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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We'll begin today with our lead reporter covering the Adams administration, WNYC and Gothamist's Elizabeth Kim. She was with the mayor yesterday at something he's begun to do recently, have a weekly Tuesday news conference where it sounds simple, sounds routine, he takes reporters' questions on basically whatever they want to ask. It hadn't been routine.

The mayor had been getting criticized for not being responsive to reporters' questions very much before that, except on topics that he designated. For example, as many of you know, he declined to continue the Ask the Mayor weekly appearance on this show and also the weekly open-ended interview with Errol Louis on NY1 on Mondays that Mayor de Blasio had been doing. Now Mayor Adams is taking questions from the press, open-ended, what they call off-topic, in City Hall and City Hall reporter parlance off-topic questions, every Tuesday that refers to topics that the mayor himself doesn't generate.

Yesterday's topics included the issue at Hillcrest High School at Queens involving student behavior toward a teacher who had posted her support for Israel online, the investigation by the FBI of the Adams 2021 campaign, and more. On the fundraising investigation, the mayor made a little news. He did say that fundraiser Brianna Suggs, whose home had been raided by law enforcement, is no longer working in that role.

Mayor Adams: I'm not going to go into personal conversations. This is, as we said, over and over again, this is an active review. The question was asked, "Is she still fundraising," and I said no to that.

Brian Lehrer: Liz Kim joins us now. Hi, Liz. Welcome back to the show.

Elizabeth Kim: Good morning, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can you set the scene generally for us first on these Tuesday news conferences? When did they start and why?

Elizabeth Kim: In terms of when did they start, I think it's been about a month now. I'm trying to think.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I think that's right, roughly.

Elizabeth Kim: Yes, it's been about a month. The way they're conducted is once a week, typically on Tuesdays, the mayor invites the press to join him in what's called the Blue Room in City Hall. It's not just the mayor by himself. The mayor is flanked by deputy mayors and more recently his chief counsel because the federal investigation has spurred a lot of questions around that, and he wants her there to answer a lot of those inquiries.

Basically, it runs about an hour or so, and the mayor just takes-- It's just what it sounds like. It's off-topic questions. Now, like you said, this is a departure from the way other mayors have done this. I should say that mayors have often tried to put boundaries or guardrails on the questions that reporters shoot at them. One of the ways that it has traditionally been done is a mayor will appear somewhere, and they will say, "In the beginning, I only want to have, what's called, on-topic questions," but then afterwards, they'll reserve maybe 10 or 15 minutes to what's known as off-topic questions.

That's the place where if there's a breaking news story or if there's a controversy, a reporter will be inclined to show up there, put a mic in the mayor's face, and say, "Can you comment on this?" Now, the mayor has basically said, "That's done. I'm only going to handle anything that's considered off-topic on one single day in one single hour of the week."

Brian Lehrer: Would you say that this new way has increased transparency and access or decreased it or neither, and it just organizes it in a different way?

Elizabeth Kim: It's certainly decreased it because reporters now have less opportunities to ask the mayor questions. That's basically what it boils down to. The mayor may not always be delivering remarks or be at an event where he is taking questions. The way it worked before was that if the mayor wanted to hold a press conference to announce a certain initiative, yes, of course, he gets to talk about that initiative, but then he also has to answer questions about other matters that are pressing to New Yorkers. It's just less opportunity.

Then what happens too is that there are many issues and many stories build up over the course of a week. You can imagine. That's just the nature of the New York City news cycle. If you're waiting seven days before you get in a question or two at most to the mayor, your list is piling up. There are many questions that you may have wanted to ask him on Wednesday, but by the time you get to the Tuesday that he's holding that press conference, you're not going to get to it. We never get to hear the mayor address it. It's less accountability.

Also, I've spoken to political experts. They also believe it doesn't serve the mayor's interests either because the mayor has this very powerful bully pulpit. A comparison that comes up often is Mayor Koch. He loved talking to reporters. His press people could not stop him from talking to reporters. There was a joke that someone once put in a story that Mayor Koch was unavoidable for comment. His people really felt that that served his interest. True. Was he going to get thrown a lot of tough questions? Yes, but he's still the mayor, and he still has the ability to control the narrative. I'm not quite sure that this is working out for the mayor in the way he thinks it is.

