Good morning. It is September 27th. It's another muggy and soggy morning in New York City, but it feels a little churlish to complain about that, since it seems to be just a faraway side effect of Hurricane Helene inundating the southeast, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Splashed all the way across the front of the morning New York Times is “Adams charged with bribery and fraud, “a banner headline for the now day-old indictment of the mayor. They gave him the first draft of history lead so heavily it sounds like an obituary. “Mayor Eric Adams of New York City, a former police captain who ran on a law and order platform, but whose tenure has been consumed by accusations of corruption, spent years accepting free airline tickets, lavish overseas accommodations, and illegal campaign donations from Turkey, federal prosecutors said on Thursday.” The New York Post went with “Grand Theft Ottoman,” which honestly is a pretty good turnaround from their apologias yesterday. The Daily News went with “Bribery, fraud, conspiracy” as it would. So here it is, the indictment that everyone has been waiting for. Or was it? It is a heck of an indictment, tracking a decade's worth of handouts and gifts to Adams from Turkish officials and business people, according to the feds, backed by fairly hilarious set of text messages explicitly discussing the wrongfulness of the activity. You can basically pick a page of the indictment at random and be rewarded with something flagrant and ostentatious. Two nights at the Bentley Suite in the St. Regis, Istanbul, for instance, at approximately 90% off the list price, as well as already resorted to the Samuel Alito defense. If you take a free seat, or in Adams's case, a free upgrade, to top-of-the-line business class on a plane that was already going to go somewhere anyway, then from the perspective of the people with the plane, the cost of your freebie is almost nothing. You can't really say the same about the alleged $10 million in fraudulent matching campaign funds that Adams is accused of accessing by dividing up Turkish contributions into fake small -scale individual donations in the names of people who would have been eligible, to make legal campaign contributions and have them multiply matched with public money. The whole thing is both blatant and mysterious. One of the mysteries being why exactly Turkey would have gone to the trouble of building a corrupt relationship with a borough president of Brooklyn. Maybe they were buying up low-level officials everywhere, like penny stocks, and Eric Adams happened to be the one that hit the big time. But there's a whole other question that sort of went unremarked, in all the excitement yesterday, which is 57 pages, though this indictment is, where's the rest of it? 

Attentive listeners to the Indignity Morning podcast may remember that on Tuesday, the New York Times had a story informing us that according to people with knowledge of the matter, the feds were looking into Adams's relationships with five other countries beyond Turkey. For all the entertaining things you can find in the feds document released yesterday, what you won't find is the word Uzbekistan, or mention of Israel, China, Qatar, or South Korea save as places that Eric Adams may have flown to on luxury travel on Turkish Airlines. The $10 million matching fund scam outlined in the report seems to be entirely confined to Turkish donations, with no mention of the version of the same scheme that was reportedly carried out at the New World Mall in Flushing, Winnie Greco, Adams' Asian American community liaison, is mentioned by title in the indictment as one of Adams's traveling companions, but isn't charged with anything. And as the Times has annotated indictment notes, the FBI raid on Greco’s house happened under the auspices of prosecutors from the federal Eastern District who have been running their own investigation unconnected to the Southern District charges that came down yesterday. The defense decided to just go ahead and wrap up one part of the investigation and move forward with the prosecution under that so things don't trail on indefinitely, or are they planning to shovel even more indictments in on top of him? Nobody seems to know yet. All we know is that so far he's not resigning. 

Hurricane Helene continues to dump water on the coastal and interior southeast after hitting Florida as a category four storm and then subsiding to tropical storm speed. Our editorial policy here at the Indignity Morning podcast is once a hurricane, always a hurricane. It's not like it's going to dump any less water just because the winds have settled down. 

Down on the bottom right of page one of the times, “Israel is defiant as envoys seek ceasefire plan.” By “defiant,” we mean not seeking a ceasefire. 

On the left side of the page, there's a strange story about the politics around the people who want to do large scale geoengineering projects to blunt the effects of global warming and the people who want to ban geoengineering, in which you have to travel 22 paragraphs down and around onto the back of the A section before the word chemtrails appears, without which the story is essentially unintelligible. The point is that real concerns about geoengineering and whether it's a good idea to try large-scale human manipulation of the climate as the remedy for large-scale human inflicted damage to the climate, have been picked up by the long-existing community of absolutely deranged conspiracy theorists who have built up an entire paranoid alternate reality around the notion that jet contrails in the sky are not a normal everyday effect of passenger airplane travel but are visual proof of a decades-long government campaign to spray chemicals on the population from the air. It's a thing. It's a known cultural force. The fact that the chemtrail movement has a toehold in the Republican Party can only be understood if you're starting the story from the fact that these are chemtrail people. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. Please subscribe to Indignity to keep us going. And if all goes well, we will talk again on Monday.