couldn't do it, you see in the indictment, I clearly stated, to manage the expectation if it couldn't be done. So you get a call from the Turkish government and they say Turkish officials want to occupy their own consulate, which is being built in New York, hasn't received a fire inspection yet.
You call FDNY and say, hey, can you do, you know, the government wants to occupy their own building. I'm the mayor.
It's another country. They want to occupy their own building.
Can you go ahead and do the fire inspection? There's no evidence that the building was a fire trap or out of compliance with any fire regulation. Is this correct? Exactly.
Right. So it's a weird thing to be indicted for.
No, no, no. And not only weird to be indicted for, when you look at, you know, being a former law enforcement person, pushing public safety, living your life a certain way, it was painful.
It was extremely painful to go through this, you know, millions of dollars in legal bills and just not being able to response. You know, the hardest part about this for me, anyone that's followed my career, they know I'm a straight fighter.
And this is the first time in my life that you have to sit here and be punched on and you have to allow your attorney to fight the fight. I know how to fight and I like to fight to defend myself and not being able to do that is hard as hell.
Well, the weird thing is from the Washington perspective where I'm from is that you're under indictment for allowing foreign governments, Turkey, not North Korea, by the way, or Iran, but like a member of NATO, allowing them to upgrade your flights. pretty much every member of Congress takes, almost every single 535 House and Senate takes flights to other countries hosted by foreign governments and are given, in effect, tens of thousands of dollars of goods and services by those governments every single time.
Upgrades, police protection, motorcades. No one's ever been indicted for that.
That's less than what you did. Are you aware of that? Yes.
Yes, I am. And I believe that I have a great attorney.
And I cannot tell you how, you know, there's a desire, again, of just want to push back on this, the narrative that has been put out there. Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who reads the indictment will come away confused,

and that's kind of why I was so anxious to talk to you.

What was this?

I mean, you're a Democrat, lifelong.

You were mayor of the biggest city in the United States.

It's an overwhelmingly Democrat city.

You're one of the most important Democratic officials in the country.

You were invited, indicted by Joe Biden's Justice Department.

What was that?

Well, many people dismiss when we stated that we felt we were a target. They wanted to dismiss that.
And then you heard the president state that his Justice Department was politicized. You heard the incoming president stating that it's politicized.
I think that there were those who were in that orbit that felt I was not a good Democrat because I watched my city, a city that I love, go through an onslaught of the migrant and immigration policy or fail a border policy. And after 10 trips to Washington, stating that this is a problem it was was costing us a great deal of money, $6.5 billion that went out of our tax dollars.
I think that there were those who were just angry about it and thought I wasn't a good Democrat. Because you complained about allowing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of illegals from foreign nationals who have no right to be here to come to your city and you have to pay for it.

And you complained.

And this indictment was punishment for complaining. That is clearly my belief.
And based on several aspects of it that I can't go into detail. But there are other aspects of it that shows me that, you know, I was targeted because of that.
So if we could just walk through and leave out the parts you can't talk about, of course, but this happens at the beginning of the Biden administration, which is close to the beginning of your administration. All these foreign nationals start showing up in New York.
They have no money. They have no jobs.
They have no place to stay. And you have to deal with them.
And the taxpayers here have to deal with them. So you go to Washington.
What were those meetings like?

Sharing with them that this was a problem. Sharing with—

Who did you speak to?

I spoke with Julie Chavez, who's one of the personnel, Perez, another personnel.

I spoke with the president himself.

I spoke with the president first.

Then the president came here to New York City.

The governor and I sat down with the president himself. I spoke with the president first.
Then the president came here to New York City. The governor and I sat down with the president and I said, Mr.
President, I'm not sure what they're telling you about this problem. But this this is a terrible problem that's playing out on the ground that we need to fix our border and we need to just stop allowing people to come into the country with no destiny.
We don't know what we're doing with them.

