Amid a slew of challengers, Cuomo’s potential entry into the race has become a topic of speculation. In the past few months, he’s switched his voter registration address to Manhattan, has spoken with a potential campaign manager and has been floating early February as a target date for a potential announcement, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Speaking Monday during his weekly City Hall briefing, Adams compared the new numbers on Cuomo to the early edge held by Andrew Yang in 2021, calling it “deja vu” and pulling out a print-out of a 2021 headline that read “Andrew Yang opens up huge lead in race to be next New York City mayor.”

“No one is going to outwork me,” Adams said. “I am so committed authentically to New Yorkers. They connect with me. I went through some difficult hurdles. It’s amazing I’m still in it with the number of things I had to go through, but I’m still here.”

Yang, an early leader in the race to replace former Mayor de Blasio, was ultimately the first candidate to concede and later finished fourth.

The new poll, commissioned by Progressives for Democracy in America, found Cuomo came in first in the ranked-choice-style poll at 32%, and Adams at 6%. It follows polling that have shown Adams likely facing an uphill battle to re-election: A December poll found Adams’ job approval rating is at an all-time low of 28% and an October survey revealed more than two-thirds of New Yorkers thought Adams should resign.

Cuomo, who resigned as governor amid a sexual harassment scandal in 2021, has for months been floated as a possible mayoral challenger to Adams.

In the poll, Scott Stringer landed second at 10%, with Brad Lander at 8%, State Sen. Jessica Ramos at 7% and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani at 6%. State Sen. Zellnor Myrie came in at 1% — with another 18% selecting “unsure.”

The poll was first reported by Politico and conducted on 800 voters between Dec. 16 and Dec. 22.

“We just wanted to know who might be competitive against Cuomo given obvious name recognition,” Alan Minsky, executive director of the group, said on why they commissioned the poll with Hart Research Associates.

With Chris Sommerfeldt

The Grammy winner is confirmed to sing “America the Beautiful” when Trump is sworn in for his second term as president on Jan. 20 in Washington.

Representatives for Trump confirmed Monday that the “Before He Cheats” singer will be joined by the Armed Forces Choir and United States Naval Academy Glee Club.

Underwood, 41, was the headliner of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest” on Dec. 31. The Oklahoma native came to fame after winning “American Idol” in 2005, and has since earned six platinum albums, eight Grammy Awards and five Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year Awards. She’s thrice been named the Academy of Country Music Awards’ Entertainer of the Year, the most of any female artist.

The Village People are also onboard to perform at Trump’s inauguration celebrations next week. The disco-era band’s late 1970s hit “YMCA” — widely considered a gay anthem — was prominent on the 2024 presidential campaign trail. The song also spawned a signature dance by the president-elect.

The group’s longtime front man Victor Willis (who plays the cop character) confirmed on social media Monday that they would appear at several parties in Washington, despite their difference in political ideologies.

“Our song YMCA is a global anthem that hopefully helps bring the country together after a tumultuous and divided campaign where our preferred candidate lost,” the 73-year-old crooner wrote on Facebook. “Therefore, we believe it’s now time to bring the country together with music.”

Grammy-winning country singer/songwriter Lee Greenwood and opera singer Christopher Macchio have also been confirmed as inauguration ceremony performers.

“God Bless the U.S.A.,” which Greenwood released in 1984, has become a patriotic anthem and is frequently played at Trump rallies.

The Florida federal judge, who has delivered a series of Trump-friendly rulings, ruled that Attorney General Merrick Garland may release the portion of Smith’s report dealing with Trump’s effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 election when a previous order expires at the end of Monday.

Garland has said he will release the report unless an appeals court or the Supreme Court steps in. There was no immediate word on whether Trump or others were seeking such an order from a higher court.

Trump railed against the forthcoming report before even knowing its contents, predicting it will be little more than a smear from Smith.

Cannon ordered a Friday hearing to consider whether prosecutors can release a separate volume of Smith’s report related to Trump’s classified documents case, which she presided over. Garland has said he planned to hand that over to congressional leaders, but to keep it sealed from public view.

It’s not known if the Jan. 6 report may include any significant new information about Trump’s failed scheme to stay in power after losing to President Biden.

Before Trump won reelection, Smith was seeking to continue a narrower prosecution of Trump in the Jan. 6 case after the Supreme Court granted Trump significant criminal immunity for official acts taken while serving in the White House.

Smith later dropped the indictments against Trump in the Jan. 6 case and the separate charges against him for improperly taking classified documents when he left the White House in 2021, bowing to DoJ policies barring prosecution of sitting presidents.

