Ex-officer Derek Chauvin, convicted in George Floyd's killing, stabbed in prison, AP source says

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd, was stabbed by another inmate and seriously injured Friday at a federal prison in Arizona, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

The attack happened at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tucson, a medium-security prison that has been plagued by security lapses and staffing shortages. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the attack and spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity.

The Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an incarcerated person was assaulted at FCI Tucson at around 12:30 p.m. local time Friday. In a statement, the agency said responding employees contained the incident and performed “life-saving measures” before the inmate, who it did not name, was taken to a hospital for further treatment and evaluation.

No employees were injured and the FBI was notified, the Bureau of Prisons said. Visiting at the facility, which has about 380 inmates, has been suspended.

Messages seeking comment were left with Chauvin’s lawyers and the FBI.

Chauvin’s stabbing is the second high-profile attack on a federal prisoner in the last five months. In July, disgraced sports doctor Larry Nassar was stabbed by a fellow inmate at a federal penitentiary in Florida.

It is also the second major incident at the Tucson federal prison in a little over a year. In November 2022, an inmate at the facility’s low-security prison camp pulled out a gun and attempted to shoot a visitor in the head. The weapon, which the inmate shouldn’t have had, misfired and no one was hurt.

Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22½-year state sentence for second-degree murder.

Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of general population and away from other inmates, anticipating he’d be a target. In Minnesota, Chauvin was mainly kept in solitary confinement “largely for his own protection,” Nelson wrote in court papers last year.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Chauvin’s appeal of his murder conviction. Separately, Chauvin is making a longshot bid to overturn his federal guilty plea, claiming new evidence shows he didn’t cause Floyd’s death.

Floyd, who was Black, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin, who is white, pressed a knee on his neck for 9½ minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

Bystander video captured Floyd’s fading cries of “I can’t breathe.” His death touched off protests worldwide, some of which turned violent, and forced a national reckoning with police brutality and racism.

Three other former officers who were at the scene received lesser state and federal sentences for their roles in Floyd’s death.

Chauvin’s stabbing comes as the federal Bureau of Prisons has faced increased scrutiny in recent years following wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s jail suicide in 2019. It's another example of the agency’s inability to keep even its highest profile prisoners safe after Nassar’s stabbing and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s suicide at a federal medical center in June.

An ongoing AP investigation has uncovered deep, previously unreported flaws within the Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department’s largest law enforcement agency with more than 30,000 employees, 158,000 inmates and an annual budget of about $8 billion.

AP reporting has revealed rampant sexual abuse and other criminal conduct by staff, dozens of escapes, chronic violence, deaths and severe staffing shortages that have hampered responses to emergencies, including inmate assaults and suicides.

Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters was brought in last year to reform the crisis-plagued agency. She vowed to change archaic hiring practices and bring new transparency, while emphasizing that the agency's mission is “to make good neighbors, not good inmates."

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, Peters touted steps she'd taken to overhaul problematic prisons and beef up internal affairs investigations. This month, she told a House Judiciary subcommittee that hiring had improved and that new hires were outpacing retirements and other departures.

But Peters has also irritated lawmakers who said she reneged on her promise to be candid and open with them. In September, senators scolded her for forcing them to wait more than a year for answers to written questions and for claiming that she couldn’t answer basic questions about agency operations, like how many correctional officers are on staff.

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Biden hails first hostage releases under Israel-Hamas deal, warns of challenges ahead

President Joe Biden on Friday framed Hamas’ initial release of two dozen women and children as a sign of progress but emphasized that the deal was just the beginning of a challenging road ahead as the U.S. works to free the remaining hostages, including American citizens.

“Today has been a product of a lot of hard work and weeks of personal engagement,” Biden said, speaking from Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he’s spending the Thanksgiving holiday with his family. “From the moment Hamas kidnapped these people, I, along with my team, have worked around the clock to secure their release.”

Hamas released the first hostages Friday — 13 Israelis, 10 Thai citizens and one Filipino. Their release marked the first wave in a deal to trade several hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israel under a four-day cease-fire. Biden said more details will be unveiled about the next round of hostages in the coming hours, but it’s not yet clear if that list will include Americans.

“We don’t know when that will occur, but we expect it to occur. And we don’t know what the list of all the hostages are or when they’ll be released, but we know the numbers when they’re going to be released. So my hope and expectation is that it will be soon,” Biden said, responding to a question from a reporter about when Americans will be released.

