A negative tabloid story and full-court press pushback: Eric Adams tussles with the Post

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday found himself on uncomfortable terrain navigated by many New York Democrats — a public fight with the city’s influential, right-leaning tabloid that has largely spared the mayor its trademark vitriol.

The day after The New York Post published a cover piece accusing the mayor of overseeing a “boondoggle” of a contract for migrants, Adams and his team vehemently sought to discredit the findings while the contractor proudly defended its work.

“It gave the impression that the $50-something million [contract] was going to MoCaFi just for administrative costs. That is just not true,” Adams told reporters, referring to the company that won the no-bid contract to provide debit cards for food and baby supplies to a select number of migrants who have entered New York City.

He was referring to a lengthy piece exploring the city’s $53 million contract with Mobility Capital Finance to distribute debit cards to migrants who are in the city’s care as part of a pilot program. The scathing article from fiscally conservative columnist Nicole Gelinas called into question the company’s fitness to monitor this program, based on its experience, and warned of the potential of ballooning costs.

Adams also said the piece inaccurately reported the contract to MoCaFi would cost billions in city dollars.

“This is gonna cost us less. I was very clear with the team: We’re gonna bring down the cost of migrants and asylum-seekers,” Adams said.

And he refuted the notion that he had a prior relationship with the founder of MoCaFi — a point the writer underscored by noting the city’s housing agency [HPD] wrote in its explanation of choosing the contractor that it was “referred to HPD by City Hall.”

“There is no relationship other than a professional relationship,” Adams said of his history with company founder Wole Coaxum, whom he met while he was running for mayor in 2021. “There’s no relationship. We don’t hang out and go [to] the Hamptons together. We don’t go to the baseball game together.”

During the same press conference, his first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright, lamented the “inaccuracies” in the “opinion piece that was in The Post” and noted the deal passed muster with City Comptroller Brad Lander, who certifies contracts and is not a particular ally of the mayor.

Confronting the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post is a familiar ritual for many Democrats. Adams’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio, readily criticized the newspaper and its political leanings; The Post, in turn, mocked him mercilessly and uncovered legitimate wrongdoing within his administration.

But Adams has mostly sidestepped that fight — a benefit of being more moderate than de Blasio and aligning with The Post on crime and other issues.

The Post endorsed him for mayor, pulled punches about some of the more salacious stories regarding his reported eccentricities and shares Murdoch’s criticism over President Joe Biden’s oversight of the border crisis.

As if to underscore how uncomfortable a position it is for Adams to spar with the unforgiving newspaper, his deputy mayor for communications Fabien Levy tried to create distance between The Post and a piece it opted to publish on its cover. “Today it was not a story by The New York Post; it was a column by the Manhattan Institute,” Levy said, in reference to the author, a longtime Post contributor.

In an interview, Coaxum confirmed that he pitched his company to Adams a few years ago. After the mayor took office, he said a staffer from Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser’s team reached out to discuss contracting with the city.

Coaxum said that the contract language includes options — like ATM withdrawals and getting cash back at the register — that the city opted out of.

“For the purposes of the asylum seekers, they made a very specific determination that they wanted these dollars to be spent for food related items and items for babies,” he added.

After meeting Adams on the campaign trail, MoCaFi inked a handful of contracts with the city’s technology office worth nearly $7 million, according to records from the city comptroller.

The city of Detroit suspended a MoCaFi contract in 2022 over concerns it was sharing undocumented residents personal information in databases used by ICE, The Detroit News reported. Both the city and Coaxum agreed that wasn’t true, but the ID card program was still shut down over public outcry.

Coaxum admitted he was concerned that could happen again.

“If it gets shut down in New York — it could,” he said. “I’m willing to have the conversation, because I think over time, people will see this is a pretty good thing and we should move forward and improve the lives of people.”

Earlier in the day on Tuesday, some mayoral rivals piled on. Former City Comptroller Scott Stringer, who is considering challenging Adams next year, tweeted: “A no-bid contract that pays up to $53M to a politically connected vendor with no experience providing emergency services in NYC is not the way to help migrants.”

But as the day wore on, Team Adams had sowed enough doubt about the piece that Gelinas was moved to defend it in a series of posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

Maya Kaufman and Irie Sentner contributed to this report.