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    Trump’s Charity Toward None

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    The cardinal should go to confession.Timothy Dolan let a white-tie charity dinner in New York showcase that most uncharitable of men, Donald Trump.At the annual Al Smith dinner, Dolan suffused the impious Trump in the pious glow of Catholic charities. Dolan looked on with a doting expression as Trump made his usual degrading, scatological comments about his foils, this time cloaked as humor.“We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child,” Trump told the New York fat cats. “It’s a person who has nothing going, no intelligence whatsoever. But enough about Kamala Harris.”Trump also offered this beauty: “I used to think the Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz.” When Trump joked about keeping Doug Emhoff away from nannies, even he admitted it was “too tough.”As he did in 2016 when he crudely attacked Hillary Clinton as she sat on the dais, Trump added a rancid cloud to what used to be a good-tempered bipartisan roast.Dolan could have stood up and told Trump “Enough!” We have been longing for that voice of authority who could deliver the Joseph Welch line — “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” — to our modern Joe McCarthy. It is the church’s job, after all, to teach right from wrong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Prosecutors Urge Judge Not to Dismiss Bribery Charge Against Eric Adams

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      Within days of being criminally indicted, Mayor Eric Adams asked a judge to drop one of five counts against him. Prosecutors say a jury should get to hear their evidence.Federal prosecutors on Friday argued against a request by Mayor Eric Adams that a judge throw out a bribery charge against Mr. Adams, saying they had clearly demonstrated his alleged pattern of soliciting and accepting luxury travel.In a 25-page filing, prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan also said that Mr. Adams, the first sitting New York City mayor in modern history to be indicted on criminal charges, was mistaken in arguing that his actions were routine for a public official. They said a jury should decide the issue.“It should be clear from the face of the indictment that there is nothing routine about a public official accepting over $100,000 in benefits from a foreign diplomat, which he took great pains to conceal — including by manufacturing fake paper trails to create the illusion of payment,” prosecutors said.The filing is the latest installment in what will most likely be a long, contentious legal battle between the mayor and federal prosecutors, led by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District.In September, federal prosecutors announced a five-count indictment against Mr. Adams that included charges of bribery and fraud. Prosecutors have said in court that they might bring additional charges against the mayor and others.Mr. Adams has pleaded not guilty and has asked the federal judge overseeing the case, Dale E. Ho, to issue sanctions against prosecutors after accusing them of leaking information about the investigation to reporters. Prosecutors were expected to file a response later on Friday to the allegations that they had leaked information.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Cowed Establishment Toasts Trump at a Manhattan Charity Dinner

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      There were grudge matches and sycophancy in equal measure at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. “Isn’t it just exciting, what’s going on,” Donald Trump said.Donald J. Trump and the assorted fat cats to whom he was speaking seemed to be processing many complicated emotions all at once.“You think this is easy?” the former and perhaps future president asked. “Standing up here in front of half a room that hates my guts, and the other half loves me?”There he stood, the godhead of a populist revenge movement, tucked into his satiny cummerbund, a black bow tie around his neck. It was the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown Manhattan.This charity event, held Thursday evening in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, has been a stop for presidential candidates ever since 1960. That’s when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon showed up, at the dawn of the television age, to make self-deprecating jokes while courting the Roman Catholic vote. In 1970s New York, the era in which Mr. Trump came up, the dinner was one of the glitziest events on the social calendar, attended by governors and mayors and media machers and real estate titans.In 2016, he came as a presidential candidate himself. But when Mr. Trump’s remarks about his then-opponent, Hillary Clinton, veered into nasty territory, he was booed. He and his wife, Melania Trump, slunk out of the room the second it was over.Eight years later, the dinner he returned to was not the same. Like so much else in the Trump era, the Catholic charity event had become savage, warped by blunt force politics. There were all sorts of open wounds and grudges on display among the tuxedoed and the begowned. There were sycophants and there were outcasts. You could see the ones who had submitted to Mr. Trump, sitting beside members of a gorgonized establishment still unsure how to treat him, much less stop him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Art Adviser Lisa Schiff Pleads Guilty to Stealing from Her Elite Clientele

