Former Gov. and unbiased mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo.
Photograph by Lloyd Mitchell
Impartial mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo on Thursday once more refused to launch a listing of shoppers he amassed as a non-public authorized advisor in response to Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s video problem to take action earlier this week.
Within the video, Mamdani — a Queens Meeting member — tried to hyperlink Cuomo to accused child-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein through the previous governor’s longtime buddy: Andrew Farkas. Cuomo and Farkas labored collectively on a marina mission in Puerto Rico, Mamdani says, citing The New York Occasions, after he resigned.
Farkas, he additionally famous, had at one level labored on an analogous mission with Epstein.
Mamdani additionally talked about an April Bloomberg report that Cuomo suggested a cryptocurrency trade going through federal investigation and a Politico story that he didn’t disclose $2.6 million in nuclear inventory choices to the town’s Conflicts of Curiosity Board.
Throughout Cuomo’s Thursday occasion, he instructed reporters that since resigning as governor he has “done podcasts,” “advocated for certain causes that are dear to me” and practiced legislation. He stated that none of his shoppers had enterprise earlier than the town or state governments and that he had not performed any lobbying work.
Even so, Cuomo declined to reveal the names of any of his consulting shoppers, as he has repeatedly performed since at the least April.
“They were private clients, and this is attorney-client privilege,” Cuomo stated.
Cuomo’s spokesperson beforehand instructed the New York Publish that Cuomo didn’t know Epstein and that you could “smell the desperation” from Mamdani in his video.
Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec responded: “We learned Andrew Cuomo advised an offshore illegal crypto exchange and failed to disclose nearly $3 million in nuclear stock options only after investigative journalists uncovered it — what else is he hiding?”
Mudslinging between Mamdani and Cuomo
Mamdani launched the video as a part of a virtually week-long mudslinging match with Cuomo. The kerfuffle started final Friday when Cuomo’s X account slammed Mamdani for dwelling in a $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized Astoria condominium, regardless of his $142,000-a-year Meeting member wage and “privileged” background.
Cuomo has used Mamdani’s condominium to color him as a hypocrite, attributable to his identification as a democratic socialist who’s pushing a hire freeze for stabilized tenants as certainly one of his core marketing campaign proposals. He even went as far as to suggest state laws, named after Mamdani, that might require tenants to spend 30% of their revenue on hire with a purpose to fill a vacant stabilized unit.
Cuomo then questioned Mamdani’s rivalry that he didn’t know the condominium was stabilized when he first rented it, calling on him to make his lease public. The slogan prompted Mamdani to counter along with his video.
Exterior of the video, Mamdani has largely ignored Cuomo’s broadsides, saying, “I live rent-free in his head,” and accusing Cuomo of treating rent-stabilized tenants like “political pawns.”
