“I’ll be there,” Trump told Fox News. “Look forward to being in beautiful Atlanta.”

Both candidates also accepted invitations for a second debate hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.

The two rivals quickly agreed to debate after a feisty Biden issued a challenge to square off against Trump next month in an early morning video posted on social media.

“[Trump’s] acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I’ll even do it twice,” Biden said.

The president even included a dig at Trump over his ongoing Manhattan criminal trial, which is dark on Wednesdays.

“Let’s pick a date,” Biden said. “I hear you’re free on Wednesdays.”

Trump, who has said he is also eager to debate, wasted no time responding to his rival’s challenge.

“I am ready and willing to debate [Biden],” he wrote on his Truth Social site. “Let’s get ready to rumble.”

It remains to be seen if the two campaigns can reach a final agreement on formats, although there seemed to be no major immediate disputes.

Biden’s campaign wants the debates to be held with a moderator in a television studio, without a live crowd and with the microphones only turned on for the candidate who is speaking. That tweak is designed to prevent a repeat of the chaotic 2020 debates when Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden.

Trump initially countered by calling for them to be held in a “very large” venue, citing “excitement purposes.” His campaign also called for a total of four debates, including additional faceoffs in July and August.

But Trump’s campaign accepted the offer from CNN for a debate to be held in the network’s Atlanta studio without a live audience.

Neither candidate mentioned the possibility of independent candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being included.

“They are trying to exclude me from the debate because they are afraid I would win,” Kennedy said in a statement.

The campaigns have apparently both decided not to work with the Commission on Presidential Debates, the bipartisan group that has organized debates for the past several elections.

Neither Biden nor Trump even mentioned the commission, which had planned a slate of three presidential debates starting in mid-September in San Marcos, Texas. The group also planned one vice presidential debate.

Presidential debates have never been held before Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign season, much less prior to the two parties’ summer conventions.

The Republican National Convention is set for mid-July in Milwaukee while Democrats will gather in August in Chicago.

The earlier debates would reflect the major changes to how and when Americans vote for president. Tens of millions of people are expected to cast ballots before Election Day on Nov. 5, either by mail or early in-person voting, with some states sending ballots to voters in early September.

Manhattan Federal Court Judge Sidney Stein spent part of Tuesday afternoon hearing from dozens of jurors who said they had family members and friends in law enforcement jobs. Most, but not all, said they could still be impartial in the case.

The 70-year-old Democrat is accused of conspiring to act as a foreign agent for Egypt as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of abusing his position to advance Qatari interests in exchange for gold bullion bars, flashy watches and Formula 1 tickets. He denies the charges.

“We’re getting closer every time you see me,” Stein said Tuesday. He told the attorneys that he expects the jury to be selected by mid-morning Wednesday, with opening arguments later in the day.

The trial is expected to last six or seven weeks.

N.J. businessmen Wael Hana and Fred Danies will stand trial alongside the veteran politician, while Menendez’s wife, Nadine, will face a separate trial in July.

Stein spent Monday and Tuesday winnowing down a pool of 150 prospective jurors, dismissing more than 70 of them. Many had a variety of personal obligations or medical concerns that would have prevented them from serving.

One said he suffered from an extreme fear of heights that would make him uncomfortable in the 23rd-floor courtroom.

More than 30 of the remaining jurors were questioned Tuesday on their jobs and occupational backgrounds, how they get their news and what they do in their spare time.

The majority of those questioned have a college education or better. One potential juror, a lawyer with a large bank, offered a surprising detail — he donated money to Menendez and several other campaigns through a political action committee. He said he could still be impartial.

Stein on Tuesday afternoon went though a list of several hundred names of people who might either be witnesses or otherwise mentioned in testimony — including David Axelrod, the chief strategist for former President Barack Obama, and several U.S. senators including Marsha Blackburn, Cory Booker, Christopher Coons, Lindsey Graham, Tim Kaine, Chris Murphy and Krysten Sinema.

