By Dana Rubinstein and Emma G. Fitzsimmons

Nov. 18, 2025

As mayor of New York City, Eric Adams has made one thing abundantly clear: He loves to travel abroad — optics, an abandoned indictment and propriety be damned.

In his first three years in office, he visited Qatar (for the 2022 World Cup), Greece (to discuss antisemitism), Italy (to meet the Pope), Israel (to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), and Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia (to urge would-be migrants not to come to New York City). Earlier this year, he traveled to the Dominican Republic to show solidarity after a deadly nightclub collapse.

But in the waning weeks of Mr. Adams’s administration, the pace of his travel is picking up and the city is footing much of the bill.

Mr. Adams has strenuously defended his mayoral wanderlust, waving off periodic questions about whether it was appropriate to be leaving New York City so frequently, especially after he was indicted on corruption charges that focused, in part, on improper foreign travel.

“I was a little boy that had a dream of traveling the globe,” he said in December 2023. “And I’m living out that dream.”

George Santos supplant him as President Trump’s “new favorite criminal.” (The Trump Justice Department abandoned the indictment in apparent exchange for the mayor’s help with the president’s deportation agenda.)

Mr. Adams has traveled broadly for years, dating back to his time as Brooklyn borough president and a New York state senator. But as mayor, his past foreign trips became fodder for federal prosecutors, who accused him of accepting free and heavily discounted airfare to countries around the world, and of soliciting illegal foreign donations and channeling them through straw donors.

Adams has hosted roughly 100 flag-raising ceremonies in Lower Manhattan for countries big and small, including Israel, Albania and Uzbekistan.

Mr. Levy said that Mr. Adams decided to travel to Uzbekistan after Shavkat Mirziyoyev, the country’s president, invited him during an event in Washington earlier this month. In October, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams who has since left his administration said he had traveled to Albania at the invitation of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5807587&forum_id=2)#49491796)