Brian Lehrer: I guess you're correcting a misimpression that I was under, and that I guess I conveyed inaccurately to our listeners in the intro, which is that the mayor instituted these Tuesday news conferences to increase access to reporters off-topic questions because as he was doing his scheduled events with his own topics, he wasn't hanging around for the questions on other things like other mayors had done.

You guys in the City Hall press corps were complaining about that, and so they acquiesced and said, "All right, we're going to do a big off-topic Tuesday every week," but it doesn't sound like what it really was.

Elizabeth Kim: Exactly. He was curtailing a lot of the off-topic questions by saying that he needed to leave immediately after the event to go to another event. The reporters weren't happy about that. I think he also was not happy with this arrangement of reporters springing questions on him. They came up with this idea, which I've been told has been tried before too, and that it doesn't usually last. I'll be very interested in seeing how long the mayor decides to continue this practice.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Well, we may have to have you on every Wednesday, Liz. In lieu of Ask the Mayor, ask Liz Kim what she asked the mayor. [laughs]

Elizabeth Kim: I'd be happy to, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: And we'll play some clips as we're about to do and as we already started doing. On the Adams campaign investigation, can you put the clip we played into context? Remind us of who Brianna Suggs is and what was new in that answer that the mayor gave.

Elizabeth Kim: Brianna Suggs is a 25-year-old campaign fundraiser for the mayor. Earlier this month, FBI agents served her with a search warrant and raided her Brooklyn home. By all accounts, neighbors saw them leaving with boxes. They also seized her personal electronic devices like a laptop. We know a lot of that because The New York Times actually obtained a copy of the search warrant.

When a search warrant is served, it's updated with the list of-- there's an inventory of what's actually taken from the home. That actual first raid, actually, is what made us all aware that there was even a federal investigation that was ongoing. That was a very, very big story and very big moment for the mayor and his campaign. At the time, the questions were what did she know, was she the target of this investigation?

I should say that thus far, neither the mayor nor Brianna Suggs has been accused of any wrongdoing, but she and the mayor did retain a law firm to represent them. It was interesting, everyone noted, that she accepted the services of the same law firm that the mayor was using. It's a law firm called WilmerHale. What many experts said was that, typically, what happens is if-- and I should say, she has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but if she were to be charged with a crime, that would pose a conflict of interest, the fact that she had the same lawyer as the mayor.

What happened yesterday was we learned that she has actually hired a new attorney. Now, I should go back to what you said. The press conference statement was just the mayor revealing that she was no longer-

Brian Lehrer: Fundraising.

Elizabeth Kim: -fundraising for him, but I think those two facts need to be taken all at once. She's no longer fundraising for him, but it's also important to note that she's decided to hire a different lawyer from the mayor, which then raises the possibility that she could elect to cooperate with federal investigators on the investigation. The fact that these two things are happening at the same time is very interesting.

The mayor would not say what her new role is. In fact, he said it was a personal conversation, so we don't really know what she's doing now with the campaign.

Brian Lehrer: When he says she's no longer in that fundraising role with the campaign, people could hear that as, "No, she's not working for me anymore," but from what you just said, that's not what it is.

Elizabeth Kim: That's not what he said it is. We really don't know. I've tried to reach out to Brianna Suggs and her spokesperson, neither would comment. Now, she does have an attorney, and her attorney did release a statement saying that they were going to continue to cooperate with federal investigators but that also, that she was still looking forward to continuing her role on the 2025 campaign.

Brian Lehrer: The fact that the mayor announced that she's no longer fundraising for him, I'll go back to what you said a minute ago, it's important to always say in the context of this story, neither she nor the mayor have been charged with any crime, and we don't know if they ever will, and so not to overinterpret the fact that he said she's no longer fundraising for the campaign as the mayor somehow saying he considers her tainted.

Elizabeth Kim: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Just to be fair to all involved.

