“No rest for the weary,” Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday, when he was asked how he was feeling. “Slight tickle in my throat, you know, a little nose-running.” A day earlier, he’d tested positive for COVID-19. Five days earlier, the F.B.I. had issued subpoenas to some of his closest aides and seized their phones. He was quarantining and convalescing at Gracie Mansion, the mayoral residence on the Upper East Side, and his weekly “off-topic” press conference had been moved online. In a Webex window, he appeared wearing a blue suit. His voice sounded raspy, and he looked tired and pixelated. “Thank you for asking,” he said.

For a week, the Mayor has been struggling to find something compelling to say about the intertwining scandals that have engulfed him and senior officials in his administration. “Stay focused, no distractions, and grind,” he told a Politico New York reporter last Thursday. It has been impossible to live up to that mantra. Tuesday was Adams’s first extended media availability since news of the federal investigations broke, and nearly every question was about them. Was he planning to fire the police commissioner? Why had he appointed old friends with past or current ethical issues to positions of public trust? Would he pledge to resign if he was charged with a crime? Adams gave vague answers. “Listen, I realize these investigations, they raise a lot of questions and a lot of concerns,” was about as direct as he got. “They are serious matters that must be addressed.”

Yet on the advice of his lawyers, the Mayor has not told reporters everything he knows. Over the weekend, The City reported that Terence Banks, the brother of Phil Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety, and David Banks, the school chancellor, had lobbied the city on behalf of a company trying to sell “panic button” apps to the city’s public school system. (The Banks brothers go way back with Adams—he served in the N.Y.P.D. under their father, Phil Banks, Jr.) The Post also reported that James Caban, the twin brother of N.Y.P.D. Commissioner Edward Caban, runs a consultancy that helps bars and night clubs deal with police matters. (Adams, while on the force, was also close with the Cabans’ father.) “It wasn’t old-school Mafia, ‘If you don’t pay, we break your windows,’ ” an unnamed source told the tabloid. “But [it was], ‘My brother is a big shot, and he can make your fines and underage drinking go away.’ ”

What happens now is anyone’s guess. There were some who thought Adams was cooked ten months ago, when F.B.I. agents stopped him on the street and took his phones and an iPad, reportedly as part of a probe into potentially illegal campaign contributions that Adams received from the Turkish government. “I think they’re already sitting on the ‘we’re gonna charge’ button,” one former federal political-corruption prosecutor texted me last November. Then months went by with no further public measures taken by the U.S. Attorney’s office. In February, the F.B.I. raided two homes owned by Winnie Greco, an Adams fund-raiser and Chinese American community liaison, as part of another investigation, overseen by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn. (Greco initially went on leave after the F.B.I. raided two of her homes in February, but later returned to her job at City Hall.) Lately, Adams has made a point of saying that no one around him has yet been formally accused of wrongdoing.

After the latest raids, the prosecutor texted me again: “absolutely unprecedented aggression . . . in the old days, just giving the commissioner a subpoena would damn near be tantamount to a declaration of war.” On Tuesday, Adams suggested, not for the first time, that he was being unfairly targeted. When Bloomberg News’ Laura Nahmias asked him if he thought the feds were “fishing a little bit,” given the breadth of these concurrent investigations, Adams said, “That’s a valid question.”

In recent months, Adams and his allies have taken to comparing him to former Mayor David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor, who lost reëlection after a single term in 1993 in a wave of racist backlash fomented in part by Rudy Giuliani. This week, Adams upped the comparisons. “I’m just in my Job moment,” he said on Sunday, while speaking to a church congregation in Brooklyn. He has stood by the Banks brothers, and refused to publicly criticize the police commissioner, even as rumors swirled that Caban was under pressure to resign. That his loyalty to his people reads as suspect rather than noble is a situation entirely of Adams’s making: he tends to double down when people in his inner circle get in trouble. “I’ve known the Banks family for years,” Adams said at the press conference. “I hold them to the same standards that I hold myself to.”

Ten years ago, Phil Banks was identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in a police-corruption case that circled Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. In 2022, Adams appointed Banks deputy mayor for public safety anyway, despite protests from good-government advocates. Now, with Banks potentially dragging a second mayor into hot water, Adams acknowledged no irony. “I have the utmost confidence in the New York City Police Department,” he said on Tuesday, despite the fact that subpoenas went out not just to Caban but to officers down the chain of command all the way to the precinct level. One of the Adams aides who got an early-morning door knock last week, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, was actually on the conference call with him, videoing in from her office at City Hall. Wright lives with her fiancé, David Banks. When asked if she could explain what the agents at her house were looking for and what she or Banks gave them, Wright said only, “I am coöperating fully with any investigation. I’m confident that I have done nothing wrong.” It was a stronger statement than Adams made all day.

“It’s paralyzing for the administration,” one former City Hall official said. “How can they get anything done when no one knows whose phones are going to be seized?” The mayor’s relationship with the City Council was already fraying before these latest developments. “Everything was so dysfunctional already,” one City Council aide said. “This has significantly made it worse, no question. But it’s not as if we went from a mediocre functioning government operation to one that’s bad—we went from bad to worse.” Adams is up for reëlection in 2025, and the news of the investigations will only embolden the politicians who are planning to challenge him in June’s Democratic Party primary. That his approval rating currently stands below thirty per cent is partly due to the impression that something is not quite up and up about the current crew at City Hall. The U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, Damien Williams, has now impugned the integrity of the Mayor in dramatic fashion on multiple occasions. He’d better have the goods. ♦