“So I was sitting with President Trump and he asked me if I was OK. He asked me if I needed money,” Cohen recalled.

“He said, um, ‘Alright. Just make sure you deal with Allen’” — the Trump family’s longtime financial sentry, Allen Weisselberg, currently serving a second stint on Rikers for a perjury conviction — Cohen added.

During his second day on the witness stand, he told the Manhattan Supreme Court jury that the meeting happened on Feb. 8, 2017, not long after Trump took up residency at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Trump’s then-lawyer was still waiting to be paid back for silencing Daniels about claims of an extramarital tryst with Trump 11 days out from the election. Establishing Trump’s knowledge of the hush money reimbursement is crucial for prosecutors to prove their case.

“Did he say anything about anything that would be forthcoming?” prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked.

“Yes,” Cohen replied. “It would be a check for January and February.”

During over five hours in the witness box on Monday, Trump’s loyal lawyer-turned-chief antagonist said his boss played a direct role in the effort to silence Daniels, former Playboy model Karen McDougal and a Trump Tower doorman about a series of sex scandals, the latter two of whom were paid off by former tabloid publisher David Pecker. Trump has pleaded not guilty and strongly denies the affairs.

Trump’s chief financial officer said he’d be reimbursed for handling the hush-money deal in installments purporting to cover a retainer fee as the president’s personal attorney, Cohen said. He testified Monday and Tuesday that the role was mostly meaningless and that he felt abandoned once Trump left Fifth Ave. for the White House.

“[Trump] approved it. And he also said, ‘This is going to be one heck of a ride in D.C.,’” Cohen said Monday.

Cohen, who went to federal prison for the payoff after pleading guilty to violating campaign finance laws and other crimes in 2018, wanted the remittance in one lump sum, but “Mr. Trump allegedly said, ‘No, it’s better, it’s better to do it over the 12 months.’”

Trump, 77, is accused of repeatedly falsifying New York business records throughout 2017 to disguise the reimbursement to Cohen — classifying it as payment for legal fees — to disguise an underlying scheme to hide damaging information from the voting public.

On Tuesday morning, Hoffinger pulled up each of Cohen’s 11 invoices to display to the court and asked him if they were false or accounted for actual “services rendered.”

“No ma’am,” Cohen answered. “They were for reimbursement.”

Asked how many hours of work he put in throughout 2017 while being compensated monthly in the tens of thousands, Cohen said, “Less than 10.”

Among the evidence the jury will have before them when they begin to deliberate is a bank statement reflecting Cohen’s payoff to Daniels — wired to her attorney, Keith Davidson, through a shell company hastily set up by Cohen in the waning days of the 2016 race. They will also have the invoices and the 11 checks Cohen received bearing Trump’s renowned spiky signature written with a Sharpie.

Last week, Weisselberg’s longtime deputy, ex-Trump Org controller Jeff McConney, identified handwritten notes on the Davidson statement as the penmanship of his former boss. The CFO calculated that Cohen was owed $420,000 — $130,000 for the payment to Daniels and an additional $50,000 Cohen paid a tech company for Trump-related work, then multiplied by two to account for taxes plus a $60,000 bonus.

Cohen revealed Monday that notes on the statement documenting the $50,000 expense were his own.

The jury on Tuesday heard how Cohen and Trump’s feud came to pass following Cohen’s 2018 guilty plea, with the former fixer saying he last spoke with his longtime boss sitting feet away at the defense table after his office and hotel room were raided by the feds, which Cohen called the “worst day of my life.”

“He said to me, ‘Don’t worry, I’m the president of the United States, there’s nothing here — everything’s going to be OK. Stay tough. You’re going to be OK,’” Cohen recalled, adding that others told him he was “loved” by Trump.

In the immediate aftermath, Cohen — who has since sought to rebrand himself as a liberal resistance hero — said he felt “reassured, because I had the president of the United States protecting me.”