Elizabeth Kim: Yes, that's true. We do not know what her cooperation means. We do not know to what extent-- Is she a target of the-- We know none of that. What we do know is that, in the beginning, she and the mayor were represented by the same lawyers. Now, she is not, and now, she is no longer in the same fundraising role as she had been.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We'll see what happens next with that as that investigation goes on and more details emerge. Another topic at the mayor's news conference yesterday was the incident at Hillcrest High School in Queens. We'll play clips in a minute, but remind us of the basics of what happened as far as we know. Some of it, I think, is in dispute.

Elizabeth Kim: What we know happened is on Monday, I should say, just to give listeners an idea, Hillcrest High School, it's a high school in Queens. It has more than 2,500 students. Approximately, 30% percent of them are Muslim. There was a teacher. She had put on her social media a picture of herself holding a sign saying that-- showing her support for Israel. What happened on Monday was there was some kind of protest in between while students were going from transitioning from one period to another.

What we know is that it's roughly around 400 students who were engaging in some kind of protest against the teacher for showing her support for Israel. It was captured on social media. Then it wasn't immediately reported, in fact. That happened on Monday. Then on Wednesday, the school learned that there might be yet another protest so then they instituted a lockdown. There were these two separate instances that happened, one on Monday, and then another on Wednesday.

Brian Lehrer: Wednesday. Last week going into Thanksgiving.

Elizabeth Kim: Yes. Ultimately, when it was finally reported, it was actually days after these two separate events had already happened. It was reported that the students were somehow out of control, that there were reports where they were called radicalized. I should say it wasn't just media reports, it was also other people chiming in, elected officials criticizing the school, and the way they handled it. Because so many days had passed before anyone realized that it had happened, it was described as-- they accused the administration of a cover-up.

Finally, this week, the chancellor holds a press conference at the school to address the incident and to clear up what he says is misinformation. What's interesting is the chancellor himself and his two brothers actually went to Hillcrest High School.

Brian Lehrer: Ah, back when they were high school students. [chuckles]

Elizabeth Kim: Exactly. He says he's very well acquainted with the school. He holds roughly, I don't know, a 45-minute-long press conference in which he tries to dispute the narrative of what was reported and what people thought they were seeing on the social media site. He says that the school, in fact, had handled the situation immediately, that there was no cover-up, that many of the students that you saw in the video, that they were-- not all of them.

He said that they went and interviewed a lot of the students and that a lot of the students didn't even quite understand what they were there for, that a lot of them had just somehow gotten caught up in the moment and joined in this protest. He acknowledged that there were people that were hurt by this incident, that the teacher herself had to be removed to a different floor on Wednesday so she would feel safer, for example.

He also posed this as-- he called it a teachable moment, and he wanted to use this incident to say that the city school system wanted to promote a dialogue about the war in Israel and that that is the right response in this moment. I would say the only problem with that was that at the press conference, he was there. Obviously, the principal was there. There were two students who were part of the protest who also spoke to the media as well, but the one person who was missing in this was the actual teacher.

That was the teacher who had posted the social media for self-showing support for Israel. Her absence was a little bit interesting because in this moment where we're talking about having an open dialogue with one another, it seemed like we were missing one critical voice and perspective of what happened last week.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, hers. Here's the chancellor from that Monday news conference mentioning that there was disciplinary action against, at least, some of the students.

Chancellor: We have taken disciplinary action against some of the students who kind of started this, but many of the students who were running and jumping had no idea what was even going on.

Brian Lehrer: The chancellor apparently was asked what he was doing there, and here's part of that answer.

Chancellor: He said, "I don't even know. I was just out there. Everybody else was out there running around, so I was out there running around too." This notion that this place is-- these kids are radicalized and antisemitic is the height of irresponsibility.

Brian Lehrer: Is the conclusion by the city that the teacher ever was under threat of violence by students at the school?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, that's the problem. She was never there to speak for herself. The chancellor said, "No, she was never in any danger that the school--" Once the protest occurred on Monday that they understood that tensions were very high in the school and once they heard that there would be a second protest that they made every effort to ensure that she was not even on the same floor.

Again, this is the chancellor. This is the administration that wants to, of course, assure the community and New Yorkers that they are in control of it. The problem is we are yet to hear from the teacher and to hear how she was feeling in the moment and how she felt about the school's handling of the situation.