And there was some that were coming here that were almost six months to a year, in some cases two years, without any work authorization. Like, what do you do with someone that cannot provide for themselves for that long period of time? Well, what do you do? We have to house them.
We had to feed, close, house, educate 40,000 children, hold them into a shelter system. The complete package of what you would do for an adult that can't take care of themselves.
And so you tell the president and his aides this, and what do they say? Basically, be a good Democrat, Eric. Be a good Democrat? That was the basic overall theme.
You know, one of his a's told me that, listen, this is like a gallstone. It'll pass.
It's like a gallstone. It'll pass.
Yes. It'll hurt now, but it'll pass.
Well, you pee it out then. Why do you have to? Well said.
And then what many people didn't understand, because people believe that, okay, you're down 170,000. We were able to cycle out of our care.
We still have about 52,000 that are in our care. And they say, well, okay, you know, the damage is behind you.
That is not true. We took $6.5 billion out of paying for chronically absent students we could have paid $200 million for.
We could have paid for housing, older adults. The long-term impact of what's happening to New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Houston, the long-term impact has yet to materialize what this crisis has done to our cities.
So what do you think that damage looks like long-term? It's a combination of things. We're facing, after COVID, we're dealing with a severe mental health issue just throughout the entire country.
But specifically here in New York, we have a substantial number of chronically absent young people who were just traumatized from COVID and other things, and they just stopped coming to school. If I had $200 million that I can go out and go find those young people and place them back on the correct course, I'm preventing the long-term problem.
If you don't educate, you're going to incarcerate. That's the common denominator in all of our prisons, the lack of education.
I could have put hundreds of millions of dollars in what I'm doing around dyslexia screening and other learning disabilities. So those $6.5 million that I didn't put into housing, I did not put into senior care, we're getting ready to excuse medical debt for New Yorkers that are dealing with severe medical debt.
All of these dollars could have gone into dealing with the long-term fixes that we were projecting to correct. And did you tell the White House that? Over and over again.
Over and over again. The impact of what these dollars— And they didn't seem to care at all.
It appears to me that there was a bigger focus on the national election and not what it was doing to the cities. And we started to build a coalition of other mayors because when I was standing alone talking about this, it appears as though that, well, Eric, why are you complaining and no one else is complaining.
And then other mayors started to see what was happening in their cities. And I started meeting with the mayor of Chicago and Denver and other mayors and said, we have to be uniform around this issue.
It sounds like they treated you with contempt. again i think they use the terminology you were not being a a good Democrat.
I think that was their philosophy, that I was supposed to silently watch what happens to this city. And I love this city.
This is a city that I gave my life to protect. And I was watching the erosion.
We were getting almost 8,000 migrants and asylum seekers a week, 16,000 every two weeks. And we were being compelled by the Legal Aid Society to find them housing within a short period of time until we had to go back to court and fight that this humanitarian crisis is not what is normally someone has the right to have shelter within the city.
And they were coming in 1, 2,

3 a.m. in the morning.
It was a constant overturn. I'm just confused by why that's

the responsibility of the taxpayers, the citizenry of New York, and your responsibility. Someone

comes into our country illegally from another nation, not invited, here in violation of our

laws, and it's your responsibility to make sure that they're dealt with? How does that work?

Where did that responsibility come from? I have no idea. It's a national problem.
It should be a national price tag. They wanted to give us $138 million to a $6.5 billion price tag and wanted to reimburse us for a hotel room at $11 per hotel room.
You can't get a doorknob in New York City for $11. It was just unrealistic.
And it really, to bring people into the country without knowing where they are going to and what is their role, that's not a plan, that's chaos. And that chaos started to really cascade cascade throughout our entire country was there ever a conversation in your 10 trips to washington where anybody said you know really sorry for doing this to you never never never never you say i'm the mayor of new york it's the biggest city in the country you can't treat me like a servant oh we deserve.
I said this over and over again. The city deserves more.
We're the economic engine of this country, and we deserve more. And we should not stymie the future of people in the city.
We had a clear plan on how we were going to move this city in the right direction. We started to see the decrease in crime.
We started to see the city turn it around. And in the midst of this, this gets dropped into our laps.
And then part of the problem was we were getting Venezuelan gang leaders that were coming to the city, creating crimes in the city. My hands were tied.
I could not allow to stop the buses from coming in. I couldn't give people authorization to work.