Trump’s eyes were closed for long periods of Tuesday’s testimony, leaving spectators wondering if he was dozing off, and he and Cohen barely looked in each other’s direction.

Trump’s court appearances have drawn high-profile supporters, including former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Eric Trump, and his wife, Lara, on Tuesday. House Speaker Mike Johnson lamented the trial outside the lower Manhattan courthouse without stepping foot inside the courtroom.

Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Florida Republicans Byron Donalds and Cory Mills, and Fox News host Laura Ingraham were also among those who came to the courthouse. Ingraham received a talking-to from a court officer for taking out her phone.

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche came bucking out of the gate on cross-examination later Tuesday, almost instantly earning a sustained objection when he asked Cohen if he’d recently referred to him on TikTok as “a crying little s–t.”

“Sounds like something I would say,” Cohen replied.

Blanche also asked Cohen about schoolyard taunts he’d made in public about Trump, ranging from “dictator douchebag” and “boorish cartoon misogynist” to “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain.” Cohen didn’t deny any of them.

Blanche attacked his credibility from all sides by portraying him as driven by hatred and financial greed. He highlighted Cohen’s countless public statements calling for Trump to be imprisoned, his propensity to wax lyrical on the phone with reporters, and the motivations behind his extensive cooperation in prosecutors’ Trump probe leading to the case on trial.

Cohen, known for having a notoriously short fuse, has yet to lose his cool on the stand and gave mild, one-word replies to the grilling.

The defense has claimed that Cohen’s payment to Daniels was an example of him going rogue and showed an unhealthy obsession with his boss. Cohen on Tuesday rejected that framing.

Asked about past praise Cohen gave of Trump — calling him “a good man” in 2015 and saying that he “cares deeply about this country” and “he’s a man who tells it straight” — Cohen said he believed his remarks at the time.

“At that time, I was knee-deep into the cult of Donald Trump,” he explained.

It emerged in court Tuesday that Cohen was the prosecution’s last scheduled witness. Trump’s lawyers said they had yet to decide whether their client, the presumptive GOP nominee in this year’s presidential election, would take the stand.

.

During more than five hours in the witness box, Trump’s former lawyer and fixer described his boss as a micromanager who was intimately familiar with everything that went on beneath him and himself as Trump’s loyal lackey — one who would bully, lie and threaten to sue anyone who stood in the way of accomplishing the task the boss assigned him “to make him happy.”

Trump was involved in every last detail, Cohen said.

“Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off,” he testified in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, sitting feet away from his longtime boss turned arch-nemesis.

No matter the issue, “You would go straight back and tell him, especially if it was a matter that was troubling to him.”

Trump’s micromanagement as a business leader extended to his campaign for president, Cohen told the court, describing him as deeply entangled in efforts to hide a series of alleged sex scandals involving former Playboy model Karen McDougal, a Trump Tower doorman and porn star Stormy Daniels.

Cohen said he was tasked with paying off the adult film star $130,000 on the eve of the 2016 election amid the “catastrophic” release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, describing Trump as being furious it was even an issue — with Cohen having worked to silence her years beforehand.

“He said to me, this is a disaster. Total disaster. Women are going to hate me. Because this is really a disaster, women will hate me. Guys may think it’s cool,” Cohen quoted Trump as saying. “But this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.”

The former fixer said Trump ordered him to “just take care of it,” and to delay paying her off until after the election.

“Because if I win, it has no relevance,” Cohen quoted Trump. “If I lose, I don’t even care.”

When the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape came out — in which Trump was heard on a hot mic bragging about molesting women — Cohen said it was Trump’s wife’s idea to excuse it as “locker room talk.

“At least he told me that that’s what Melania had thought it was. And use that in order to get control over the story and to minimize its impact on him and his campaign,” Cohen said.

Trump, 77, is charged with 34 felony counts of falsification of business records, which are each tied to his alleged reimbursement to Cohen for paying off Daniels. Prosecutors say the payments were falsely logged as legal fees. The criminal charges are the first ever filed against a former U.S. president.