Smith resigned from his post as special counsel Friday after submitting one volume on each case.

Cannon had previously dismissed the classified documents case against Trump and two Mar-a-Lago employees on the grounds that Smith was improperly appointed. Smith dropped his appeal of that ruling when Trump won the November vote.

Despite having dismissed the case, Cannon surprised many legal observers last week when she blocked release of Smith’s report on the grounds it could compromise the rights of Trump’s co-defendants in the documents case.

Tiffany Raspberry, Adams’ intergovernmental affairs director, and Camille Joseph-Varlack, his chief of staff, will take on the deputy mayor roles effective immediately, Adams said at his weekly press conference Monday morning at City Hall.

Joseph-Varlack is becoming the “deputy mayor of administration,” while Raspberry’s being given the title “deputy mayor of intergovernmental affairs,” Adams told reporters. Raspberry’s deputy mayor title is new to the municipal bureaucracy, and Adams’ office said she’ll now coordinate intergovernmental affairs teams “across all city agencies,” while Varlack’s portfolio is expanding to include oversight of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services.

Joseph-Varlack, who will also retain her chief of staff role, already makes a base annual salary of $287,663, the deputy mayor level pay grade, and won’t get a raise, according to Adams.

Raspberry, a longtime Adams ally who worked on and helped raise funds for his 2021 campaign, currently makes $260,000 and will get a salary bump to the deputy mayor level, he said.

Prior to the promotion, Raspberry applied recently to become Fordham University’s new vice president of external affairs — a job she ultimately didn’t get, according to a source directly familiar with the matter. A since-closed job posting for the Fordham post says it has a minimum starting salary of $310,000.

Adams, who has pleaded not guilty in a federal corruption indictment, has seen a large number of senior advisers depart his administration in recent months, several after becoming ensnared in corruption investigations of their own.

A Fordham University spokesman declined to comment Monday. Raspberry didn’t return a request for comment, but Adams spokeswoman Amaris Cockfield said her Fordham application played no factor in her promotion.

The elevation of Joseph-Varlack and Raspberry means Adams now has eight deputy mayors, more by one than other recent mayors, according to Louis Cholden-Brown, an attorney and City Charter expert. Mayors Michael Bloomberg and Ed Koch at certain points in their tenures had seven deputies, the highest number Cholden-Brown said he could recall.

With Josephine Stratman 

Team Blue says suburban moderate Republicans showed how little leverage they have with Trump when they left the sit-down without a road map for either fully restoring the deduction or dramatically raising the $10,000 cap the GOP imposed as part of the 2017 Trump tax cuts.

“Unfair double taxation is hurting hard-working Long Islanders’ pockets,” Rep. Laura Gillen, a Nassau County Democrat, posted on X. “House Republicans must push for a full restoration of the SALT deduction. If they won’t, I’m happy to take their spot.”

Big Apple Republicans including Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island, Long Island’s Rep. Nick LaLota and Westchester County Rep. Mike Lawler shot the breeze with Trump and won a thumbs up from the MAGA leader after a chummy meeting in balmy Palm Beach.

Even before it started, Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries discounted the meeting as an empty talk shop that would never lead to real results.

“These people aren’t serious,” he posted to X.

The GOP lawmakers sought to put a positive spin on the meeting, claiming they are making progress towards winning Trump’s support for the deduction, which is a huge issue for wealthy voters in pricey suburbs in New York, New Jersey and California.

“(Trump) is committed to helping Long Islanders, who suffer from the nation’s highest state & local taxes,” LaLota tweeted.

“We will get it done,” Lawler chimed in.

Malltiokis conceded that it’s unlikely fellow Republicans will agree to scrap the cap altogether. She admitted that Trump told them to hash out details on a possible increase with fellow Republians.

“He wants us to work on what would be a fair number.” the Staten Island lawmaker told Politico.

Trump and congressional Republicans are still seeking to come up with a broad plan for passing key portions of Trump’s agenda given the GOP’s tiny majority in the House and the fact they need to use a legislative slight of hand called reconciliation to get it past a potential Democratic filibuster in the Senate.

Extending the Trump tax cuts, which significantly cut rates for the wealthy and big business, is a key priority for almost all Republicans.

But some of the blue state GOP lawmakers say they won’t back any tax plan that does not eliminate or expand the SALT deduction cap.

Meanwhile, some Republican fiscal hawks bitterly oppose scrapping the SALT cap because it would increase the budget deficit. Others have said they won’t vote to eliminate the debt ceiling, an unrelated top goal for Trump, who wants a free hand to push for more spending as he sees fit.