I was required to give them housing. I couldn't even allow them to volunteer and give them a stipend for picking up garbage and removing graffiti and doing some of the services.
They said, no, you can't do that either. So they had to sit there idle and then.
Think about that. Yeah, think about that.
You know, idle mind. Yeah, no, it's totally right.
right idle hands all right um after was it after your 10th trip that you got indicted when you started complaining about it in public it was it was uh after the 10th trip and on the on the one of the trips i was headed down to washington dc to meet uh with uh leaders about the with other mayors and on the plane round ride down one of my fund my fundraiser had a house rated while I'm on the way to Washington to meet with other mayors about immigration a lot of symbolism did you know it was connected No, I had no idea. I had no idea what it was about.
And when I returned to the city and I started hearing Turkey, I was like, what is this? What is this? You know, I follow the rules. I follow the law.
And this is the most bizarre thing that has ever happened to me in my life. And, you know, Tucker, it's one of the most painful things.
You know, you cannot imagine how it feels to watch your life unfold like this. You know, I said it over and over again.
The only benefit of all of this is that, you know, mommy's not alive to see this. It would have broken my heart for her to have to watch her cycle.
You know, you hear that with a lot of people who've been successful. You know, you get to this place that you never thought you'd be.
And you realize you don't have as much power as you thought you had. And when you disobey, you get crushed.
Right. Right.
Just like that. Just like that.
Have you spoken? The Biden people are gone now. Trump's getting inaugurated.
But did you, between your indictment and the end of Biden's term, talk to anyone at the White House and say, hey, you indicted me for complaining? What's this? They wouldn't allow the president to communicate with me. Oh, because you're an indicted person now.
You know, for whatever reason, there was little or no communication. And, you know, Tucker, listen, if it means fighting for this city, I'm going to fight for this city.
And I was clear on that. I never told anyone I was going to do anything other than that.
I was going to fight for this city. And I saw the long-term impact.
Remember, what inspired me to run for office was watching an 11-year-old boy arrested several times for robbery and just to learn that he was not in school for months and no one was checking up on him. His dad was in jail for a serious crime.
His mother was on crack cocaine. And this 11-year-old boy is sitting inside my precinct.
I said, damn it, I'm at the end of the line here. I need to go to the top of the line.
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They're not getting free hotels. They're not getting housing vouchers or free cell phones or free airplane tickets.
Illegal aliens are getting them. What, I mean, what's their perspective on this? And it's so funny you said that.
I was at a meeting the other day with a group of Jamaican immigrants. I was at a, they were having a reception.
And it was the same time that the correction officers killed a young man in upstate, one of our jails, one of our prisons. The correction union came out immediately and said, they're not one of us.
Those correction officers don't represent us. And I said that to the Jamaican immigrants who were in the room.
And I shared with them, you come here to pursue the American dream. Many of you stay with your family members.
You leave loved ones at home. You fight hard.
You're willing to do whatever job that's possible. I need you to stand up and say, those who are committing crimes, those who are part of gangs and being violent, they're not one of you.
You know, you know, this is a country of immigrants. That's who we are.
Build our bridges, our roadways from early Irish or early Italians and so on and so forth. So the issue is how do you properly allow people in the country with a secure border and know what their destiny is when they get here? That is what we don't have right now.
This is a free fall and it's the wrong thing to do. I got to admit, I'll just admit it.
I thought it was pretty funny when they started trucking illegals here because I don't live in New York, so I have to deal with the consequences because it is such a liberal city., but mostly because it's a sanctuary city, which has basically committed an act of insurrection against the federal government by ignoring federal law, kind of what the Confederates did at Fort Sumter, except even more outrageous. And so isn't there a sense in which New York kind of deserves this? It was a sanctuary city.
And many people don't really get the sanctuary city part. Like me.
So here's what the sanctuary city states. John, who is from a country, is in New York.
He goes into the store, he buys a loaf of bread. He's paying taxes on that.