Prosecutors allege the payments represented the last stage of a conspiracy to influence the results of the election Trump won, orchestrated in August 2015 at Trump Tower at a meeting attended by Cohen, his boss and David Pecker, the former tabloid publisher and chairman of America Media, Inc., or AMI.

“What was discussed was the power of the National Enquirer in terms of being located at the cash register of so many supermarkets and bodegas; that if we can place positive stories about Mr. Trump, that would be beneficial; that if we could place negative stories about some of the other candidates, that would also be beneficial,” Cohen told the court of the meeting.

Bolstering testimony jurors heard from Pecker at the beginning of the trial, Cohen said the tabloid publisher told him and Trump “he could keep an eye out for anything negative about Mr. Trump and that he would be able to help us to know in advance” to “try to stop it from coming out.”

Cohen, 57, went to prison for the payoff to Daniels after pleading guilty to federal offenses in 2018. He and Trump barely looked in each other’s direction when Cohen walked into the courtroom around 9:30 a.m. and throughout his day on the stand.

Cohen, who frequently addressed the jury while answering Hoffinger’s questions, said his boss was directly aware he needed to be reimbursed for the money he paid Daniels after wiring it to her lawyer through a shell company, which he said Trump also knew about. He explained how Trump’s convicted former finance chief Allen Weisselberg tallied that he was owed $420,000 after doubling the expense to account for taxes and tacking on a bonus and another $50,000 expense.

Cohen laughed when asked why he had to set up a fake account to deposit the money.

“Oh, I’m not sure they would have opened it if it stated to pay off — to pay off an adult film star for a non-disclosure agreement,” he said.

He explained that Trump promised to pay him back while he was on vacation in December 2016, when he blew up about being shorted on his bonus by two-thirds.

“Don’t worry about that other thing,” he quoted Trump. “I’m going to take care of it when we get back.”

The former fixer directly tied Trump to the payments at the heart of the case. His first day of testimony yielded little evidence the jury hadn’t already seen, instead weaving together the paper trail prosecutors have laid out over the past four weeks in bank records, emails, text messages and call logs during testimony from 17 witnesses.

The defense has sought to portray Cohen as untrustworthy and unhinged — claiming he went rogue in paying off Daniels — but the fixer told the jury his fealty to his boss wasn’t so strong that he’d part with $130,000 with no expectation he’d be paid back.

Cohen challenged the defense’s claims that Trump was unaware of what Cohen was up to at any given moment and that any efforts on his part to hide unflattering information from his past were intended to protect his family.

During one line of questioning, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger asked Cohen if he brought up Melania Trump in his conversation with Trump about Daniels, who he said told him, “Don’t worry.”

Cohen said Trump never told him whether Daniels’ claims of a 2006 tryst in a Lake Tahoe hotel room, which Trump has strongly denied, were valid. When the porn star’s story was first published on a blog in 2011, he said Trump didn’t directly address its veracity but bragged about her being attracted to him.

“He told me that he was playing golf with Big Ben Roethlisberger, the football player, and they had met Stormy Daniels and others there. But she liked Mr. Trump; that women prefer Trump even over someone like Big Ben,” Cohen said.

When McDougal came forward with claims months before Daniels, which AMI would ultimately pay her $150,000 to stay quiet about, Cohen said Trump similarly took a moment to brag.

“His response to me was, ‘She’s really beautiful,’” Cohen recounted. “I said, ‘OK, but there’s a story that’s right now being shopped.’”

Trump’s directive, Cohen said: “Make sure it doesn’t get released.”

Cohen is expected to continue on the stand Tuesday and is slated to face a cross-examination for the ages when Trump’s legal team gets its time with him in the witness box.

In a written statement, Catsimatidis said Giuliani gave him an ultimatum last week demanding he double his airtime and salary.

