The New York City mayor just got busted for carrying a faked photo of a slain officer in his wallet.

The issue isn’t that the photo is a copy of the original, but that he had his staff print it off Google and then to stain it with coffee to make it look old after he claimed he’d had it in his wallet since the 80’s at a funeral of two police officers.

Here’s more from the New York Times:

In Mayor Eric Adams’s first month in office, he was confronted with a tragic crisis: the deaths of two New York City police officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance in Harlem.

Mr. Adams, a former police captain who campaigned as a Democratic crime fighter, quickly sought to humanize the killings. The loss of the officers, he said, reminded him of the 1987 line-of-duty death of a friend, Officer Robert Venable.

“I still think about Robert,” Mr. Adams said at a news conference at City Hall. “I keep a picture of Robert in my wallet.”

A week later, Mr. Adams posed for a portrait in his office, holding a wallet-size photo of Officer Venable after The New York Times had requested to see it. Mr. Adams has since repeated the moving anecdote in media interviews and at a Police Academy ceremony last June, where he again displayed Officer Venable’s picture.

But the weathered photo of Officer Venable had not actually spent decades in the mayor’s wallet. It had been created by employees in the mayor’s office in the days after Mr. Adams claimed to have been carrying it in his wallet.

The employees were instructed to create a photo of Officer Venable, according to a person familiar with the request. A picture of the officer was found on Google; it was printed in black-and-white and made to look worn as if the mayor had been carrying it for some time, including by splashing some coffee on it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Two former City Hall aides, who asked not to be identified, said they were informed about the manipulated photo last year, not long after it was created.

“Campaign to paint the mayor as a liar”

Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, did not dispute that Mr. Adams had shown a photo to The Times and at the police ceremony that had been recently created by a City Hall aide.

Mr. Levy, however, insisted that Mr. Adams had carried a photo of Officer Venable for decades, and provided the names of several former transit police colleagues who said in interviews that Mr. Adams and Officer Venable had indeed been friends.

The person who directly ordered the altered photo to be created, according to the person who was familiar with the matter, said she had no comment when reached by The Times. She said she had been told to direct all media inquiries to Mr. Levy.

Mr. Levy criticized The Times for what he characterized as a “campaign to paint the mayor as a liar.”

“The Times’s efforts to attack the mayor here would be laughable if it were not so utterly offensive,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.

After releasing the statement, Mr. Levy ignored repeated requests to elaborate about the authenticity of the photo. He also did not respond to questions about whether the photo was made to look old in part by staining it with coffee.

Politicians really do stupid stuff sometimes. All Mayor Liar had to do was admit that he’d lost the photo. But instead he had his team participate in a cover-up of sorts and now his shame is all over the New York Times. What an idiot.