A day after several of his closest associates were indicted on corruption charges, Mayor Eric Adams was defiant, insisting on Friday that he was not stepping down or quitting a bid for re-election.
Instead, in a nearly 30-minute news conference, Mr. Adams praised and extended well wishes to some of the people who were now facing corruption charges from Manhattan prosecutors. He called for two former city employees accused of accepting bribes to be given due process.
At the same time, the mayor distanced himself from the allegations and used the occasion to renew attacks on his opponents in the November general election. Mayor Adams scoffed at questions that he said City Hall staff members had recently been fielding from journalists asking if these latest legal woes would drive him from office.
“Hell no,” he said. “That cannot happen.”
Mr. Adams has not been charged in relation to the new indictments. Prosecutors have said he is not a target in the investigations focused on Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s former chief adviser.
Mr. Adams is waging a long-shot bid at re-election to a second term that continues to be overshadowed by the many allegations of corruption surrounding his administration. On Thursday, Manhattan prosecutors unveiled new bribery charges against Ms. Lewis-Martin, his closest political ally and formerly the second most powerful person at City Hall.
A day earlier, Winnie Greco, a top fund-raiser and adviser for the mayor and a former City Hall employee, gave a journalist cash stuffed into a potato chip bag. Last year, Ms. Greco’s homes were raided by the F.B.I. as part of a federal investigation into possible Chinese government interference in the 2021 mayor’s race.
The mayor made the argument that he should stay in the race because his opponents are not equipped for the job of mayor. He said Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, did not have enough experience, and he questioned former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s handling of nursing home deaths during the pandemic.
He and Randy Mastro, the first deputy mayor, who was at Mr. Adams’s side for the news conference, sought to downplay the indictment. Mr. Mastro said the charges were being used to “smear” the administration and the work it was doing to reduce crime and build affordable housing. He called the allegations “ancient history.”
The weight of the corruption scandals surrounding his administration have bogged Mr. Adams down. He is trailing in the polls behind Mr. Mamdani; Mr. Cuomo, who is running as an independent; and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, whom he defeated by almost 40 percentage points in 2021.
Tom Allon, a media executive who was a close ally of Mr. Adams’s, said the mayor did have accomplishments to point to and might be sailing to re-election if he and several people in his administration had not been accused of corruption.
“He was dead in the water before Ingrid and Winnie, so it’s hard to see him in the next few months pull himself out of this,” Mr. Allon said. “It feels like the final nail in his coffin.”
Mr. Adams’s opponents point to the indictments as symbolic of his administration’s failures. On Friday, Mr. Mamdani held a news conference near the former site of Tammany Hall, once the headquarters of the corrupt Democratic machine that ran the city. Mr. Adams, he said, had become “a living, breathing testament to the continued legacy of corruption in this city’s politics.”
Mr. Cuomo handed out bags of potato chips to reporters on Thursday and said the mayor was unelectable but added that it was Mr. Adams’s decision whether to drop out of the race.
“It plays to the worst impression that you could have,” Mr. Cuomo said of the bribery charges. “It feeds the worst cynicism.” Mr. Sliwa said on Friday that New York City was laughing at Mr. Adams.
Mr. Adams responded with props of his own, placing whistles in the chairs reporters were to sit in for the news conference. Asked of their significance, Mr. Adams said they were so that female reporters interviewing Mr. Cuomo could call for help if necessary.
The former governor resigned after the attorney general’s office substantiated several allegations of sexual harassment against him. The whistles “would get a lot more use if they were blown every time there was a new Eric Adams corruption alert,” said Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo.
“This is a mayor who made history by being federally indicted and became infamous by entering into a corrupt agreement to make those charges go away,” Mr. Azzopardi said.
Mr. Adams successfully worked to have the federal corruption charges dropped by the Trump administration’s Justice Department. Accusations that he engaged in a quid pro quo with the Trump administration have followed the mayor, hurting his prospects with the city’s Democrats. He chose to not run in June’s Democratic primary but as an independent in November.
On Friday, the mayor defended Ms. Lewis-Martin, saying that he had know her for more than four decades and that she was “like a sister” to him. “I know her son, and I know her, and I know her heart,” the mayor said.
Mr. Adams called Gina and Tony Argento, siblings who run a soundstage company and who were charged with bribing Ms. Lewis-Martin, as “wonderful people” and “great New Yorkers.”
Mr. Mamdani said that the people the mayor had put his faith and trust in were a reflection of his administration and that a “circus” atmosphere had been created by the string of corruption charges.
Asked how he would prevent corruption at City Hall if he were mayor, Mr. Mamdani said it starts with the people you surround yourself with.
“The first thing that you do is ensure that the people that you hire are characterized by excellence, by a track record of delivery,” he said. “Not by how long they’ve known you — or that they know you at all.”
Taylor Robinson and Maya King contributed reporting.