Two days after the demand, Catsimatidis said he learned that Giuliani continued to make “defamatory comments” about Georgia election workers, two of whom sued the former mayor for defamation and won $148 million in damages as a result. The stolen election narrative pushed by Giuliani and Trump has been proven false.

“That same day, I sent Rudy a letter reminding him not to speak about the legitimacy of the election results on our air,” Catsimatidis said. “Yet just hours later, during his 3:00 pm show that day, he did just that.”

Catsimatidis, who mounted his own failed run for mayor in 2013, did not say explicitly Monday whether or not he had fired Giuliani, who was suspended from airtime last Friday, but a WABC press release sent out Sunday noted that Catsimatidis was expected to “announce the cancellation” of Giuliani’s radio show.

On Monday, Giuliani all but confirmed getting sacked, saying on Twitter that he “was FIRED for refusing to give in to their demand that I stop talking about the 2020 Presidential Election.”

“I bought WABC at a time when media outlets wanted to stay away from associating with Rudy,” said Catsimatidis, who purchased the station in 2019 for $12.5 million. “I gave Rudy his own show and continued to support him despite the criticism I received as a result of this decision.”

He went on to detail how after buying the radio station, WABC received a letter from the lawyers of Dominion Voting Systems, which sued Fox News for defamation in March 2021, claiming the outlet spread the conspiracy theory that its machines transferred votes from Trump to President Biden.

That lawsuit resulted in Fox coughing up a settlement of close to $800 million to avoid a trial.

According to Catsimatidis, that resulted in WABC’s lawyers instructing its broadcasters “‘not to state, suggest or imply that the election results are not valid or that the election is not over.’ This has remained the policy of the station ever since,” Catsimatidis said, adding that Giuliani “agreed not to speak about Dominion” as well as “any allegations of electronic voting manipulation surrounding the 2020 election.”

After Giuliani broke that promise, Catsimatidis said that the WABC control room prevented his comments on the topic from airing live by using its “dump button” — but also noted that the station has a copy of the remarks “in our records.”

Giuliani received another warning in writing after that. Catsimatidis recounted how afterward Giuliani responded to him directly with a text stating “I am disregarding every order given in this letter.”

Catsimatidis, who made his fortune as the owner of grocery stores in the city, said the response raised concerns to him “as a responsible journalist” and that nobody at WABC has “ever been fired for free speech or talking about the election, even though in my mind, talking about the election of 2020 is like talking about who shot Kennedy.”

While Catsimatidis didn’t directly allude to Giuliani being fired in his statement Monday, he did reference each “decision” as the station’s head.

“As a licensee of the [Federal Communications Commission], the First Amendment grants me the rights and responsibilities to protect WABC,” he said. “Each decision I make is guided by what I believe best serves the station, our listeners, and above all, the truth.”

Cohen has been outspoken about his feelings on his former boss ahead of his expected appearance next week, sparking a response from Trump’s lawyers. The ex-president is under a gag order and barred from talking about witnesses.

“It’s now becoming a problem every single day that President Trump is not allowed to respond to this witness but the witness continues to talk,” lawyer Todd Blanche said.

Earlier Friday, a defense team’s efforts to prove how the former president was concerned about how his family would take the news of the Stormy Daniels sex tryst allegations fizzled. The dramatic fourth week of the first criminal trial of a U.S. president wrapped on Friday with a series of witnesses establishing key pieces of evidence and setting the scene for the case’s star witness, Cohen.

Trump, 77, has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony charges alleging he covered up reimbursement to Cohen for paying adult film actress Stormy Daniels into silence 11 days before the 2016 election by logging it internally as payment for legal fees. 

Prosecutors say the payoff was hastily arranged as the Trump campaign sought to contain the fallout of the damning “Access Hollywood” tape and concluded a yearslong conspiracy to unlawfully promote Trump’s candidacy by suppressing negative information from voters. 

