Several times during Thursday’s Democratic primary debate on NY1, Maya Wiley sought to use Eric Adams' own words against him.
It started with this: "Eric, you were a self-described conservative Republican when Rudy Giuliani was mayor."
That quote came from a 1999 New York Times profile, but on Friday his campaign said Adams never said that. A campaign spokesman said the Times reporter conflated the fact that Adams said he was conservative on crime with the fact he was, at the time, a registered Republican.
Did Adams really praise Giuliani?
Wiley also said Adams called Rudy Giuliani “better than David Dinkins.” In fact, Adams was a vocal Giuliani critic.
But he did tell the Daily News in a 1999 interview that “Giuliani deserves tremendous credit for the falling crime rate. Dinkins was way too soft on crime.”
Did Yang vote in 2000?
Andrew Yang, meanwhile, was asked by NY1 political anchor Errol Louis about not voting in the 2000 election and said this: "I believe I did vote in that election. I voted in the presidentials consistently, so I'd have to check that record."
We did check Yang's voting record, which shows the elections he did vote in, and 2000 is not among them.
Did Yang make a racist remark?
Ray McGuire asked Yang about a comment drawn from a 2020 Times article, in which five former employees of Yang's nonprofit fellowship program said he “suggested offhandedly that the program might simply not be the best fit for black applicants."
Did Yang really say that? He gave two different responses.
"It was like a hypothetical where I was posing it to my team in order to challenge our thinking,” he said at first. Then, when pressed twice by McGuire, he said: "I actually don't even remember saying that. But, like, if you say that it's documented somewhere, I didn't want to come and say, ‘Hey, I didn't say that.’"
Did Ray McGuire help create the financial crisis?
And finally, there was Shaun Donovan's attack on former Citi executive Ray McGuire, where Donovan referred to the Great Recession as “a crisis that you helped create."
But McGuire was largely overseeing mergers and acquisitions at the time of the financial crisis, in a division of the bank that had nothing to do with the mortgage-backed securities that sparked the crisis.