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      Lisa Schiff acknowledges stealing millions from major collectors who trusted her to buy them fashionable art.A leading art adviser whose clients have included Leonardo DiCaprio, and who was accused by the government of bilking her clients of millions, pleaded guilty on Thursday in federal court in Manhattan to one count of wire fraud, for stealing $6.5 million from people who trusted her to buy art for them.The adviser, Lisa Schiff, 54, whose eye for contemporary art launched a lucrative career acquiring blue-chip pieces for a host of major collectors, was accused by federal prosecutors of stealing money that clients had entrusted to her for the purchase of approximately 55 artworks. As part of the plea agreement, Ms. Schiff will forfeit about $6.4 million. The felony fraud charge also carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. “For years, Lisa Schiff breached the trust of her art advisory clients by lying to them and diverting millions of dollars her clients had entrusted to her,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “Instead of using client funds as promised, Schiff used the stolen money to fund a lavish lifestyle.”Her lawyer, Randy Zelin, said the plea agreement had been in the works for several months. “Lisa has been anxious to have the opportunity to accept responsibility, she has been anxious to set out on a path of righting the wrongs and making amends,” he said in an interview on Thursday.Ms. Schiff, who is based in Manhattan, will be sentenced on Jan. 17 by J. Paul Oetken, a judge for the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.“The specter of standing in front of a judge and acknowledging criminal wrongdoing, and acknowledging the prospect of a prison sentence, is an extraordinarily daunting thing,” Mr. Zelin added. “But that is a fire that Lisa ran to, not away from.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Charges Indian Official in New York Assassination Plot

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      The United States and Canada have worked together to investigate what they say is the Indian government’s campaign against Sikh separatists.Federal prosecutors have charged a man they identified as an Indian intelligence officer with trying to orchestrate from abroad an assassination on U.S. soil — part of an escalating response from the U.S. and Canada to what those governments see as brazenly illegal conduct by a longtime partner.An indictment unsealed in Manhattan on Thursday said that the man, Vikash Yadav, “directed the assassination plot from India” that targeted a New York-based critic of the Indian government, a Sikh lawyer and political activist who has urged the Punjab region of India to secede.The target of the New York plot has been identified by American officials as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the general counsel of Sikhs for Justice.In a statement, Mr. Pannun called the plot to kill him a “blatant case of India’s transnational terrorism which has become a challenge to America’s sovereignty and threat to freedom of speech and democracy.”The indictment said that Mr. Yadav called himself a “senior field officer” in the part of the Indian government that includes its foreign intelligence service, known as the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW.Authorities say Mr. Yadav recruited an associate to find a U.S.-based criminal to arrange the murder of the Sikh activist. Last year, U.S. prosecutors charged the man accused of being Mr. Yadav’s henchman, Nikhil Gupta, and said Mr. Gupta had acted under instructions from an unidentified employee of the Indian government. Now, prosecutors have charged Mr. Yadav with orchestrating the plot.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ka, Lone Soldier of New York’s Underground Rap Scene, Dies at 52

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      The rapper, whose name was Kaseem Ryan, was known for self-producing 11 albums while also a maintaining a career with the New York Fire Department.Kaseem Ryan, who built a small but fervent following as an underground Brooklyn rapper known as Ka while maintaining a career as a New York City firefighter, died in the city on Saturday. He was 52.His death was announced by his wife, Mimi Valdés, on Instagram, as well as in a statement posted on his Instagram page. No cause was given, though the statement said that he had “died unexpectedly.”First with the mid-1990s underground group Natural Elements, and then on 11 solo albums he produced himself and released over nearly two decades, Ka gripped hard-core hip-hop listeners with gloomy beats and vivid descriptions of street life and struggle.In a 2012 review of his second album “Grief Pedigree”, The New York Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica described Ka as “a striking rapper largely for what he forgoes: flash, filigree, any sense that the hard work is already done.”Kaseem Ryan was born in 1972 and raised in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York. During his teen years, he dealt crack and sold firearms.He spent much of the 1990s trying to make a name for himself as a rapper, but then quit music altogether, only to come back a decade later.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Can Do Better Than Andrew Cuomo