He buys gas, he's paying taxes. Sanctuary city says that as long as you're here, you have a right to get the services your tax dollars are paying for.
Your children are being educated. If you need police services, you can get it.
If you need medical care, you can get it. That's what Sanctuary City says, and that you should not be afraid of getting those services because your tax dollars are paying for them.
Right, but I mean, you can say that of anybody breaking federal law. I mean, there could be someone indicted on terror charges or a murderer on the lam.
Right. And if New York harbors him, it's harboring a criminal.
It's violating federal law. And that is a form of insurrection, right? You're saying we're not following the laws of the United States of America.
So like, why shouldn't Washington send troops here like immediately and make you obey as Eisenhower did to Central High School in Little Rock in the 50s when they ignored Brown versus Board? You can't be out of compliance with federal law without getting the 101st Airborne, don't you think? Well, my conversation with Tom, who's coming in as our border czars, one place here and I totally agree on. Those who violate their rights to come here by committing crimes, they need to leave our country after they serve their time.
We're on the same page with that. That immigrant family who's trying to get a pathway into becoming a citizen, living out this amazing American dream, I don't think they should be rounded up in the middle of the night and say, we're going to move you out.
Well, then why isn't it fair for the states that are, you know, still part of the United States and are obeying federal law to send all of their illegals here? Because you guys welcome them. I mean, and you can pay for it.
No, we're not welcoming them. We've been very clear.
We're not welcoming everyone. Except when you are.
No, everyone's sin. We say when they're here and they're following the rules and they're paying their taxes, they're doing the things that people are supposed to do.
My focus are those who are harming innocent citizens. But you said it was a minute ago.
I mean, I get what you're saying, and I think it sounds good. But I think we just discovered why it's not good.
Because it's the volume. Like, I think probably 99% of the immigrants who are wrecking your city are great people.
Who have good, you know, they're not bad people. But there are just too many of them.
And you can't afford it. Right.
Right? And how do you address that? That's what I'm saying. Maybe not be a sanctuary city.
Maybe just say, we're going to follow federal law like everybody else. Well, there's a couple of things to that.
I think you addressed it by controlling our borders. Yeah.
And we've allowed the immigration issue to control us instead of controlling it. This is what I'm getting from my other mayors.
My other mayors are saying across the country, Eric, we need workers. We have places in our city where we have population problems.
We have places like in Kentucky, they need backstretch workers. Here, I need nurses.
I need other professionals. I need food service workers.
We in dire need of workers in this country. Now, if we would have said, when you come into the country, you're not going to go where you want to go.
You're going to go to the city where we need you, stay there for three years, four years, and then you could decide to go anywhere. Like indentured servitude.
No, no, they can, they're working. Well, so do the indentured servants.
They're not doing it for free, you know? And if you want to come, if we don't, if we control the border and make sure prior to people coming in, that you know where you're going and what you're doing and not this free fall that we're seeing right now. That is where the crises lie.
Real immigration reform is securing our borders. And I said it over and over again.
Yeah. And I know you always hear that about the lack of workers.
And it's clearly true. I mean, there is a labor crisis in the country.
Obviously, every employer says it's it's it's real on the other hand there are a lot of americans who aren't working for whatever reason and among native-born african americans young men the number is like over 50 right it's awful so rather than just say we're just going to import people from honduras or paraguay or whatever Why don't we say, let's get our people working instead? That's exactly what we, here in New York, we've cut unemployment in those communities that you're talking about by over 20%, because you're right. We need to make sure while we're filling those jobs, we need to make sure that we're looking after those who are in this country for whatever reason have barriers to employment.
We have been removing those barriers to unemployment and is still not filling the demand that we have in need of workers. Not only here in New York.
You go across the country in those cities where you have a population problem. We need workers.
Well, because the more immigration you have, the smaller the percentage of Americans who work.