With only a 219-215 Republican majority in the House, that signals big trouble for SALT and potentially the entire Trump plan. The narrow edge is expected to get even slimmer when two Republican members of congress join Trump’s cabinet.

Clapping back at critics, the once and future first lady said in an interview Monday that she is far more than President-elect Donald Trump’s wife; she’s also his trusted adviser.

“Some people — they see me as just the wife of the president, but I’m standing on my own two feet independent,” she said. “I have my own thoughts.”

She added: ”I don’t always agree with my husband is saying or doing. And that’s OK.”

The Slovenia-born former model says she has no qualms about giving her honest opinions to her husband — whether he likes it or not.

“I give him my advice, and sometimes he listens. Sometimes he doesn’t. And that’s OK.” she told “Fox and Friends.” Melania Trump made headlines during the recent presidential campaign by revealing that she supports abortion rights, a position that puts her at odds with the president-elect.

She said she will move to the White House soon and would split her time between Washington and Trump properties in Palm Beach and New York during her husband’s second four-year term.

And she appeared to pour cold water on reports that she would mostly stay in Manhattan, where teenage son Barron Trump is attending New York University.

“My first priority is, you know, to be a mom, to be a first lady, to be a wife,” she said. “And once we’re in on [Jan. 20], you serve the country.”

After having spent four years as first lady, she sounded confident about having a bigger role this time around. She vowed to expand her so-called Be Best initiative focusing on children and mental health challenges, which she suggested did not get enough backing in the first Trump term.

“Imagine what we could do in those years if they would rally behind me and teach the children what to do to protect them about social media and their mental health,” she said.

She is giving interviews ahead of her return to the White House and to promote her self-titled memoir.

Amazon recently agreed to pay an eye-popping $40 million for the rights to create a documentary with her involvement, which is due out this fall. The move is one of many appearing to be part of an effort by Big Tech to curry favor with President-elect Trump as he returns to power.

Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos, have been prominent targets of Trump ire over the years. The mogul and Washington Post owner has sought to smooth things over with the company’s $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Walden’s $629,736 cash pull in the latest period, which spanned between Oct. 8 and this past Saturday, is larger than what any of Mayor Adams’ other challengers have raised in a single previous reporting window. However, it won’t be clear until Wednesday’s public disclosure deadline how much money the other 2025 mayoral candidates, including Adams, raised in the most recent span.

Walden, who shared his fundraising numbers exclusively with the Daily News ahead of the deadline, said he also has about $300,000 of his own money in his independent mayoral campaign account, giving him roughly $930,000 in cash on hand as June’s primary elections loom six months away. Only ex-City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Adams had larger 2025 campaign cash balances as of the last reporting period, which ended Oct. 7.

“Friends and strangers stepped up in huge numbers to pledge their support for our campaign and an independent path forward for New York City. We achieved our goal; out-raising all the challengers in less than half the time they had before I entered the race,” said Walden, who has never before campaigned for public office. “We will be fully funded by the height of the campaign season. And we will be pounding miles of pavement to speak with voters across the five boroughs about my plan for restoring integrity and accountability to City Hall.”

Still, Walden isn’t expected to be eligible for public matching funds when the Campaign Finance Board issues its second round of payments Wednesday.

Walden’s $629,736 came from 834 individual contributors, 492 of whom are New York City residents, he said. In order to be eligible for matching funds, mayoral candidates need to raise at least $250,000 from 1,000 city residents.

Walden told The News he hasn’t decided yet whether he’s going to participate in the public matching funds program. If he opts out of it, he could accept as much as $3,850 from each donor, more than the $2,100 that candidates who participate in the program can collect.

The sizable first fundraising run from Walden, who launched his campaign Oct. 23, gives him a competitive edge as he mounts a third-party mayoral bid.

As an independent, Walden hasn’t absolutely ruled out running in the June 24 Democratic primary in which Adams already faces a sprawling field of challengers. But Walden says he may seek the Republican nomination, too, in addition to running as an independent in November’s general election.

Petitioning for the primaries begins at the end of February.

A seasoned litigator with a history of representing various New York politicians, including potential 2025 mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo, Walden has pitched himself as a government expert inspired by Michael Bloomberg.

With Adams’ federal indictment looming over the 2025 race, Walden has made rooting out corruption in city government a key plank in his campaign, recently floating a proposal to give the city Department of Investigation more power to go after crooked politicians. Walden is currently representing Joseph Jardin, a top FDNY official who alleges he was pressured by Adams to approve the opening of the Turkish consulate in Manhattan in 2021, a key episode in the mayor’s indictment, to which he pleaded not guilty.