Under the agreement announced earlier this week, Hamas is expected to release a total of 50 hostages for 150 Palestinian prisoners, all women and teenagers. The deal, which emerged from talks involving Israel, Hamas, Qatar, the U.S. and several outside groups, could be seen as a rare bright spot amid several weeks of death and devastation. More than two hundred trucks also arrived in Gaza on Friday, carrying fuel, food, medicine and cooking gas, Biden said, and hundreds more are expected to arrive in the coming days.

“I don’t trust Hamas to do anything right,” Biden said of the ongoing negotiations. “I only trust Hamas to respond to pressure.”

While several administration officials say the deal is evidence that their strategy toward the Israel-Hamas war is working, the president didn’t take a victory lap on Friday, as roughly 200 hostages will remain in captivity.

The hostages suffered immeasurable trauma, Biden said.

“All of these hostages have been through a terrible ordeal. And this is the beginning of a long journey of healing for them,” Biden said. “The teddy bears waiting to greet those children at the hospital are a stark reminder of the trauma these children have been through at such a very young age.”

Hamas killed 1,200 people Oct. 7, and Israel’s response has killed more than 13,000 people.

The political challenge facing the president is far from fading as progressive-minded Democrats ramp up calls for a cease-fire. Biden said Friday that he’s encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “focus on trying to reduce the number of casualties,” while trying to eliminate Hamas, which he called a legitimate objective.

Biden also faces an uphill climb in securing aid for Israel, as some members of his party call for conditions attached to aid for Israel, such as a reduction in bombing.

“I think that’s a worthwhile thought,” Biden said. “But I don’t think if I started off with that that we would’ve ever gotten to where we got today. We have to take this a piece at a time.”

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Trudeau blames ‘MAGA influence’ for stirring debate on Ukraine

Justin Trudeau is blaming the MAGA movement and Republican ideology for eroding support for Ukraine.

The Canadian prime minister used a press conference with visiting European leaders to connect a gambit by his Conservative rivals in Ottawa to hard-right rhetoric in the United States and Europe, which he said is “starting to parrot Russian disinformation and misinformation and propaganda.”

Canada is home to 1.4 million Ukrainian Canadians and boasts the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora after Russia. Until now, politicians of all stripes have been united behind Ukraine.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and his party turned heads in Parliament earlier this week when they voted as a bloc against legislation that would update the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement. The bill passed anyway with the aid of Bloc Québécois and NDP MPs for study at the committee level.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the new deal when he met with Trudeau in Ottawa this fall. Ukraine asked Canada to fast-track the modernized legislation to help lure investments to rebuild the war-torn country.

In a surprise move, Conservatives voted against legislation that would enact those changes. The party claimed that the new trade deal with Ukraine would impose Canada’s controversial carbon tax which Poilievre has vowed to kill.

No such wording actually exists in the document. In fact, the Eastern European country has had its own carbon mechanism since 2011.

Ukrainian officials were taken aback by the sudden politicization of a trade deal first championed by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Trudeau called the Conservatives opposition to the deal “frankly absurd.”

During Friday’s press briefing he called out what he described as a bigger trend behind the Conservatives’ twist — using the moment to tie his political foes to Trumpian influences.

“The real story is the rise of a right-wing American, MAGA influence thinking that has made Canadian Conservatives, who used to be among the strongest defenders of Ukraine … turn their backs on something Ukraine needs in its hour of need,” Trudeau told reporters in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Support for Ukraine has evolved into a crisis in Washington, with calls from congressional members to pump the brakes on U.S. aid to the country. The position, most evident among a hardline group of Republicans, reflects former President Donald Trump’s “America First” ethos on foreign policy and hostility to foreign aid.

Trudeau was hosting European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in the Atlantic harbor city for a two-day leaders’ summit at which a new EU-Canada green alliance was formally announced.

Von der Leyen also confirmed that the European Union will formally join Canada’s global carbon pricing challenge to get all countries on board with emissions trading or a tax to lower emissions.

The rising cost of living has made the Trudeau government’s climate policies — especially its carbon tax — a lightning rod for partisan derision. A wave of growing support for Poilievre has been partly fueled by Conservative calls to “axe the tax.”

While Poilievre has stumped around the country, railing on the tax, he does not acknowledge the federal government rebates that Canadians receive to offset the carbon tax, which was designed to incentivize a dip in fossil fuel use and the adoption of greener energy alternatives.

