Mayor Adams said Tuesday that he met the Chinese billionaire, Hui Qin, who pleaded guilty a day earlier to making more than $11,000 in straw donations to three political candidates, but the mayor added he had “no involvement” in the scheme.
According to a source familiar with the Qin case, one of the candidates targeted with the illegal donations was Adams.
“Yes, I know who he is. I’ve met him before,” Adams said at a City Hall press conference. “But I think we need to be very clear. As we saw over and over again in these straw donor cases — the one that happened in the Manhattan District Attorney and the one that’s happened here — a lot of people read over the fact that the U.S. Attorney stated that this was not done with the campaign’s knowledge.”
In the federal case Adams referred to involving Qin, the feds acknowledged that the campaigns targeted by Qin were unaware of his actions because he “concealed” his use of straw donors. In the other case Adams referred to — which involved Dwayne Montgomery, a former NYPD inspector and longtime friend of Adams — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not accused Adams of wrongdoing in the case, a fact that the mayor has pointed out repeatedly.
Montgomery pleaded guilty in that matter last month.
Speaking Tuesday of the Chinese billionaire, Adams said he met Qin, a Chinese national who was in the U.S. on a green card, in the course of his 2021 campaign and attributed that to visiting groups he described as often ignored by other politicians.
“I went to non-traditional communities — Chinese, Russian-speaking, people from Bangladesh, Nepali — I went to all of these communities that people often ignored and I built this unbelievable coalition of people,” Adams said. “He’s one of those people who I met while on the campaign trail — the thousands upon thousands of people that I interacted with from different walks of life in a very unique, Eric Adams type of way — and he’s one of them.”
The mayor added that “we had no involvement or coordination” in the scheme involving Qin, who’s been in federal custody since October last year.
According to Brooklyn federal prosecutors’ criminal complaint, Qin agreed to reimburse straw donors that he tapped to give to three candidates in 2021 and 2022. Court documents don’t identify those political figures by name, or the straw donors who acted on his behalf, but a source with knowledge of the case confirmed Tuesday to the Daily News that the candidates identified are Adams, Rep. Andrew Garbarino, (R-NY), and Allan Fung, a Republican who ran for Congress in Rhode Island.
Garbarino denied having knowledge of the scheme and said his campaign will be donating the illegal contributions to charity. Fung did not immediately respond to a message.
Campaign finance records show that, aside from donating through straw donors, Qin, of Westbury, Long Island, also donated directly to Adams. In March of 2021, he contributed $2,000 to Adams’ mayoral run that year, according to the city’s Campaign Finance Board database.
The case against Qin builds on several probes involving Adams and his political orbit.
Aside from the Qin case, Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Breon Peace is also investigating Winnie Greco, a top City Hall aide whose residences the FBI raided last month. Greco was involved in several Queens fundraisers for Adams’ 2021 campaign that took place at the New World Mall, which was also raided by the feds. According to reporting by The City news outlet, one employee at the mall said she was reimbursed for a donation, which, if true, would make that donation illegal, and another employee said she never made out a check that appears in her name in campaign finance records.
The FBI and federal prosecutors in Manhattan are also investigating ties between Adams’ political operation and Turkey. In November, as part of that investigation, the FBI seized Adams’ cell phones, and raided the homes of his fundraiser Brianna Suggs, City Hall aide Rana Abbasova and Turkish Airlines exec Cenk Öcal.