Previously, Stringer held the distinction of drawing in the most cash in a single reporting period out of all the candidates running against Adams, raising just shy of $411,000 for his Democratic mayoral campaign between January 2024 and July 2024.

Stringer was the only candidate who received the Campaign Finance Board’s first public matching funds payment on Dec. 16, netting him $2 million for a total cash balance of $2.3 million.

Adams, whose 2025 campaign has a $3 million cash balance, was also eligible for matching funds last period. But the CFB denied him the payment, citing concerns about his indictment, which alleges he solicited illegal straw donations and bribes from Turkish government operatives in exchange for political favors. Adams is expected to stand trial in April, just weeks before the Democratic mayoral primary.

Several other 2025 candidates, including Comptroller Brad Lander, have said they expect to be eligible for matching funds Wednesday. All the candidates in the mayoral field, which also includes Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, Queens state Sen. Jessica Ramos, Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie and ex-Bronx Assemblyman Michael Blake, are expected to have their latest fundraising hauls disclosed Wednesday as well.

During more than two hours of arguments, justices from across the political spectrum seemed skeptical of the social media company’s claim that a law banning the app — owned by Chinese-based ByteDance — would violate the free speech rights of the owners and TikTok’s 170 million American users.

“It doesn’t’ say, ‘TikTok, you can’t speak,'” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said.

“The law doesn’t say TikTok has to shut down. It says ByteDance has to (sell TikTok),” conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, referring to the law’s Jan. 19 deadline for the Chinese company to sell the app’s American operation.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative appointed by President-elect Trump in his first term, sounded open to the government’s claim that the law was intended to prevent possible Chinese indoctrination of a generation of American youth.

“That seems like a huge concern for the future of the country,” said Kavanaugh, who has two teenage daughters.

The top court did not say when it might rule. But the law goes into effect a week from Sunday, the day before Trump is inaugurated, unless the Supreme Court blocks it.

Trump, who has no direct role in the case, nevertheless has asked the justices to put the law on hold until he can seek to broker a solution once he’s back in the White House.

Republicans and Democrats alike overwhelmingly backed the law that orders ByteDance to sell the American operation of the app, or shut it down. President Biden signed it into law, teeing up the current court fight.

TikTok lawyers called the law an unconstitutional effort to muzzle the app and its tens of millions of users. It says Congress has no right to effectively ban a platform that is widely used for political discussion and e-commerce.

A government lawyer defended the law as a narrowly tailored effort to prevent Communist-ruled China from continuing to have unfettered access to the phones and minds of Americans.

Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stressed that the law doesn’t take any stance on the cute cat videos, glitzy cosmetics ads and political statements from all sides that are posted on TikTok.

“All of the same speech that’s happening on TikTok could (still) happen,” Prelogar said, adding, “All the act is doing is trying to surgically remove the ability of a foreign adversary nation to get our data and to be able to exercise control over the platform.”

She said a shutdown might not be permanent and noted that Congress may have anticipated that ByteDance would only take the edict to sell seriously once a shutdown takes effect, at least temporarily.

Speaking with a hoarse voice from the lower Manhattan courtroom, Arkan, 76, admitted to orchestrating straw donations to Adams’ mayoral campaign through workers of the construction company he partly owns, KSK, and then reimbursing them. Arkan indicated he planned to enter the plea last month — the first resulting from the ongoing probe of illicit foreign donations to the mayor’s campaign.

“When I wrote the checks, I knew the Eric Adams campaign would use the checks to apply for public matching funds,” Arkan said, referring to the system under which city political candidates get donations from local residents matched eightfold with city dollars.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Celia Cohen told the court that if Arkan had gone to trial, prosecutors would have provided testimony, photographs, video electronic records, and other evidence to establish he illegally colluded with a Turkish consular official to funnel money to the mayoral campaign that Adams personally solicited at a restaurant in April 2021. Manhattan Federal Court Judge Dale Ho accepted Arkan’s plea and set his sentencing for Aug. 15.

While it wasn’t stated that the plea deal requires Arkan to testify against the mayor, his cooperation in the feds’ ongoing corruption investigation is all but certain, with Cohen asking his sentencing to be scheduled after Adams’ April trial. It is common for federal defendants who take plea deals to agree to testify or cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for leniency at sentencing.

The plea comes as prosecutors with the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office recently said in a filing they’d uncovered “additional criminal conduct” the mayor and others engaged in and may bring more charges.

Were Arkan to testify, though, Adams’ defense team believes he would have nothing incriminating to say about the mayor.

“We know from the government’s own interviews that Mr. Arkan repeatedly said that Mayor Adams had no knowledge of his actions.” Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, said in a statement. “Mr. Arkan’s conduct will have no bearing on the mayor’s case whatsoever.”