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      There are many ways for New York City to turn the page on Mayor Eric Adams.None of them need to include Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor now plotting a comeback as mayor. Yet he is working the phones right now, trying to persuade donors and New York Democrats to back him for mayor in a special election if Mr. Adams resigns in the wake of his recent indictment. It is up to Democratic leaders as well as voters to make it clear that Mr. Cuomo has no political future — not as a replacement for Mr. Adams, and not in any vainglorious attempt to return to the governor’s office, either.Before abjectly resigning in 2021, having been accused in a state attorney general report of sexually harassing 11 women, Mr. Cuomo did some things well as governor. He was adept at slashing through the state’s thicket of bureaucracy to finish big infrastructure projects. New York’s airports are much improved, for example, for which Mr. Cuomo deserves credit.The press briefings he held during the pandemic defending public health measures, like mask mandates and vaccinations, were a balm of responsible leadership during the Trump presidency. They were undermined, however, when the public later learned that Mr. Cuomo’s officials had helped cover up the deaths of more than 4,000 people who had died of Covid in nursing homes.But after nearly four years of visionless mediocrity and cronyism, New York City needs a mayor who is deeply ethical and treats his staff with respect. It needs a mayor who puts the priorities of the public above his own political ambition and personal interest. It needs a mayor, in fact, who likes living in New York City.None of that describes Mr. Cuomo, whose toxic bullying of state employees was legendary in Albany, whose trampling of fundamental ethics was continuous. If he does run for mayor, the public will need answers to some basic questions, including who is funding his campaign and when and how he established residency in New York City. For years, he lived in Albany and Westchester.The 2020 report from Letitia James, the state attorney general, found Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed numerous women who worked for him in his role as governor, then used the powers of that office to punish women who complained, an abuse of power. In a state with a normally functioning Democratic Party, a governor forced to resign amid serious allegations of sexual harassment wouldn’t be the first choice to replace a mayor under criminal indictment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former U.S. Soldier Is Sentenced to 14 Years for Planning to Help ISIS

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      Pvt. Cole Bridges pleaded guilty in 2023 to charges of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and attempting to murder U.S. military service members.A former soldier in the U.S. Army was sentenced on Friday to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to provide ISIS with information to help plan an ambush he thought would result in the deaths of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East, according to the U.S. Justice Department.The soldier, Pvt. Cole Bridges, 24, of Stow, Ohio, also discussed potential locations for terrorist attacks in New York City with an undercover F.B.I. agent whom he believed to be a supporter of the Islamic State.Private Bridges enlisted in the military in 2019 and joined an infantry division in Fort Stewart, Ga. Before enlisting, he had already been persuaded by radical ideologies, according to the Justice Department.“Cole Bridges used his U.S. Army training to pursue a horrifying goal: the brutal murder of his fellow service members in a carefully plotted ambush,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.Beginning in at least 2019, Private Bridges began researching jihadist propaganda and posted his support for ISIS on social media. About a year after joining the Army, he began a correspondence with an F.B.I. agent who was posing as an ISIS supporter in contact with the group in the Middle East.A criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York detailed the soldier’s fervent intent on aiding the Islamic State, describing Private Bridges as “a supporter of ISIS and its mission to establish a global caliphate.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mayor Adams’s Rivals Reveal Fund-Raising Totals. Mr. Adams? Who Knows.

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      With Mayor Eric Adams’s future in flux as he faces federal bribery charges, his challengers prepare for the possibility of an election before the June primary.With Mayor Eric Adams facing a five-count federal indictment and at least four Democratic primary challengers next year, the quarterly fund-raising reporting deadline on Friday carried heightened intrigue.Would Mr. Adams see a significant drop-off in donations? And of the candidates seeking to replace him, who would make the most of the mayor’s problems?The answers were only partially revealed on Friday, with Mr. Adams’s fund-raising disclosures not reported by the New York City Campaign Finance Board by day’s end.It was not clear if the mayor’s campaign filed disclosures at or past the deadline, or not at all. Vito Pitta, a compliance lawyer for the Adams campaign, did not respond to requests for comment.As for Mr. Adams’s Democratic rivals, Brad Lander, the city comptroller, claimed bragging rights by bringing his fund-raising total to just under a million dollars for his mayoral campaign so far. It was enough to potentially qualify him to receive $3.5 million in taxpayer money under the city’s matching funds program, which awards candidates $8 for every dollar up to the first $250 donated by a city resident.Mr. Lander said he was in a “strong position” to qualify for the maximum amount allowed in matching funds, enabling him to hit the $7.93 million spending cap for a primary or special election, should Mr. Adams resign or be forced out. Mr. Lander also raised the most money in the three-month reporting period that ended Oct. 7, collecting just over $315,000.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More