Brian Lehrer: When the chancellor said disciplinary action against some of the students who kind of started this, have they even made it clear what's starting this involved? Was it threats? Was it antisemitic remarks against the teacher? What did starting this involve that they took disciplinary action against students for if they made that clear?

Elizabeth Kim: What the chancellor was very clear about was that protesting is not a crime. It's not an infraction at a school. There was nothing wrong with that. I think what happened is getting it out of hand was to have 400 students running in a hallway and maybe saying things that might make the teacher feel unsafe. The word that's been used is targeting her, but I'm not exactly clear what kind of language that he was using to define the students who so-called, started it. That's not very clear. The chancellor said that suspensions had been issued, but he wouldn't say how many.

Brian Lehrer: All right. More to come on that-

Elizabeth Kim: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: -but here's the mayor after being asked if there will be added security for that teacher or anyone else.

Mayor Adams: There's no place for hate in this city. We are going to have the proper decorum that is expected of our students, and that's expected of our professional staff, but we will never reach a day in this city where our children will look in the back of the room and there's going to be a armed security guard there to make sure that they can be educated. That is not going to happen in this administration.

Brian Lehrer: Did the mayor address how they're dealing generally with the tensions in that school or in other schools? We know there is so much tension in so many institutions of learning, high schools and colleges, from any side around the Middle East situation.

Elizabeth Kim: The mayor himself did not speak to it, but he supported the chancellor's statements the prior day. What the chancellor announced was that they were going to hire some kind of outside entity to come in. I think the words he used was, we need to meet the moment. He wasn't specific on what kind of entity or organization it would be, but the idea is to bring someone in and help foster a healthy conversation and debate between students with each other, but also students and also teachers and administrators.

His feeling was that there are too many people that are walking on eggshells around this issue, and he said that teachers themselves, they're afraid of what to say and that they're afraid that they'll say something that will offend a student, and that somehow, they'll be labeled in some way. He says that's not healthy. That we actually need to sit down and just hear from each other.

He even said that when he came to the school, his approach was not to issue disciplinary action. He said the first thing he did was he just sat down with the students and he wanted to hear from them about, how are they feeling about this issue? What drew them to decide to protest? He thought that that was the most important thing to do in this moment.

Brian Lehrer: Did the mayor make clear or is it clear in an ongoing way when teachers are allowed to post anything political on their own private social media feeds? Whether it's about this or any other issue and on any political side of any issue, are teachers who-- I'm sure there's a policy which maybe you can explain, but I'm sure there's some kind of policy about teachers not imposing their politics on their students in the classroom. What about outside?

Elizabeth Kim: You're right, Brian. Earlier when the war broke, I did see there were educators who shared with me some emails that they got from the city's Department of Education just reminding them not to talk about their politics in the classroom. I don't know how or whether such a policy can extend to a teacher's personal life and their personal convictions. I don't know how they can police that and say to a teacher that you can't put X, Y, Z on your personal social media, or you can't attend a protest. That I'm uncertain about.

Brian Lehrer: All right. We'll continue in a minute with WNYC and Gothamist's Elizabeth Kim, who is our lead reporter on the Adams administration. To reset the basics here, the mayor has begun holding a general questions news conference every Tuesday, and Liz is usually the one from our shop who attends that news conference. She's here today breaking down what the mayor talked about yesterday and what we can learn from some of his responses.

We're going to continue and bring up at least one other topic in a minute after a break. Also, listeners, you can call in. Like I said before, if the mayor isn't coming on for Ask the Mayor, at least we can do ask Liz Kim, which she asked the mayor or what other reporters asked the mayor and what we learned at his weekly Tuesday news conference, which is only about a month of Tuesdays old, only about a month old. Some kind of at least changed access for reporters now.

If you have any questions or comments, or if any Hillcrest High School teachers or students are listening right now or anybody involved in the Adams campaign investigation, the two topics we've talked about so far, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call, you can text, and we'll continue in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we break down Mayor Adams Tuesday news conference with our reporter Elizabeth Kim, and we can take your comments and questions. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, call or text. On migrants, the asylum seekers, Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom was there at the news conference and was asked about reports that some are sleeping outside in the cold as they wait for shelter beds to open up. She said this.