Adams is accused of soliciting and accepting illegal straw donations from Arkan and others, as well as luxury travel upgrades and perks in exchange for doling out political favors for the Turkish government. He is expected to head to trial on the five counts of bribery, conspiracy and wire fraud in April — just two months before he’s up for reelection in the June primary.

He has pleaded not guilty.

Arkan appears in Adams’ indictment as “Businessman #5.” Per the indictment, he hosted a fundraiser for the soon-to-be mayor at his firm’s Brooklyn office in May 2021, a month after the dinner with the mayor mentioned in court Friday. On the day of the fundraiser, records show that Arkan and 10 employees of the firm donated nearly $14,000 cumulatively to Adams’ campaign, for which Arkan reimbursed them.

Records show that after submitting those contributions for public matching funds, the Adams campaign raked in an additional $22,000 in taxpayers’ cash off of them.

All of those donations were illegal straw contributions funded by Arkan and made “at the behest of” Reyhan Ozgur, Turkey’s consul general in New York, according to Adams’ indictment. Ozgur and Arkan allegedly agreed to make the illegal donations during the dinner with Adams in April 2021.

“We are supporting you,” Ozgur told Adams at that dinner, according to court papers.

As part of his plea, Arkan agreed to making $18,000 restitution payments and not to contest a sentence below six months. He also faces the risk of being denaturalized, deported, and denied entry to the U.S. in the future, Ho warned him.

The offense Arkan pleaded to could result in a maximum of up to five years in federal prison, three years supervised release and $250,000 in fines.

Arkan’s attorney, Jonathan Rosen, had no comment after Friday’s plea hearing.

The administration is also planning to close 13 additional migrant shelters by June, according to the Mayor’s office, including Clinton Hill’s Hall Street shelter, which has been the subject of much controversy in the area.

“The policies we implemented, and the tremendous work of the dedicated public servants who execute our mission, show how our administration continues to creatively and effectively manage an unprecedented crisis,” Adams said in a statement.

“The additional closures we are announcing today, provides yet another example of our continued progress and the success of our humanitarian efforts to care for everyone throughout our system.”

The new site, located in an industrial section of the Bronx off Bruckner Boulevard, will house 2,200 single men in the seven-story warehouse after in opens in the next couple months. It was granted a slew of temporary permits last month to convert the space into a shelter, city records show.

The space will be operated by the city’s Housing Recovery Operations office and is intended to fill the gap left by the closure of the huge tent site at Randall’s Island and others, according to City Hall.

“We should not be housing people shelters to begin with,” said Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the New York Immigration Coalition. “We should be giving them the services that they need to get on their feet and actually get out of shelter and into permanent housing This circling the wagon on creating more and more shelters, is not going to help the people who are directly impacted.”

Councilmember Diana Ayala, whose district contains the shelter site, said she has concerns about the building as a potential target for federal immigration officials.

“I don’t like the idea of congregated settings specifically just for the asylum seekers, because I’m concerned about the Trump administration getting access to addresses,” she said. And it makes it easier for ICE to single out a specific location.”

The new opening comes as the city has entered into a new phase of the migrant crisis: Various shelter closures underway around the city have pushed migrants into new shelters.

Last week, single men living at a Bushwick shelter were pushed out and transferred to Randall’s to make way for adult families. At Floyd Bennett Field, which was fully vacated earlier this week, families were sent to shelters across the city, including some to the Hall Street shelter set to be closed, according to Ariana Hellerman, a volunteer with mutual aid group Floyd Bennett Field Neighbors.

Although the city has seen its migrant population in shelters consistently decreasing for 27 weeks straight, according to City Hall, there are still tens of thousands of asylum seekers in the city’s care. As of Sunday. Jan. 5, over 50,000 migrants remains in the local shelter system, according to City Hall data. The city has opened nearly 200 sites since spring of 2022. 

Adams has promised future closures and emphasized that city initiatives such as case management and 30- and 60-day notices have caused the migrant crisis to ease up.

By June, the city plans to close over a dozen more shelters, including the Clinton Hill shelter and the Watson and the Stewart hotel sites. These closures will further reduce the city’s overall capacity by 10,000 beds — not counting the beds added by the Bruckner site.

Adams has touted decreases in migrant spending as a further sign the worst of the crisis is behind the city — although members of the City Council and the city’s Independent Budget Office have said the administration inflated cost estimates for migrant expenses.

The Bronx building was purchased by developers Maddd Equities and South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, or SoBro, in 2023, city records show. Before the pandemic, the building was converted into an office building.