I mean, that's true in every country with mass immigration. The Native population stops working when you flood the country with foreigners.
And I don't know why that's not obvious to everybody, but it is true. And it's particularly true for African Americans.
And I just think it's weird that nobody seems to notice or care. Yeah, no, well, I definitely care.
I care about the employment. I care about when I sit down with my business leaders and my business leaders are saying, Eric, I have to close down a restaurant because I can't get workers.
Yeah, that's real. I know it is.
So I believe that there's a solution and answer that starts with securing our borders, real immigration reform, removing those who are committing serious violent actions in our country, and continue the pursuit of the American dream. So what I see the conflict, like big picture, I know you feel this every day, I don't know if you'll admit it, is the conflict between the people who pay for everything in politics, not just on the Democratic side, by the way, also Republican side, but they're all rich white liberals, just to be honest.
And then everybody else. And it does seem like the values are just in conflict.
Like the people who pay for campaigns, not just yours, but everybody's could care less like what the subways are like. And they could care less about the downstream effects of education, like public schools.
They don't send their kids to public schools. They don't care.
Do you see that maybe this isn't a coalition that can continue?

No, and I like that.

I like that because people looked at particularly the real estate industry that was extremely supportive of my campaign. They said, okay, listen, these are just rich real estate guys.
No. When I walked in the room and I explained to them that if we don't fix our school system, the first thing someone will do when they go to buy property, they ask two questions.
How good are the schools? How safe is the community? Yeah. I ran on better schools, safe communities.
And so, yes, maybe that affluent real estate owner is not sending his school, his child to public school, but no one wants to bring their company here if you have bad schools and unsafe communities. And so there is this symbiotic relationship, even as they're not directly connected to it.
They need safe streets, good schools in order to bring in those employees, those workers, those renters, those buyers. And that is what I stood for.
Or they could just go to Florida. I mean, I was in Miami last week, which is, you know, it's totally transformed.
If you haven't been to Miami recently, it's like everyone you heard. I was with New Yorkers actually there.
Right. We're all there.
And for years. And a lot of them live there now.
And they're bringing their finance money down there, which is the single largest private sector employer in your city, of course, is banking. Right.
And by far. And they're moving out.
And so, like, how do you pay for a city of 8 million people if an increasing percentage of the population is poor? If the rich people are leaving, which they are. Like, how do you do that? And we're very tired.
First of all, we have to start, stop that far left rhetoric that wants to demonize success. And far too often we do that.
We want to, we want to be difficult to business. We want to demonize success.
We want to do things that impact the quality of life in cities. Like how do you legalize public urination? We did everything to get encampments off our streets and I'm back in court fighting with those who want to allow why you go to court why don't you just send the cops or get off the street it's not your side you don't own the sidewalk because what are you gonna do about it and i'm with you i'm with you tucker you know and i'm just saying like i'm not saying but we're sued because of it but so what no we're still doing our job don't give me just just make what are you gonna do about are you going to do about it, Mr.
Legal Aid guy? You ban guns. Like, only the cops have guns.
And we're not allowing people to live on the sidewalk or self-fentanyl all the kids. Like, sorry, it's up shit.
Why don't you do that? You're good, Lord. Kind of go full fascist a little bit.
People would love you if you did that. You've thought about that.
Here's what we have done. When we first came into office and we stated that we were not going to allow people to sleep on our streets, we did just that.
I don't want to hear all that noise. People are not sleeping on our streets.
And we were able to move our city from encampments on the sidewalks, on the highways, in our train station. You don't see that anymore in this city.
And because of that success, you now have those that are suing us, but we're still carrying out the job. But why don't you put the junkies in their houses, Miss Legal Aid Lawyer? If you're so competitive, like how many junkies do you have living in your house? Zero.
But you expect taxpayers in Queens to pay for shelter for junkies? Like what? And that's the disconnect. Who are we serving here? That's the disconnect.
You know, the loudest don't represent the majority. I hear from everyday New Yorkers that say, thank you for taking this encampment off our street.
Thank you for making sure that our communities have the quality of life issues. But the professional loudest that really are not speaking on behalf of everyday New Yorkers, I hear everyday New Yorkers, and I know that we're in the right direction.

I still hear people saying everyone says New York is getting better, you know, low bar.

But it's still, the subways are scary because there are a lot of crazy people on the subways.

I saw a picture today of people waiting for a train, and they're all standing with their backs against the wall, so no one pushes them.

Daniel Penny tried to save a man's life he gets indicted uh for doing the right obviously doing the right thing um what do you do about that like what is else is his here's what we're going through in the city what's overshadowing our success is how people are feeling because of random acts of violence. Yes.
You have to go back to 2009 when you take out the two COVID years to see our subway system safer. We have over a billion riders, 4.5 million a day.
We have an average of six felonies a day out of those 4.5 million a day. But none of that means anything when someone is burned to death on your subway system.
That shoved you to the subway track. But when you do a correlation of what's causing that fear, that anxiety, it's those with severe mental health issues.
We have been fighting with our state lawmakers as well as those advocates, again, that are trying to stop us from taking those with severe mental health illness off our streets and we have been successful in doing that 8 000 people uh with with mental health illness we were able to remove off our subway system and put them into what we call safe haven so the real battle is dealing with the anxiety that people are feeling but this city city has recovered. More jobs in the city history,

second largest tourism in city history.

Our subway system is safe back to the 2009 days of 20,000 illegal guns removed off our streets.

Our cops have stepped up.

No matter how bad they've been treated by some,

they've stepped up and they've produced

for the people of the city of New York.

