The federal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams has riled top advisers, aides, and commissioners — and also tested the many supporters of the city’s campaign finance system.

Adams is accused of seeking and receiving tens of thousands of dollars in illegal foreign campaign contributions funneled through “straw donors” — people who make political donations with other people’s money.

Some of those donations then earned Adams’s campaign even more money through the city’s generous public financing program, which uses taxpayer funds to match eligible donations at a rate of $8 to $1.

The scandal has exposed cracks in New York’s widely admired behemoth of a system, including loopholes that sometimes allow donors who have business with the city or middlemen who handle contributions to skirt the rules.

Eric Adams once maintained friendly relations with a nonprofit Turkish Cultural Center in Brooklyn. As a state senator, he met with its executive director in Albany. He attended the group’s annual dinner gala. As Brooklyn borough president, he worked with the center to distribute 1,500 pounds of meat to food pantries.

But around 2016, he suddenly stopped associating with it.

By that year, Adams had started accepting free travel from groups tied to the Turkish government, according to a criminal indictment against the mayor brought last week by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A senior Turkish diplomatic official told Adams that if he wanted to keep receiving those kinds of perks, he could no longer associate with the center, according to the indictment, which accuses Adams of bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions.

The reason for the ultimatum? The community center is dedicated to promoting the teachings of Fethullah Gülen, a cleric living in exile whom the Turkish government blames for fomenting an attempt to overthrow Turkey’s president in 2016. (Gülen has denied involvement.)

According to the indictment, Adams acquiesced.

After Eric Adams became the first sitting New York City mayor in over 150 years to face criminal charges, he was quick to brush off any suggestion that he might resign. If he stands firm, there are two players who can force him from office. The first is a committee of city officials. The second is a friend: Governor Kathy Hochul.

No governor has used that power before. In a statement Thursday night, Hochul described the indictment as “the latest in a disturbing pattern of events.” She called on Adams to “take the next few days to review the situation and find an appropriate path forward to ensure the people of New York City are being well-served by their leaders.”

If she were to remove Adams, it would be a sudden fall from grace for a mayor whom Hochul, just months ago, called a “strong friend.” She vouched for the mayor just last week, as federal raids and resignations continued to plague his administration: “​​No matter what anyone says about our current mayor, he has done some good things,” she told the New York Post. She has also repeatedly bragged about their working alliance. “We’re just working together in a way that was unprecedented but comes very natural to the two of us,” she said in May. In March, Hochul thanked Adams for reinforcing “the depth and the strength of our relationship.”