NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) -- Mayor Eric Adams said the Trump administration should release the documents related to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in a federal prison in 2019.
“I would love to see what’s in those Epstein files, as you know, I think we all do,” Adams said in an interview on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast released on Friday.
The Epstein comments were part of a wide-ranging interview where the mayor, who is running for reelection in November, touched on subjects ranging from billionaires and and the so-called deep state to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s shocking victory in the Democratic primary for mayor.
Adams, who has been praised by President Donald Trump as a “very good person,” said he didn’t know the reason why documents related to Epstein hadn’t been released as Trump promised to do on the campaign trail.
“There’s so many deep secrets in America that I think we all want to know,” he said. “I’m eager to look at UFOs,” he added with a laugh. “I’m still trying to figure out who could have killed Kennedy.”
Adams, 64, a former New York police captain, has previously suggested he was himself the victim of a government conspiracy, when he became the first sitting mayor in the city’s modern history to be indicted on federal corruption charges last year.
Adams claimed the investigation was retaliation by the Biden administration for his criticisms of their handling of migration at the US southern border, although unsealed documents from the case have since revealed that the probe began before Adams was even inaugurated in January 2022.
Trump’s Justice Department ordered the charges against Adams dropped earlier this year, alleging the prosecution was politically motivated.
When the charges were dropped, Adams, who has been reluctant to criticize Trump or his Cabinet nominees, brought a copy of FBI director Kash Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy to a press conference and told reporters the book explained the “rationale” behind prosecutors’ case against him.
“People laugh at the terminology of a deep state, but it is,” Adams said on the podcast. “We have people in government who have been in government through presidents, through mayors, through governors, and they’re very arrogant. They believe they are the elected. They believe they answer to no one. They believe that they are able to hold up projects that they don’t like, and I saw that firsthand as the mayor. And they’re connected to reporters, they’re connected to prosecutors,” he said.
The federal corruption investigation and indictment seemingly derailed Adams’ reelection campaign. But he announced earlier this year that he would drop out of the Democratic primary and seek reelection in November on an independent line.
Adams said he wasn’t shocked by the 33-year-old Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo last month and on election night, he didn’t wait up for the results to come in.
“I think I was in the bed sleeping,” Adams said. “I knew what the outcome was going to be.”
On Billionaires
Adams was sharply critical of Mamdani’s attitude toward the city’s billionaires. In an interview on NBC last month, Mamdani said “I don’t think that we should have billionaires” at a moment of such inequality in the country.
“When you look at the billionaires in the city that everyone wants to demonize, they’re the ones who pay into their philanthropic actions into our museums,” Adams said.
“Their tax dollars are paying for our teachers and our firefighters and those who are on the low economic end,” he added. The income from wealthier earners helped subsidize a policy called “Axe the Tax” that he championed that was enacted in the state budget this year. It will eliminate city personal income taxes for people earning less than about $46,000 or less for a family of four.
Asked whether policies like eliminating income taxes for poorer New Yorkers, which effectively redistribute wealth, are a form of socialism, Adams said there is a balance.
“I like to say all the time, I want the person who drives the limousine to get a fair wage and be able to provide for his family, and I want the person that sits in the backseat of the limousine to be able to use his discretionary dollars or her discretionary dollars,” Adams said.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com.