Key campaign player for NYC Mayor Adams raised reelection funds while taking money to lobby his office, sparking ethics concerns

Mayor Adams’ campaign fundraising manager solicited donations for the mayor’s reelection bid last year while simultaneously being paid to lobby his administration on behalf of a Manhattan property owner with business before the city, according to a Daily News review of public records.

There’s no indication that the Adams aide, Brianna Suggs, ran afoul of any laws in playing the dual roles.

But Betsy Gotbaum, a city government veteran who serves as executive director of the Citizens Union watchdog group, said mixing of campaign and government activities that way is problematic in that it opens the door to pay-to-play politics. Gotbaum also said she thinks it should be illegal.

“The reason I think it should be illegal is because when people work for you on a campaign you become close, and if that person then lobbies the same [official] she’s raising money for, she’s going to get preferential treatment … and that means her client gets preferential treatment,” said Gotbaum, whose resume includes serving as the city’s public advocate and Parks Department commissioner.

“That just doesn’t look good. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

Suggs, whose professional relationship with Adams dates back to a Brooklyn Borough Hall internship she did in 2017, has worked as the coordinator of the mayor’s political fundraising activities since his successful 2021 mayoral campaign. Her LinkedIn profile says she was responsible for raising $18.4 million for Adams’ 2021 campaign, and she has claimed credit in city records for raking in at least $900,000 so far for his 2025 reelection effort.

Against that backdrop, Suggs launched a lobbying firm in June 2022 called Brianna Suggs and Associates, state records show.

On Aug. 1, 2022, she signed a contract for her firm to lobby Adams’ office on behalf of Terry Chan, the owner of East Broadway Mall, a Chinatown shopping complex housed in a city-owned building.

The contract submitted with the City Clerk’s Office stipulated that Chan would pay Suggs $1,500 per month to lobby the mayor’s office between Aug. 1 and Dec. 31, with a goal of convincing the administration to renew East Broadway Mall’s lease. The main target of her lobbying was listed in the City Clerk’s Office database as then-First Deputy Mayor Lorraine Grillo, who oversaw the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, the agency that controls the mall’s lease.

Suggs was at the same time getting compensated by the mayor’s campaign to solicit money from donors. The campaign sent her $57,289 in October that’s classified in a Campaign Finance Board record as “April-September pay” for fundraising and consulting.

Grillo, who resigned as first deputy mayor in January, said last week she never spoke directly with Suggs while she was contracted to lobby her. The only lobbyist Grillo said she spoke directly with about the matter was Jacqui Williams, founder of 99 Solutions, another firm hired by Chan to lobby the Adams administration about renewing his lease.

Prior to being asked by The News about the matter, Grillo said she was not aware of Suggs’ position with the Adams campaign. She said she’s happy she never found that out at the time of Suggs’ lobbying contract.

“I feel better that I have no knowledge of that because it was not used to influence me,” she said.

While Suggs’ contract was supposed to run for five months, Clerk’s Office records state Chan only paid her $3,000.

Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for Suggs, said she actually only got $1,500 — falling below the $5,000 threshold that requires lobbyists to submit their contracts with the Clerk’s Office.

“Brianna Suggs was engaged to do work that had the potential to include lobbying. She registered accordingly but, in retrospect, did not need to,” Barowitz said, adding that his client has since requested to pull her paperwork from the City Clerk’s database.

Barowitz also said Suggs did not speak to “any city official” about the East Broadway Mall matter. He said she spoke with Chan, but did not name any other people she might have spoken with as part of her contract.

Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said: “Neither City Hall nor the mayor have ever been lobbied by this firm.”

The Campaign Finance Board and the Conflicts of Interest Board, which respectively enforce city campaign finance and government ethics laws, both declined to comment. The City Clerk’s Office, which enforces local lobbying rules, would not comment on Suggs’ situation, but noted there is no law “against lobbyists engaging in fundraising and political consulting activities.”

Whatever lobbying efforts that were underway apparently didn’t net positive results for Chan, East Broadway Mall’s owner.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services said last month the agency is moving forward with terminating Chan’s lease, citing millions of dollars in unpaid rent and the mall’s deteriorating conditions. The department plans to instead open up bidding for another company to take over the lease, which runs through 2035.

Virgo Lee, an advisor to Chan, said the East Broadway Mall owner hasn’t given up on his lease, though, and plans to submit a new proposal for consideration once the administration reopens bidding. In the interim, Chan has hired another lobbying firm, MirRam Group, to keep approaching the administration about the matter, records show.

John Kaehny, executive director of the Reinvent Albany government watchdog group, said it doesn’t matter from an ethics perspective whether Suggs’ lobbying was successful.

He said he’s concerned that the overlap between her lobbying and fundraising roles sends a message that the East Broadway Mall owner has the mayor’s implicit support. More broadly, Kaehny said it indicates to others with business before the city that Adams’ administration is open to blurring the lines between campaign business and government affairs.

“If [she’s] raising money for a candidate that she’s lobbying at the same time, she can tell a client to donate money [to the campaign] in order for something to happen on the government side,” Kaehny said. “There would be an obvious conflict of interest there.”

Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist who’s a registered lobbyist in the city, defended Suggs’ activities and argued political operatives “have to make a living when the campaign season is over.” Still, he acknowledged the optics of her contract weren’t great.

“Is it ethical? It’s the system that we have,” he said. “Would the Founding Fathers like it? No, but they’ve been dead a long time.”