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Medicare Advantage plans under Congress’ microscope for care denials

Enrollment in Medicare’s private-sector alternative is surging — and so are the complaints to Congress.

More than 30 million older Americans are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, wooed by lower premiums and more benefits than traditional Medicare offers.

But a bipartisan group of lawmakers is increasingly concerned that insurance companies are preying on seniors, and, in some cases, denying care that would otherwise be approved by traditional Medicare.

“It was stunning how many times senators on both sides of the aisle kept linking constituent problems with denying authorizations for care,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in an interview, referring to a bevy of complaints from colleagues during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing.

Congress has already gone after insurers for their celebrity-filled ads and misleading directories. But its scrutiny of these care denials, which is expected to continue into next year, could have a far greater impact and reshape the rules for one of the most profitable parts of the insurance industry.

“CMS is very attuned to what is going on on the Hill,” Sean Creighton, managing director of policy for consulting firm Avalere Health, said of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He added that next year will likely bring “more scrutiny by the Hill and CMS on this, and there will be more reporting requirements for the plans and actions the plans are required to take to lessen the burden on providers and patients.”

Legislation requiring insurers to more quickly approve requests for routine care passed unanimously in the House in 2022, but stalled in the Senate over cost concerns. The Improving Seniors’ Timely Access to Care Act, which mandates insurers quickly approve requests for routine care and respond within 24 hours to any urgent request, was reintroduced this year in the House and passed out of the House Ways and Means Committee this summer as part of a larger health care package.

Still, lawmakers are peppering the Biden administration with demands for reforming the commonly used tool called prior authorization, the process in which health insurers require patients to get insurer approval ahead of time for certain treatments or medications.

It “has turned into a process of basically just stopping people from getting care,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), leader of the House Progressive Caucus.

Jayapal was one of more than three dozen House Democrats who told CMS this month of “a concerning rise in prior authorizations,” accused health insurers of prioritizing “profits over people” and asked for “a robust method of enforcement to rein in this behavior.”

Unlike traditional Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans can employ prior authorization and restrict beneficiaries to certain doctors within their network. Those are among the incentives private insurers have to participate in the program and enrollment has doubled during the last decade.

But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said some hospitals in his state won’t take Medicare Advantage plans any more. “We can’t do it because we can’t afford the constant chasing from all the denials,” he said.

AHIP, the trade group representing insurers, told POLITICO that prior authorization was among the tools that can curb wasteful spending.

“These tools are important when coordinating care, reducing unnecessary and low-value care, and promoting affordability for patients and consumers,” said spokesperson David Allen in a statement.

CMS has a track record of responding to liberal concerns, which could translate into big changes for Medicare Advantage in the coming years. Earlier this month, it proposed a rule to improve the standards for behavioral health networks following complaints from Congress about woefully inaccurate mental health provider directories, which some lawmakers said amounted to fraud.

It also for the first time this year is evaluating Medicare Advantage television ads before they air, following prodding from lawmakers and numerous complaints from elderly consumers who felt duped by the ubiquitous ads.

CMS also proposed a rule earlier this month that plans be required to factor the impact of prior authorization denials on marginalized and underserved communities, part of a larger effort by the agency to close gaps in health equity. The rule, if finalized, would take effect in 2025.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who wants the agency to go further, has proposed an amendment that would require CMS to collect and publish data from Medicare Advantage plans on their prior authorization practices to make public the number of prior authorization requests, denials and appeals by type of medical care.

She has support from Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), who said during a recent hearing that his support for Medicare Advantage plans “does not mean that I like the prior authorization process and that I do not see some problems here that need to be solved.”

Insurer advocacy group Better Medicare Alliance told POLITICO it supports legislation and regulations to create an electronic prior authorization process that could expedite prior authorization decisions that typically take up to a week or more.

“Our goal has always been to protect prior authorization’s essential function — coordinating safe, effective, high-value care — while also strengthening and streamlining this clinical tool to better serve beneficiaries,” Mary Beth Donahue, president and CEO of the group, said in a statement.

Creighton suspects insurers would be fine with implementing guardrails for prior authorization, as long as they can continue to use it.

“It is super important that in this case one doesn’t throw out the prior authorization with the bath water,” he said. “It is just finding that balance.”

But many physicians complain that balance has tipped too far in favor of Medicare Advantage plans.