But the prosecutors don't, I mean, I keep reading,

you know, some guy gets picked up, he's been arrested 47 times for violent crimes, not prosecuted. Like, that's not sustainable.
Like, civilization can't exist under those circumstances. Well said.
You know, when I talk about it all the time, the criminal justice system is not just police. Everyone will see the police, but it's more than just the police.
We need to have our judges on board, our prosecutors on board, our lawmakers on board. We were just showing stats today.
People who were arrested three times in a year for the same crimes, the numbers are unbelievable. For robberies, for assault, for burglaries, for grand larceny.
These guys are being, it's a revolving door system. And it's not only here, if you go across the country, you will see it's the same stats, the same small number of people are repeatedly committing crimes.
Of course, always. Yes.
So how is it that those people don't get put away? They keep doing it. Well, you know, we have to, like I said, every aspect of our criminal justice system must do its job.
But why not? I mean, you know who they are. You've got some of the worst prosecutors in the country.
George Soros paid for them, as you know. And why not just call them out and say people died because of that prosecutor? No, what we do is sit down and really try to show our lawmakers, our prosecutors, where the numbers are, where the results are, and how we can turn this around.
And one of the bills is what's called the Discovery Bill, which has caused a great deal of refusal or failures to prosecute. We sat down with our district attorneys.
They seem now to be aligned with us as we go back and sort of alter some of these changes that we've made that's impacted on public safety. Idealism, I say, collides with realism.
The laws we make must ensure that we don't make our city unsafe. Yeah.
And why do you let people smoke weed on the street here? It smells like a slum. Why not, if you want to smoke weed, just go to your apartment and watch TV or whatever.
But why do you have to, people blowing weed weed on your face on the street. Has that made anyone's life better at all? Yeah, you know, it's so funny.
When I ran for office, that question came up about legalization of marriage. Just go smoke in your apartment, you know? Cannabis.
And I was at a press conference, and I said, I smell weed everywhere. Yeah.
You know, and we need to manage how we're dealing with the cannabis issue. Yeah.
You know what my teachers are telling me? What? Our children are high all the time. Of course they are.
They say they're high. So a small number of people run all the weed supply chains and the retail, and they're making a ton of money, and everyone's invested in it, private equity's all up in it.
I'm sure they're handing out money to politicians here. They are everywhere else in the country.
But it's clearly hurting people, and it makes the place smell like a slum. I mean, it's disgusting.
And everyone knows that. And like, why can't anyone do anything about it? Well, one thing we did, we were having, after the law was passed, legalized cannabis, we were having illegal shops open everywhere.
And we had no power to close them the way we wanted to. We went back to Albany.
This is where our state state government is as you know we went to albany and we stated we have to get this under control the governor gave us the authority we've closed down over 1300 of these illegal shops almost 67 million dollars in illegal cannabis we took off our streets and now the legal uh cannabis business is thriving but what we must do now we need to go back and say, listen, what should we be smoking? How we should manage this even more? And I'm with you. I think there's too much open cannabis being smoked on our street.
We need to really carefully decide where you can smoke cannabis. And I go with you on that also.
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out on their website, sambrosa.com. So here's, tell me what you think of this vision.
This is a liberal vision. You want to do weird stuff at home.
We're not going to bother you. We're not going to ask any questions, but it's kind of up to you because it's your life.
That's kind of the liberal idea. Don't do it on the street.
You want to have a parade, put your junk away at the pride parade. Don't have sex with people in ATMs.
Don't smoke weed on the street. If you're a violent, crazy person, don't bark at people on the subway or push them in front of trains.
Just keep it indoors. Why can't New York arrive at that? And you would not have one argument with me.
Don't publicly inject yourself with drugs. Don't publicly urinate on the street.
Don't smoke in front of somebody's house smoking your cannabis. If you want to smoke cannabis, do it at home.
If you want to urinate, go use the bathroom. So you're not get a debate uh you know you won't get a debate from me but you like wonder like is that far right to say go do your weird shit at home like i don't think that's far right is it no you know what no what has happened in our country we reached a point where any and everything goes and you know the the most bizarre it is, people think it's acceptable but it's not to everyday working class people that's the that's what people don't fully understand everyday working class people don't believe in uh any and everything goes i totally agree with that yeah i mean i'm just for the record i'm kind of against all immigration right now.
We have too much of it. But I will also say I've never seen an African immigrant do anything like that.
Like they're not marching around with their junk out in parades or whatever. Like we've buttoned down people coming into the country.
And the longer they stay here, the more they decide, like, I got to do this stuff on the sidewalk. I mean, it is it's a very specific affluent liberal culture that promotes doing all that stuff in public.
And I'm wondering why, like, why are they in charge of everything? Have you ever wondered that? Well, you know, what happens is that if you push back on that, that's the norm and that's what working class people want, you get demonized. Or indicted.
Right. For upgrading your flight.
That's exactly what you happen. So people often say, well, you know, you don't sound like a Democrat.
And, you know, you seem to have left the party. No, the party left me and it left working class people.
And our conversations that we should be talking about are not the issues that everyday people that are in power are talking about. People are concerned about the future of their families, and that should be our focus, and that's the focus of this administration.
It does seem that way. So you're being challenged supposedly, and I think it's true, by Andrew Cuomo, the former governor.
What do you make of that? Well, he hasn't announced, and I'm a firm believer, I'm not running against anyone. I'm running against myself.
You know, Andrew Yang got into the race the last time. He was 13 points up in the poll.
And the team, we were very clear, we have to run our race. And so no matter who's in the race, I'm going to run my race.
And I'm going to sell to New Yorkers what we did with this city and the reversal of where we were headed and where we're going now. So you were here in the 90s when the city reached peak crime, 92, 93.
Then Giuliani comes in. Everyone hates Giuliani now, and he's being destroyed by lawsuits.
But the truth is, crime just went right off a cliff. You were there.
And the idea was pretty simple. It's like, we're just not going to let quality of life crime slide anymore.

