Eric Adams tight-walked the line between pathetic and malignant with his last-minute trip to the White House Friday for a meeting he’d requested with Donald Trump.
The president made Hizzoner cool his jets before briefly meeting behind closed doors, without the joint public appearance Adams had wanted in a visit he insisted was on behalf of New Yorkers and the city’s priorities.
They discussed “almost nothing. He came in to say hello,” Trump told reporters after Adams left. “He’s a nice man. But I think he actually came in to thank me.”
Indeed, Adams has a lot to personally thank Trump for.
His visit came, perhaps not coincidentally, on the day the Department of Justice finally released 1,785 pages of investigative documents full of new details about what went into its corruption charges against him.
They’d done so on the order of the judge who’d presided over Adams’ case, and who wrote as he reluctantly dismissed it at the request of Trump’s DOJ that “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”
New York City’s 110th mayor, who made history last year as the first one ever to be criminally charged, is setting a useful example this year as the first big-city Democrat to get a dispensation from the 47th president and then get into line.
While Adams was in Washington saying hello, Newark’s Ras Baraka was in his own city getting arrested by Homeland Security Investigations agents, many of them masked, for supposedly trespassing at the massive new ICE lock-up that opened earlier in the week.
The interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, previously one of Trump’s personal lawyers, announced Baraka’s arrest in a post ending in a scream: “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”
Members of the state’s congressional delegation who were with Baraka say the feds also got a little rough with them as they tried to make what they called an “oversight visit” only for the Department of Homeland Security to declare they’d “stormed the gate” in a “bizarre political stunt.”
If this was a stunt, it was at least one — unlike Adams’ the same day — with a clear public purpose.
The prison just across the Hudson is owned and operated by the for-profit GEO Group, which signed a $1.2 billion contract with ICE to reopen and operate it as the company’s CEO told investors “the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced.”
Baraka has been fighting the company in court, arguing the prison hasn’t gone through the necessary inspections to safely and legally operate, while repeatedly attempting to visit before his arrest on Friday and release hours later.
In a statement titled “Members of Congress Break into Delaney Hall Detention Center,” DHS said that the immigration lock-up “Currently Holds Murderers, Rapists, Suspected Terrorists, and Gang Members” and provided names, details and arrest photos of five of them.
But it’s not clear how many other prisoners are being held inside the newly reopened facility, or are accused of anything more than being an “illegal alien.”
It’s crystal-clear, however, what border “czar” Tom Honan — who warned Adams on live TV he’ll be “up his butt saying, ‘Where the hell is this agreement we came to?’ ” if the mayor doesn’t deliver — intends to do.
His job is to get the mass deportation machine the president has promised up and running. Around New York City, a key component of that is keeping Delaney Hall filled to capacity with inmates who get quickly flown out of the country from Newark Airport and replaced with new inmates, due process be damned.
You haven’t heard word one about this from Adams, who’s said he won’t publicly criticize Trump.
It’s a movie montage, with one mayor kissing the ring while the other gets put under the boot.
Ironies abound: Where Baraka has been trying to use building inspections to block a privately run prison meant as a no-exit waiting room for endless deportation flights, Adams was charged with prying open similar administrative bottlenecks to get a private building open in time to please the foreign patrons who’d paid for his pricey world travel.
That’s the case the Trump administration trashed while pushing out the assistant U.S. attorneys who’d made it and stood behind it as, in effect, trespassers in his privatized Justice Department where the Jan. 6 “martyrs” and “patriots” warranted Day 1 commutations and pardons.
When this crew says “no one is above the law,” they mean “no one is above Trump.”
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