A survey released earlier this month by the physicians’ trade group Medical Group Management Association found 97 percent of medical group practices said an insurer delayed or denied medically necessary care. Another 92 percent said they had hired staff specifically to process prior authorization requests. A December 2022 survey from the American Medical Association also found that 94 percent of physicians reported care delays due to prior authorization denials or processing.

“Even when you are doing the most cost-effective treatment, you are going through the [prior authorization] process,” said Vivek Kavadi, chief radiation oncology officer for U.S. Oncology, a network of more than 1,200 physicians.

Studies show that oncology faces the most prior approval requests.

Five oncologists told POLITICO that prior authorization requests are increasing as more patients migrate from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage. This surge of insurer prior approval demands has put a strain on their practices’ resources, they said.

A 2020 survey of oncologists by the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) found 64 percent reported treatment delays due to prior authorization requests increased during the pandemic.

Insurers may at times contract with radiation benefit managers, companies that manage claims processing and keep a cut of savings they generate. This can encourage more services requiring prior authorization and create a “greater incentive to identify opportunities where denials can be pushed on to the provider,” said Constantine Mantz, chief policy officer for the oncology network GenesisCare.

EviCore, a radiation benefit manager, said its work is meant to ensure patients receive care grounded in the latest clinical evidence as quickly as possible. “For requests that don’t meet evidence-based guidelines, the [physician] has the opportunity to discuss the case … which can help resolve any concerns prior to initiating a formal appeal,” the company said in a statement.

BMA did not wish to comment and AHIP declined to respond to a list of questions on radiation benefit managers.

Medicare Advantage plans have been slow to update their coverage policies and at times lag Medicare in which treatments are covered, Mantz said. This can lead to situations where a Medicare Advantage plan denies care after a prior authorization request that would be covered under traditional Medicare.

HHS’ Office of the Inspector General in a 2022 report found 13 percent out of a sample of claims from Medicare Advantage plans in which care was denied under prior authorization for services that should have been approved. Some of the examples OIG found included prior authorization denials of advanced imaging services and stays at inpatient rehabilitation facilities.

If a request is denied, a doctor can file an appeal and eventually speak with another physician to plead their case.

Recent studies have shown that most appeals to a denial get overturned. In 2021, Medicare Advantage plans fully or partially denied more than 2 million claims through prior authorization, but 82 percent of those were overturned after an appeal, according to an analysis from the think tank KFF. A 2019 survey from ASTRO found 62 percent of oncologists, who appealed on behalf of their patients, got their prior authorization denial overturned.

But doctors say getting through the appeals process can take weeks.

“It feels more like the business model is a way for insurance companies to potentially reduce costs by feeling that physicians won’t want to participate in this peer-to-peer process because it is a burden on time,” said Amar Rewari, chief of radiation oncology for the Maryland-based health system Luminis Health.

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Gaza has become a moonscape in war. When the battles stop, many fear it will remain uninhabitable

Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells.

Nearly 1 million Palestinians have fled the north, including its urban center, Gaza City, as ground combat intensified. When the war ends, any relief will quickly be overshadowed by dread as displaced families come to terms with the scale of the calamity and what it means for their future.

Where would they live? Who would eventually run Gaza and pick up the pieces?

“I want to go home even if I have to sleep on the rubble of my house,” said Yousef Hammash, an aid worker with the Norwegian Refugee Council who fled the ruins of the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya for southern Gaza. “But I don’t see a future for my children here.”

The Israeli army’s use of powerful explosives in tightly packed residential areas — which Israel describes as the unavoidable outcome of Hamas using civilian sites as cover for its operations — has killed over 13,000 Palestinians and led to staggering destruction. Hamas denies the claim and accuses Israel of recklessly bombing civilians.

“When I left, I couldn’t tell which street or intersection I was passing,” said Mahmoud Jamal, a 31-year-old taxi driver who fled his northern hometown of Beit Hanoun this month. He described apartment buildings resembling open-air parking garages.

Israel’s bombardment has become one of the most intense air campaigns since World War II, said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor. In the seven weeks since Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 attack, Israel unleashed more munitions than the United States did in any given year of its bombing campaign against the Islamic State group — a barrage the U.N. describes as the deadliest urban campaign since World War II.

In Israel’s grainy thermal footage of airstrikes targeting Hamas tunnels, fireballs obliterate everything in sight. Videos by Hamas’ military wing feature fighters with rocked-propelled grenades trekking through smoke-filled streets. Fortified bulldozers have cleared land for Israeli tanks.

