Trump calls DOJ ‘dirty players’ over Adams indictment

Donald Trump on Thursday slammed the Justice Department as “dirty players” for charging Eric Adams with bribery and fraud, as the criminally convicted former president and the embattled New York City mayor suddenly find themselves on similar legal paths.

During a press conference at Trump Tower in New York City, the Republican former president suggested Adams, a Democrat, was bound to be indicted after criticizing the Biden administration’s handling of the migrant surge that overwhelmed the nation’s largest city.

“I watched about a year ago when he talked about how the illegal migrants are hurting our city, and the federal government should pay us, and we shouldn't have to take them. And I said: You know what? He'll be indicted within a year. And I was exactly right,” Trump said. “Because that’s what we have — we have people that use the Justice Department and the FBI at levels that have never been seen before.”

Adams alluded to similar shadowy forces at work in the DOJ.

“I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you that I would be a target, and a target I became,” Adams said in a video released by his legal team Wednesday night after news of the indictment broke.

And while stopping short of drawing an explicit link to the public disagreements between City Hall and the White House over the influx of migrants, Adams suggested the spat was related to his charges.

“I put people of New York before party and politics,” he said.

The White House has denied any coordination with the Justice Department on the case. President Joe Biden largely cut ties with Adams nearly two years ago , amid the mayor’s haranguing of his administration’s response to the migrant influx.

But Trump, who was convicted in New York earlier this year on 34 counts of falsifying business records and faces three other criminal probes, two of them federal, drew parallels between the cases against him and Adams’ criminal indictment. And he suggested, without evidence, that the Justice Department was again acting in bad faith — even as the indictment of yet another prominent Democrat threatens to weaken the Republican’s argument that his opponents are weaponizing the legal system against him.

“I noticed the indictment’s very old. It goes back a long time. Well, I had the same thing, they went way before the statute of limitations,” Trump said.

“That's what they do. These are dirty players. These are bad people. They cheat,” Trump continued. “These are bad people, and we need an honest Justice Department, we need an honest FBI, and we need it fast.”

Federal prosecutors have charged Adams with a yearslong conspiracy to receive illegal foreign campaign contributions , wire fraud and bribery, according to a 57-page indictment unsealed on Thursday that detailed lavish trips and other perks the first-term mayor allegedly received from Turkish officials looking to curry influence with the mayor. Adams, the first sitting New York City mayor to be indicted, has yet to enter a plea. But he has remained defiant and denied any wrongdoing.

Adams was charged on the same day Trump’s lawyers returned to the courtroom in New York to ask an appeals court to toss a more than $400 million civil fraud judgment against the former president and his business empire.

The former president said Thursday that while he does not know Adams “well,” the mayor has “been fairly generous to me in his statements for a while.”

And now, as the politically divergent but similarly bombastic politicians face similar legal entanglements, Trump said: “I wish him well.”

Joe Anuta contributed to this report.