Anne Williams-Isom: We are doing the best that we can. We are setting up legal clinics, we're focused on resettlement. We're working and trying to coordinate with other cities. We are re-ticketing people. We are doing the best that we can, and we're trying to cut budgets and make sure that the places are appropriate for folks. We are re-ticketing. Sometimes when people come into the Roosevelt, sometimes they get re-ticketed at their shelters, but other times, when people come up to their 30 days, they have to go to a centralized place, which makes it easier. We're running out of staff, we're running out of money, we're running out of space.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, are people sleeping out in the cold because there aren't enough beds?

Elizabeth Kim: My colleague, Karen Yi, went out there, and according to the migrants that she spoke to, I don't believe that she heard that people had slept overnight, but there were clearly people who were waiting over 10 hours online to get into the re-ticketing agency, which is also not just re-ticketing, I should say. Re-ticketing refers to the city offering a migrant a bus or airfare to a city or place of their choice.

The other reason that they've been showing up at this center, which is in the East Village, is that after 30 days, if you are a single adult migrant, you have to leave your shelter and you have a choice. You can either just pack your bags and leave and find somewhere else to go, but if you don't have somewhere else to go, you can just simply reapply for shelter. That's what's causing these long lines, is at two places.

They're doing intake at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and then they've opened up this other center in the East Village, and both of them have long lines because of this new rule. For single migrants, it's 30 days. There's a 60-day rule for families with children, and that gets even more complicated because a lot of these families have their children enrolled in school. The idea that every two months they now have to reapply for shelter but also possibly be placed in a neighborhood that's far away from where their children are enrolled in school, that's new complications.

Brian Lehrer: As I mentioned in the break, we're going to be doing a segment on tomorrow's show on explicitly that with city Council Member Shahana Hanif, who's on the immigration committee. It must be so hard for everybody involved if the asylum-seeking families with children get moved from place to place to some degree.

You also want to have continuity for the kids by not moving them from school to school multiple times within a school year. Then it puts them in the situation if the family does get moved, because there's a 60-day limit on where they're staying in the first place or anything like that, then it puts them in the situation of perhaps a long commute to school, which might be hard to arrange. That's a really tough one, isn't it?

Elizabeth Kim: It is. In the beginning, when we saw some of these families be relocated, they were being sent to Floyd Bennett Field, which if our listeners know that area, it's basically a transit desert. On top of the fact that you may be moving migrant families away from their homes, their school districts, add on top of that, it's very inconvenient and long distances to travel perhaps to a school of their choice. Some migrant families, in fact, refused to accept shelter there. They instead decided to go back to the intake center to see if they could get another assignment.

Brian Lehrer: We have two callers who I think are going to express opposite perceptions of how Mayor Adams is scrutinized by the press generally. We'll take Anna in Manhattan first. Anna, you're on WNYC. Sharon in Queens if you hear me, hang on, we're going to go right to you after this. Anna, hi, you're on WNYC.

Anna: Oh, yes. Hi, Brian. Thank you. As I mentioned, I had already my doubts about Adams, and that, I had expressed during a previous call-in that you had about which candidate we supported and why. The general feeling about Adams at the time of the primary was that he was not scrutinized carefully by the press, because unfortunately, the racial issue would come up, and then everybody would back off. It was much easier to focus on the competition with Andrew Yang. That was easy.

However, once I remember during that show, when I expressed my doubts about him and especially his position on guns and everything, after I finished, a man from Brooklyn came on, and he said, "Well, as the woman from Manhattan said, yes, there are many questions about Adams, and you guys outside Brooklyn don't know half of it."

The question is, now when the FBI is insisting so much in investigating him, in my assessment, they're not doing it because they have nothing better to do. They really have shady reasons. The question is, is the press going to focus laser eye on this and not leave it alone until we know the truth about Mayor Adams?

Brian Lehrer: Anna, thank you very much. A couple of things. One, there were multiple Black candidates in that Democratic primary in 2021, including ones who had different points of view on many issues than Adams did, so I'm not sure about that part of what you said. Liz, I have no doubt that the press-- now that there's an FBI investigation and I don't want to take her implication that where there's smoke, there's fire, where there's smoke, they investigate the smoke, and they'll see if there's fire, meaning any kind of criminal activity by anybody, but the press is obviously interested in the story.