Trump’s defense has claimed that Cohen went rogue in paying off Daniels and that he believed he’d paid him for legitimate legal services. 

Social media digs upset Trump

In response to the request from Team Trump, Merchan directed prosecutors to keep Michael Cohen on a tighter leash in the home stretch of the case — even though they’ve said they’ve already done everything they could do.

Cohen “was talking explicitly” about the case on a TikTok live Wednesday night, dressed in a white t-shirt with a picture of Trump in an orange jumpsuit behind bars, Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche said, asking that “he be prohibited from talking, the same way as Mr. Trump is.”

ADA Joshua Steinglass said Cohen had already been repeatedly warned to not make public statements.

“The fact of the matter is these witnesses are not subject to the gag order and we have no recourse if they make those statements,” Merchan said.

As Merchan ordered the prosecutors to remind Cohen not to make public statements, Trump smirked.

Trump v. Cohen set for next week

Laying the groundwork for Cohen’s expected testimony next week, prosecutors used Trump’s own words to show how his feelings about his longtime fixer changed amid revelations about the hush money scheme.

Trump came to the defense — and then bashed  — Cohen, who pleaded guilty to orchestrating the hush money payments to the porn star in 2018 in a series of tweets during his presidency after the feds began probing his fixer’s payoff to Daniels.

The tweets, read aloud to the jury by witness Georgia Longstreet, a paralegal for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, directly addressed the hush money payments.

“Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a non-disclosure agreement, or NDA,” Trump wrote weeks after the FBI raided Cohen’s office in April 2018.

But Trump turned by the following August after Cohen’s surprise guilty plea to campaign finance violations and other crimes.

“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!” he wrote in August of the same year.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg was in the courtroom for part of Friday’s proceedings.

‘The whole situation was very unpleasant’

Former top White House aide Madeleine Westerhout, who lost her job after saying she had a better relationship with Trump than his daughters, testified Friday morning that she understood the then-president was worried about his family when the Daniels allegations were made public.

But under further questioning, she couldn’t recall Trump mentioning his wife or kids at all in a conversation after the news broke.

“I don’t believe he specifically said that, but I could just tell the whole situation was very unpleasant,” Westerhout said to a sustained objection. Her comment was stricken.

Prosecutors are attempting to prove that Trump wanted Daniels’ story killed not for concern of his family — but over how news of the Tahoe dalliance would affect his political prospects.

Westerhout, 34, once Trump’s presidential executive assistant and director of Oval Office operations, first took the stand late Thursday, spoke glowingly of the presumptive Republican nominee and broke down into tears Thursday, relaying details of her firing after telling reporters she had a better relationship with the former president than his daughters and said they were overweight.

“I was invited by a White House colleague of mine to what I understood to be an off-the-record dinner. And at that dinner I said some things that I should not have said,” Westerhout testified.

“That mistake, eventually — ultimately, cost me my job. And I am very regretful of my youthful indiscretion. But I feel like I’ve learned a lot from that experience. I think I’ve grown a lot since then.”

Earlier in the week, Stormy Daniels took the stand for her bombshell testimony, including a fiery hourslong cross-examination by Susan Necheles, who attempted to paint her as an unreliable liar based on her work in the porn industry.

“Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh…wait. Nevermind,” she wrote in a post on X — a taunting reference to Trump not testifying in the case and using his own social media accounts to rail against the proceedings.

The zinger came after Trump’s lawyers unsuccessfully requested a mistrial based on Daniels’ testimony.

If Trump were to testify, he would open himself up to cross-examination by prosecutors.

Earlier in the day, Daniels pushed back during a tense, hour-long cross-examination by Trump’s attorney Susan Necheles.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, said she had sex with Trump in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 2006. Trump has denied the two had any such encounter. The alleged tryst is at the center of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case alleging Trump covered up a $130,000 reimbursement to fixer Cohen for paying Daniels into silence days before the 2016 election.

The presumed Republican presidential nominee scowled and crossed his arms during her testimony.

Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for purportedly buying Daniels’ silence.

After Daniels’ testimony, Trump lawyer Todd Blanche argued unsuccessfully for a mistrial, claiming Daniels’ comments were “a dog whistle for rape” and went far beyond the scope of the charges Trump’s facing.

“He’s a corrupt judge, and he’s totally conflicted,” Trump told reporters outside the courtroom.

Brooklyn federal prosecutor Breon Peace, who handled the case, called the sentencing “a lesson in American civics the hard way.”

“Qin’s brazen flouting of our political and immigration systems and his defrauding government agencies resulted in a felony conviction, prison sentence and today, his removal from the United States,” Peace said in a written statement.

Qin pleaded guilty two months ago to making more than $11,000 in illegal donations to three political candidates.

Along with the donations to the Adams campaign, he arranged for illicit contributions to Rep. Andrew Garbarino, (R-N.Y.), and Allan Fung, a Republican who ran for Congress in Rhode Island. None of the three politicians have been implicated in any wrongdoing in the case.

Federal prosecutors said in March that the campaigns targeted by Qin were unaware of his actions because he “concealed” his use of straw donors.

When first asked about Qin’s guilty plea, Adams told reporters he’d “met him before,” but that he was one of “the thousands upon thousands of people that I interacted with” while on the campaign trail.

A month later, the Daily News reported that Adams celebrated his 60th birthday party at Qin and his former model wife Emma Duo Liu’s luxe Plaza penthouse.

Also in attendance at that party was Adams adviser Winnie Greco, whose Bronx homes were raided in March by the FBI. She hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.

At Thursday’s sentencing of Qin, United States District Judge Joan Azrack ruled in favor of giving him time served, as he’d already been incarcerated since his arrest in October. As part of his plea, Qin also agreed to relinquishing his permanent resident status in the U.S. — which he obtained illegally — as well as his immediate deportation.

In addition to admitting to illegally reimbursing donors for their political contributions, Qin also fessed to filing a false application for legal resident status and fraudulently obtaining a Florida driver’s license, despite not being a legal resident there.

The Qin matter isn’t he only straw donor case connected to Adams’ political operation.

The federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan is probing ties between the Adams campaign and the Turkish government and whether the campaign benefited from illicit Turkish money. As part of that investigation, the FBI seized the mayor’s electronic devices and raided the homes of top campaign fundraiser Brianna Suggs and City Hall adviser Rana Abbasova last November.

In another case, which involved Dwayne Montgomery, a former NYPD inspector and longtime friend of Adams, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged that several defendants orchestrated a straw donor scheme to help Adams’ campaign in the hopes that they’d benefit down the road.

Montgomery pleaded guilty in that case to misdemeanor conspiracy and was sentenced in April to 200 hours of community service.

Adams hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing in any of the cases.

Biden traveled to suburban Racine, Wisconsin, where he cheered a decision by Microsoft to build a $3.3 billion data center there that is expected to create roughly 2,000 jobs.

He also mocked former President Trump for holding a ribbon cutting in 2018 for a Foxconn facility on the same site that he promised would create 10,000 jobs. It wound up never being built.

“My predecessor made promises which he broke more than kept, and left a lot of people behind in communities like Racine,” Biden said. “Under my watch, we make promises and we keep promises.”

A new Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed Biden opening up a 6% lead over Trump in Wisconsin, a better showing for the Democratic president than most recent swing state polls.

Biden won the Badger State by just 20,000 votes in 2020 and both campaigns expect another close contest this year.

The Biden campaign swing came a day after Trump logged another underwhelming electoral performance in the Indiana Republican presidential primary.

Trump won 78% of the GOP vote compared to 22% for Nikki Haley, even though the former UN envoy left the race two months ago and Trump is the presumptive nominee.

In Indianapolis’ Marion County and suburban vote-rich Hamilton County, Haley won an impressive 34% of the vote as affluent and well-educated Republican areas continued to show signs of disquiet with Trump.