“The north of Gaza has been turned into one big ghost town,” said Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City who fled to Egypt last week. “People have nothing to return to.”

About half of all buildings across northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. With the U.N. estimating 1.7 million people are newly homeless, many wonder if Gaza will ever recover.

“You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” said Raphael Cohen, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a research group.

The war has knocked 27 of 35 hospitals across Gaza out of operation, according to the World Health Organization. The destruction of other critical infrastructure has consequences for years to come.

“Bakeries and grain mills have been destroyed, agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” said Scott Paul, a senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam America. “You need more than four walls and a ceiling for a place to be habitable, and in many cases people don’t even have that.”

Across the entire enclave, over 41,000 homes — 45% of Gaza’s total housing stock — are too destroyed to be lived in, according to the U.N.

“All I left at home was dead bodies and rubble,” said Mohammed al-Hadad, a 28-year-old party planner who fled Shati refugee camp along Gaza City’s shoreline. Shati sustained nearly 14,000 incidents of war damage — varying from an airstrike crater to a collapsed building — over just 0.5 square kilometers (0.2 square miles), the satellite data analysis shows.

Southern Gaza — where scarce food, water and fuel has spawned a humanitarian crisis — has been spared the heaviest firepower, according to the analysis.

Palestinians look for survivors under the rubble of destroyed buildings following Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled, File)

But that’s changing. In the past two weeks, satellite data shows a spike in damage across the southern town of Khan Younis. Residents say the military has showered eastern parts of town with evacuation warnings.

Israel has urged those in southern Gaza to move again, toward a slice of territory called Muwasi along the coast. As of Thursday, Israel and Hamas were still working out the details of a four-day truce that would allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and facilitate an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.

“This is our nakba,” said 32-year-old journalist Tareq Hajjaj, referring to the mass displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — an exodus Palestinians call the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”

Although publicly Palestinians reject the idea of being transferred outside Gaza, some privately admit they cannot stay, even after the war ends.

“We will never return home,” said Hajjaj, who fled his home in Shijaiyah in eastern Gaza City. “Those who stay here will face the most horrific situation they could imagine.”

The 2014 Israel-Hamas war leveled Shijaiyah, turning the neighborhood into fields of inert gray rubble. The $5 billion reconstruction effort there and across Gaza remains unfinished to this day.

“This time the scale of destruction is exponentially higher,” said Giulia Marini, international advocacy officer at Palestinian rights group Al Mezan. “It will take decades for Gaza to go back to where it was before.”

It remains unclear who will take responsibility for that task. At the recent security summit in Bahrain, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi vowed Arab states would not “come and clean the mess after Israel.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the army to restore security, and American officials have pushed the seemingly unlikely scenario of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority taking over the strip.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, regarded by many Palestinians as weak, has dismissed that idea in the absence of Israeli efforts toward a two-state solution.

Despite the war’s horrors, Yasser Elsheshtawy, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, hopes reconstruction could offer an opportunity to turn Gaza’s ramshackle refugee camps and long deteriorating infrastructure into “something more habitable and equitable and humane,” including public parks and a revitalized seafront.

But Palestinians say it’s not only shattered infrastructure that requires rebuilding but a traumatized society.

“Gaza has become a very scary place,” Abusada said. “It will always be full of memories of death and destruction.”

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Russia is holding next year’s global climate summit ‘hostage’

The dispute means that global efforts to secure a liveable future risk being left leaderless.

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Joe Biden once embraced Eric Adams. Don’t expect that anytime soon.

NEW YORK — Joe Biden and Eric Adams, once a perfect political match, haven’t spoken in nearly a year — and nobody expects that to change anytime soon.

The icy relationship — emerging amid Adams’ criticism of the president's handling of the migrant crisis — has evolved into a deep freeze with the New York mayor now embroiled in a federal investigation over whether his campaign colluded with foreign interests.

An FBI raid on his chief fundraiser’s home earlier this month led Adams to abruptly cancel high-level Washington meetings on migrant funding and jet back to New York.

Earlier ethical yellow flags in the mayor’s career — an alleged bid-rigging scandal and a self-promotional nonprofit — weren’t enough to stop Biden from embracing the Black, politically moderate former cop who fit well with the president’s own political persona. But now, Biden’s advisers are glad the growing gulf exists and argue that it should insulate the Democratic president from any political fallout.