Elizabeth Kim: Absolutely. I would say since that investigation and it's not that it broke, but since it became publicly known, that one topic has dominated all of the mayor's weekly off-topic press conferences. He gets more questions about that than anything else. We didn't even mention that last Wednesday night there was a sexual assault lawsuit filed against the mayor. There was that too, but that actually got very few questions. That was something that came about right at the deadline of the Adult Survivors Act.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, our next segment as soon as you're done with us, Liz, is going to be to look at those last days of the Adult Survivors Act and those lawsuits filed against Mayor Adams and former Governor Cuomo and people who are not as famous. Listeners, that is coming up. I said Sharon in Queens would be next, and you are. Hi, Sharon, you're on WNYC.

Sharon: Hi, Brian. I love you. As a mother of a Black woman, Brianna Suggs is speculated to do a lot of things, but for the FBI to go into her house in Brooklyn and take boxes out like she's some Trump alliance person, her reputation is ruined for life. I take exception to that. She's a young woman. If anything, you can go after him, but why her under speculation? It's horrible.

As a Black politician in New York, this is nothing new. Dinkins had a whole lot of stuff going on that they speculated. He didn't get a second term beyond that. Rangel, Adam Clayton Powell. They are always going to harass Black men, Black people of color, when it comes to positions in New York City. What speculation? You are innocent until you are proven guilty.

Mayor Adams has his hands full in this migrant crisis, so now we're going to distract the [unintelligible 00:36:18] to the sexual harassment. This is nothing new. It doesn't surprise me. For the young woman, I beg to differ.

Brian Lehrer: Sharon, thank you very much. Liz, on exactly the issue that she raises of the raid on Brianna Suggs's home and how that reminds her of something they would do to a Trump person, I guess, with the classified documents, I think typically the FBI raids somebody's home, or even in the case of Mayor Adams, shows up in his car and seizes his cell phone and his iPad unannounced because there was some attempt to get a cooperative handover, and that handover did not take place, so they had some reason to think that evidence would be destroyed.

I don't know how much we know about that in this situation, but I think that's supposed to be the standard that they use before they just raid somebody.

Elizabeth Kim: Right. I think it's important to understand that there is a legal process behind getting a search warrant. Basically, an FBI agent needs to sit down with a prosecutor and they prepare an affidavit. What that affidavit will say is that the FBI agent believes that there is evidence that a crime has been committed and that by executing this search warrant and seizing certain belongings like an iPad or files, that those materials will show evidence that a crime has been committed.

That then has to be presented to a judge who has to decide that there is credible evidence there. It's not somehow that investigators decide on their own that, yes, we want to seize these materials and we're going to surprise the mayor on the street, or we're going to knock on his fundraiser's door. There is a legal standard here. I think that that is partly why this investigation has drawn a lot of interest because that not only happened to the mayor's fundraiser, it happened to the mayor himself.

Investigations of mayors is true. That's absolutely right. Sharon is right there. That's not unusual. What is unusual is the FBI serving a mayor with the search warrant and then also doing it in such a public manner. The mayor was coming out of a public event, the evening when the FBI agents approached him and then proceeded to search his vehicle.

Brian Lehrer: I think we hear from the two callers in contrast with each other, the one saying, "Oh, Adams wasn't scrutinized very much when he was running because he's Black," and the other caller saying, "He gets more scrutiny and Brianna Suggs gets more scrutiny because they're Black." That there's racial politics playing out in various ways with various people's perceptions in New York City, and that's the way of the city and that's the way of the world these days, huh?

Elizabeth Kim: The mayor has made that argument himself. He's pointed out. He's not incorrect that the political press corps is mostly white. It's not entirely white, but that has been his argument is that somehow, they are unable to understand the perspective of him as a Black elected running the city.

Brian Lehrer: Elizabeth Kim, covering Mayor Adams, including yesterday's news conference. Thanks for breaking it down. Maybe we'll talk next Wednesday after next Tuesday's Eric Adams news conference. Thanks, Liz.

Elizabeth Kim: I would love to. Thanks, Brian.

 

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