And if you'll commit a small crime, you're more likely to commit a big crime.

That was the idea.

Jack Maple and the whole, you were there.

Yes.

Why not do that?

Well, no, that's exactly.

And you're right.

And I policed during that era.

And Bill Bratton, who I have a great deal of respect for.

And Jack Maple, as you mentioned.

Many people don't know that name, Jack Maple. but we owe a debt of gratitude to his commitment.
And that whole model of just not accepting any and everything goals, I know how successful it is. And that is a methodology that I believe and I live by.
Because at police, when you allow any and everything goals, I was in the subway systems and I saw what our subway systems look like. And so you have to go to the method.
As Bill would say, you have to reclaim the city so that you can make sure it's doing the right thing for New Yorkers. What are you expecting with this indictment? Do you think, I mean, is there going to be a trial? When is that going to be? What is the penalty that you're facing? How does this play out to the extent you can explain it? I have a great deal of respect for my legal team, and they're going to exercise every avenue to get justice for me, whatever that avenue may be.
Alex is a great attorney. Spiro.
Yes, he's heading my defense, and he's going to exercise every avenue to get justice. What's the potential penalty hanging over you? Oh, no, this is real time.
You could do 20, 30 years. You could do 30 years for taking flight upgrades? This is real.
Do you wish you'd flown coach in retrospect? Look, you know, you can't live, you can't live like- Just bring your own food. You can't live life in the rearview mirror.
You got to live life in the front windshield, you know. Have you talked to Trump? Yes, yes.
How'd that go? Very well. We talked about, he loves the city.
Yeah, he does. And we talked about, you know, how do we do things to work together to improve the city? And as I told everyone, I'm not here to be warring with the president.
I'm here to work with the president. And everyone should do that.
And you have the mayor of Washington reached out and said the same thing.

After that, you have the governor did the same thing.

People realize that you can't spend the next four years fighting. We need to spend the next four years listening to the American people.
The popular vote, the electoral vote. We can't be bigger than the American people.
And the American people are saying we need to do something about our borders. We need to do something to make it easy to do business in the city.
We need to do things differently. We need to be open to do that.
And, you know, we need to be clear with even if incoming president is talking about with the new visas of getting some of the intellectual talent into this country. I think there's some great opportunities and we need to find out those areas of agreement.
But you're not going to let those people drive into the city without paying a big tax? No, no. Why don't let people drive in your city? Okay, here's my take on congestion pricing.
This is the bicycle lobby from the West Side who doesn't believe in cars in the first place, exerting undue influence once again on the mayor's office and shafting the people in Westchester or the outer boroughs just want to drive their minivans into the city to do a day's labor. You know, and I always tease people when I'm at the town hall of a guy came up to me one day and said, you know what, I'm getting a divorce.
It's your damn fault, mayor. Everything that happens wrong in the city, people look at the mayor.
We had nothing to do with congestion prices. The governor's in MTA.
Were you involved with his wife at all? No, I mean, you don't have to answer. You know, listen, the people think the mayor made that decision.
The MTA made that decision in partnership with Albany. Yeah.
That made the decision in the federal government. The mayor did not make that decision.
And if it was up to me, we would have more waivers if we had to do it, because we have to think about our firefighters, our police officers, our teachers. We were able to get some waivers.
We were able to get one hundred million dollars for the environmental communities that would be impacted. But this was a decision by the MTA.
The environmental communities? Places like the Bronx, because people would be parking their cars there. They would be trying to reroute themselves.
And some communities have a historical problem with environmental issues because of the cross-Bronche Expressway and other issues that they had to deal with. Now you're getting into deep New York stuff.
I'm drowning in it. I don't even understand what you're talking about.
But can we both agree that people who ride bicycles should have no say in governance in the city of Asia? No, they should have say. Minor, minor say.
They shouldn't have control. They shouldn't have control.
Yeah, they shouldn't have control. And so you have some communities where we attempted to force bike lanes and other items in their communities.
And we said, no, we have to communicate with those long-term community residents. We never should get so far ahead of those long-term community residents and what they desire their communities to go.
Amen. I agree with that.
But if you're going to, basically, this MTA rule will force people onto public

