It’s a good morning to brush up on Eric Adams’s ties to foreign governments. The Southern District of New York has yet to unseal its charges against the New York City mayor, though the available reporting indicates that they likely involve his relationship with Turkey.
Either way, with the Eastern District of New York’s probe into Winnie Greco, a top Adams aide connected to the Chinese regime, ongoing, it’s worth revisiting City Hall’s extensive ties to Beijing — a subject that I’ve reported on for about two years, after we learned about Adams’s relationship with a community group that hosted an illegal Chinese police station on behalf of Fujian province’s ministry of public security. Links to a few of my stories below.
Adams’s connection to one of the defendants in the 2023 DOJ case against the Chinese police station stretches at least as far back as 2014, when he took a trip to China that involved a dinner with the man. Then, five years later, Greco and Jesse Hamilton, another top Adams political ally, traveled again to Fuzhou, China, with the defendant in tow, for a meeting with officials from the city; Hamilton, in a resurfaced video that I reported on, spoke about then-borough president Adams’s bid for mayor in that meeting.
City Hall also has extensive, remarkable ties to China’s consulate general in Manhattan, whose events Greco — who holds the title “director of Asian Affairs” — has frequently attended. Chinese consul general Huang Ping wrote to Adams, with Greco acting as intermediary, to urge him to skip a banquet honoring then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her visit to New York City last year. He also invited Adams to join him for a dinner at his personal residence. Adams, who attended a flag-raising celebration for the founding of the People’s Republic of China with Huang later that year, did not show up at the gathering for Tsai. It’s worth noting that Huang is understood to have personally directed the activities of a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, who used her post to advance the Chinese regime’s interests in state government.
As the federal government closed in on the Adams administration this year, the mayor and his team moved to further cement the city’s “friendship” ties with China, signing a new agreement and opening talks with subnational Chinese entities. Edward Mermelstein, another top Adams official, spoke about some of these efforts during receptions at the Chinese consulate general, later posting an article from a CCP propaganda outlet about one of those events to his LinkedIn page.