Rudy Giuliani slammed Mayor Eric Adams as a “failure” for attending social events instead of solving the city’s crime problems in his first detailed comments on the city’s new leader.
“Adams hasn’t done a damn thing,” Giuliani told The Post in a recent interview.
“So far, he’s the biggest failure of a new mayor in America. He’s the worst failure of any new first-year mayor in New York City in my lifetime.”
Giuliani — who led former President Donald Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to overturn the 2020 election — said Adams should stay out of the spotlight until he gets more done.
“I didn’t go to a Met gala until I got the city under control,” said Giuliani, who was once lauded as “America’s Mayor” after 9/11.
“People should stop inviting him to events. Adams should be at City Hall and Gracie Mansion implementing plans that should have been implemented months ago.”
Giuliani, along with then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, instituted a new data system for the NYPD and oversaw plummeting crime rates during his tenure in the mid-to-late 1990s.
He said Adams’ early track record was worse than his predecessor Bill de Blasio, who saw an uptick in the city’s crime rate and an outbreak of violence during the violent Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
“Crime is up 38 percent. That is a tsunami,” Giuliani said. “Adams has more crime than Bill de Blasio. The city is undeniably more dangerous than it was last year under de Blasio.”
A recent Quinnipiac University College found that a majority of New Yorkers now disapprove of Adams’ handling of crime four months into his mayoralty.
Adams used his experience as a retired police captain to convince voters he was best equipped to tackle crime. But Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, claimed that was all talk and no action.
“I arrested way more criminals than he did,” Giuliani said. “Ask him about his most famous arrest. This guy was a politician who was a member of the police department.”
Giuliani also took issue with violence in the city’s subway system — where felony assaults jumped 50 percent from February to March of this year.
“Adams goes out and tells us the subways are safe. Who believes that?” the former mayor said.
Overall crime is down compared to before COVID-19 — but not when adjusted to lower pandemic ridership figures.
In addition, Giuliani claimed Adams didn’t have the courage to press Gov. Kathy Hochul and the left-leaning legislature to take more sweeping steps to help put criminals behind bars instead of releasing them under the revised cashless bail law.
A City Hall rep said Giuliani is a laughingstock who lacks credibility to question Adams.
“Giuliani is a national embarrassment who burned all of his credibility as a lying lapdog to a president that made our gun violence crisis exponentially worse by failing to do a single thing to combat the flow of firearms into our city during his four years in office,” said Adams spokesman Max Young.
“Since the start of our administration we have been laser-focused on public safety – we have taken over 2,300 guns off the street, instituted an all-new anti-gun unit, and invested a record amount of funding in programs, like youth employment and summer jobs, that will prevent New Yorkers from entering the criminal justice system in the first place.”
The mayoral spokesman also took issue with Giuliani’s take on Adams’ lobbying of Hochul and state lawmakers on criminal justice issues, including efforts to tighten the bail law.
“We have pushed reforms in Albany that no one thought possible, and have begun correcting historical mistakes that allowed too many criminals to avoid punishment for their actions,” Young said.
“But let’s be clear – President Trump, who Mayor Giuliani humiliated himself for time and time again, did nothing to stop this crisis, and in fact made things far worse by opposing virtually every single gun safety law or measure proposed. If the former mayor wanted to do something useful he would be in Washington demanding that his party take action,” Young said.
