Damian Williams
speaker
16 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Damian Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Everyone, thank you for gathering.
My name is Damian Williams, and I'm the United States attorney here in the Southern District of New York.
Today we are announcing campaign finance, bribery, and conspiracy charges against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City.
As the indictment alleges, Mayor Adams engaged in a long-running conspiracy in which he solicited and knowingly accepted illegal campaign contributions from foreign donors and corporations.
As we allege, Mayor Adams took these contributions even though he knew they were illegal.
And even though he knew these contributions were attempts by a Turkish government official and Turkish businessmen to buy influence with him.
We also allege that the mayor sought and accepted well over $100,000 in luxury travel benefits from some of the same foreign actors who arranged many of the illegal campaign contributions.
These benefits included free international business class flights and opulent hotel rooms in foreign cities.
The mayor had a duty to disclose these gifts on his annual public disclosure forms so that the public could see who...
In addition to not disclosing these benefits, Adams sometimes created fake paper trails to try to cover up the travel benefits he solicited and received.
Let me give you one example.
Adams wrote emails to his staff suggesting he paid for his 2017 business class flights on the Turkish airline when, as we allege, he did not.
Those flights were worth a lot of money.
Just one ticket alone cost more than $10,000.
But months after taking the flights, Adams wrote an email to a staff member and told the staff member that he had left cash in her desk drawer and that she should send the money to the Turkish airline to pay for a trip he had already taken.
As the indictment makes clear, that's just a clumsy cover-up.
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