transportation buses, and particularly the subway system, biggest in the country. Isn't it fair that the subway be like perfect? It has to be.
Force people to take the subway. There should be zero crime, zero crazy people barking at you.
You stare at someone in the eyes, he punches you in the face. You can't have that.
If you don't have that in Tokyo, why have it here? The goal is to use the money from congestion pricing to improve on our subway system. We have to have a first-rate subway system, and that is the goal, to use the money to make sure we improve our subway system.
We have to do just that. By improving, do you mean make it safer? Yes, that's it.
That's the prerequisite to prosperity is public safety. People should be able to ride our subway system anytime in the night without fear of harm.
And you can't do it by allowing people to stay on a system that are harmful to themselves and harmful to others. That's why we took 8,000 off the system to give them the care that they deserve.
Why are there so many mentally ill people all of a sudden all around? That's a great question. That's a great question.
I don't know the answer. Yeah.
Well, you know, we made a mistake years ago when, because of the way our psychiatric wards, the draconian practices of those psychiatric wards, advocates came in and stated that it's wrong for people to be kept in these locations. When we shut them down, we put them in the street.
No one thought through, well, what do we do? Because listen, we have to be honest with ourselves. They are those who cannot take care of themselves.
They need complete care. 51% of our inmates at Rikers have mental health issues.
20% have severe mental health issues. Yet we're closing the jail, open four new jails, just to create four more smaller ricas.
I say, let's turn one of them into a state-of-the-art mental health facility for outpatient, inpatient treatment. This way, we can deal with the population the way we should be.
I'm not an expert, but there does seem to be an absolute rise in severe mental illness, not just anxiety disorders, but disassociative, you know, schizophrenia, stuff like that. And I don't know, I don't, I don't, you know, Tucker, I don't know if it was from COVID.
You know, people were traumatized through COVID. You know, I lost a lot of good friends through COVID.
And, you know, some people lost loved ones and family members who took care of them when they were going through severe problems. Some families were destroyed.
I've seen an increase after COVID or during COVID. I don't have any empirical data that can state that, but we do need to look at it.
It's a national problem. When I go across the country, I'm seeing the same problem, and there's no real attempt to address it as much as I believe we should be.
What about all the people who were hesitant to take the vax, who didn't know enough or who are aware of, you know, previous incidents of the government lying about public health? And a lot of them lost their jobs. At the very least, they were yelled at and scolded by the Biden administration and by public health authorities here in New York.
Aren't they owed an apology, at least, those people? Brady to mind, we inherited. The mayor had a rule in place already on what happened with those who did not take the vaccine.
Those conversations are still being played out in court to determine what should happen with them. But we had to make sure we were dealing with a severe public health emergency, and we had to make sure that we addressed it as soon as possible to make sure we could get it under control.
Those were some real troubling, scary times when we're dealing with COVID. But when you have a scary time, what you can't do is isolate a vulnerable minority and blame them for everything, which is what they did.
We should never do that. We should never isolate.
Right. I mean, I feel like we've seen a lot of that through history, and maybe it's a bad idea at this point.
We shouldn't do that. You won't get a disagreement.
Right. So the next time there's a public health crisis or any kind of crisis, when you see public officials say, it's these people's fault.
Mm-hmm. American citizens with jobs and families, they did this.
Maybe we should call that what it is, which is bad.

Yeah, and I think that, you know, your love of history,

that I think that sometimes when you're dealing with emergency,

how we respond, we look back later and say,

hey, could we have done things differently?

Yeah.

You know, there's so many lessons of that in history,

and we always want to do it better.

Now, there was some question about what happened to de Blasio. We were mentioning the mentally ill on subways.
Is he one of them? What happened to him? Do you know? Who's that? Bill de Blasio, the former mayor? He lived here. Yes.
I believe he's teaching from time to time. What would he be teaching? I believe he's teaching at one of our Ivy League schools.
I'm not sure. What would he teach? Like, what would be the class? Bill Tablasio on what? Do you have any idea? No, no, I don't.
You know, we'll touch. He'll send me, you know, good luck, you know, some tips from time to time.
But I'm not sure what he's doing professionally right now.

I don't know what happened to the afterlives of mayors.

What do you think?

What does happen to mayors?

You know, that's a good question.

Have you thought about that?

I'm not going to find out this time because I'm running for re-election and I'm looking forward to winning.

Mayor Adams, thank you very much for having us.

No, real, real pleasure to spend time with you as well.

Thank you.

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