A federal judge Friday upheld a decision to deny Mayor Eric Adams roughly $3.4 million in public money for his 2025 re-election campaign.
New York City’s publicly funded campaign finance program offers candidates an eight-to-one match of tax dollars for every dollar raised by small local donors. But the system requires extensive disclosures to make sure candidates are following the law.
After Adams became the first sitting mayor in the modern era to be criminally indicted for campaign finance fraud, the city’s Campaign Finance Board requested a trove of documents from the mayor’s campaign. The board later denied the campaign matching funds based on their findings.
When the charges in the indictment were dismissed this year by the Trump Administration, the Adams campaign sued the CFB, saying their denial was based on charges that no longer applied and the $3.4 million should be awarded to the campaign.
A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York said the indictment wasn’t the only issue holding up the money.
“The CFB provided two independent valid reasons for its decision to deny the Adams Campaign public matching funds,” U.S. District Court Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis wrote in a 61-page ruling, citing the mayor’s “failure to timely respond to the CFB’s request for information” as well as a blown deadline to file a conflict of interest disclosure to the city.
Neither the Adams campaign nor the Campaign Finance Board immediately responded to requests for comment.