Two White House officials not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations said there had long been rumors in New York about Adams and his inner circle, but they are not aware of any heads-up to Biden about the mayor’s latest string of legal troubles.

Adams’ recent comments underscore the sour mood.

“I kid myself by calling myself the Biden of Brooklyn,' he told reporters.

He remains unapologetic about his call for the president to do more to alleviate the migrant crisis as the city stares down a fiscal cliff.

“D.C. has abandoned us, and they need to be paying their cost to this national problem,” the mayor said. “Don’t yell at me, yell at D.C.”

The silence between Biden and Adams has left the two top Democrats increasingly reliant on intermediaries to discuss federal funding to support the surge of migrants overwhelming big cities.

The president hasn’t discussed Adams publicly or privately as of late, the two White House officials said.

Several Democratic leaders say those in Biden’s orbit must have known about Adams’ past probes.

“They read the same press stories everybody else reads,” said a national Democratic operative who was granted anonymity to discuss the relationship. “Fair or not fair, they’re out there. This is not a secret kept in New York.”

One longtime Democratic aide, who was also granted anonymity to discuss the circumstances, said of the federal investigation, “I’m surprised it took this long.”

The New York mayor has neither been charged nor accused of wrongdoing.

The FBI stopped him and seized his electronic devices on Nov. 6, four days after agents removed campaign documents from his fundraiser’s home. Adams’ attorney says he is fully cooperating with the probe and even outed an individual on his campaign accused of unspecified wrongdoing.

The feds are looking into whether the Adams campaign conspired with the Turkish government to accept illegal foreign contributions in exchange for favors for Turkish officials, according to The New York Times.

It’s not the first time Adams has been under investigation.

The state inspector general examined alleged favoritism that Adams showed for a gaming operator making a bid for a contract at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens. The operator had donated to him.

Then, both the federal government and the New York City Department of Investigation looked at the fundraising he did as Brooklyn borough president for his One Brooklyn nonprofit, which operated in a gray area for charity and to boost his profile, according to the New York Post.

Adams was charged in neither and went on to decisively win the race for mayor in 2021, but his political career has additionally been dogged by questions raised in POLITICO stories about his secret office and where he makes his home.

And currently, the federal examination of whether his campaign for mayor used so-called straw donors to leverage public matching funds comes in addition to the Manhattan district attorney indicting six Adams supporters for allegedly bundling illegal donations and charging his former buildings commissioner with alleged bribery.

The mayor’s supporters argue that Black and Latino elected officials face greater scrutiny than white ones.

Other defenders, especially Republicans, say without any evidence that Biden’s Department of Justice is targeting Adams because he has been critical of the president.

Another person with the White House granted anonymity said officials there received a last-minute cancellation of meetings without an explanation on Nov. 2, the day Adams left Washington, D.C., almost as soon as he’d arrived.

The mayor has sought to quash any notion that Biden aides directed him to return to New York because of the federal investigation.

“The White House didn’t do that,” Adams told reporters earlier this month. “That is just not true. And keep in mind, I did not call for the meeting in D.C. Another coalition partner called for it, the mayor of Denver.”

Though Adams has said he would reschedule the meetings he missed, including with White House chief of staff Jeff Zients and Biden senior adviser Tom Perez, the mayor’s spokesperson would not confirm whether he had yet done so, saying such information is released only with his daily public schedule.

The president and mayor last spoke — doing so only briefly — in January at an event in New York City. Adams was dropped in May from the president’s National Advisory Board. And the two didn’t meet when Biden was in town in September for the United Nations General Assembly.

It’s a long fall from February 2022, when Biden visited New York City and commended Adams at an event on gun violence strategies.

“Mayor Adams, you and I agree: The answer is not to abandon our streets,” Biden said then at NYPD headquarters.

Even earlier than that, Biden appeared to spot promise in Adams. In July 2021, the president hosted the then-Brooklyn borough president at a White House summit on combating gun violence.

“The prerequisite to prosperity for New York and America is public safety and reform and justice,” Adams says in a Facebook video posted by the White House, adding of Biden: “And he gets it.”

The president and mayor now leave it entirely up to their top aides to make progress on their behalf.

“We are all one big family,” Adams’ chief of staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, told reporters recently. “There are times when we’re not going to be aligned but the fact of the matter is the work continues to move on.”

Nick Reisman contributed to this report.

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