Some analysts see the stubbornly strong support for Haley as a sign Trump has still failed to fully unite the Republican electorate behind him as he faces an epic rematch with Biden in the fall.

“It can’t be good news for Trump,” tweeted Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist.

Trump has bitterly complained that his campaign is being hampered by his Manhattan trial on charges related to hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels.

But the former president held no public campaign events on Wednesday even though there were no court proceedings scheduled.

Myrie, a progressive Democrat who represents the same swath of central Brooklyn once led by Adams in his state Senate days, said Wednesday that voters are tired of the current mayor’s “showmanship” and are yearning for “results.”

“New Yorkers want to see their government working relentlessly to make this city affordable, safe and livable — and that’s why I’m taking the first steps to explore a race for mayor in 2025,” Myrie said in a written statement. “We need to build a city where families can find good housing in a safe neighborhood, schools to care for and educate our kids, and leadership that is laser-focused on solving our city’s challenges.”

Gun

Myrie, who was born in Brooklyn and whose parents emigrated from Costa Rica to the U.S., has focused much of his work as a lawmaker on gun safety, abortion and voting rights.

His announcement comes at a critical point in Adams’ tenure. Recent polls show Adams’ approval rating is the lowest it’s been since he was elected in 2021, and several probes — on the city, state and federal fronts — threaten to further diminish his standing among voters.

Those investigations include Manhattan federal prosecutors’ probe into the mayor’s ties to Turkey, the Manhattan DA’s ongoing case against Adams’ former buildings commissioner Eric Ulrich, and a city Department of Investigation probe into Tim Pearson, a top adviser to the mayor.

Aside from Myrie’s possible challenge, former city Comptroller Scott Stringer, who served as Manhattan borough president and ran a failed campaign for mayor in 2021, is also mulling a City Hall run. Stringer announced in January that he was setting up a committee to explore a run.

Like Stringer, Myrie is positioning himself as a results-oriented candidate who will be more effective than Adams at managing the city’s vast bureaucracy. Unlike Stringer, Myrie is a lawyer, but his experience as an elected official is limited to his tenure as a state lawmaker, which began in 2019.

“I sincerely welcome him into the deep end of the pool,” Stringer said of Myrie’s potential run against Adams.

SCOTT STRINGER

A spokesman for the mayor’s campaign did not offer comment on Myrie’s announcement, but passed along a statement from Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, an Adams ally who’s the boss of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. She said Adams “has brought down crime” and “raised test scores in our schools.”

“And that is why New Yorkers, especially working-class New Yorkers, will be behind him for mayor,” her statement added.

Myrie came into the state Senate as part of a progressive surge, defeating Adams’ acolyte and successor, former state Sen. Jesse Hamilton, and flipping the Senate to Democratic from Republican control.

The potential Myrie mayoral run, which was first reported by The New York Times, is not likely to benefit the current mayor in ranked-choice voting, according to veteran political observers.

Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic strategist who advised former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, said Myrie’s entry in the race could hurt Adams given that he’s likely to make at least some inroads with the incumbent’s base of outer-borough African-American voters.

“It takes a certain amount of votes away from Adams,” Sheinkopf said. “If there is a beneficiary here, it might be Stringer.”

At the same time, Sheinkopf said a Myrie bid could steer some votes away from Stringer, given their shared progressive leanings.

“It hurts everybody potentially,” he said.

Ultimately, though, it’ll be very hard for either Stringer or Myrie to unseat Adams.

“If crime is down and streets are cleaner and [Adams] can convince the electorate that the migrant crisis is ultimately the responsibility of the federal and state governments, then Adams is going to be very difficult to beat,” Sheinkopf said. “Any incumbent mayor is very hard to beat.”

Over the past half century, only two incumbent first-term New York City mayors, Abe Beame and David Dinkins, lost reelection, Sheinkopf noted.