Tag: new york

Obama Privately Endorses Communist Zohran Mamdani in Phone Call and Offers Him Political Support

Former President Barack Obama has privately endorsed the mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani, a communist, in New York City.

According to The New York Times, Obama called Mamdani for around half an hour, during which time he praised his campaign and offered him political support.

Their report states:

Former President Barack Obama called New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Saturday, praising his campaign and offering to be a “sounding board” into the future.

The private, roughly 30-minute phone call, which has not previously been reported, was described by two people who participated or were briefed immediately on what had been said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversation.

Mr. Obama said that he was invested in Mr. Mamdani’s success beyond the election on Tuesday. They talked about the challenges of staffing a new administration and building an apparatus capable of delivering on Mr. Mamdani’s agenda of affordability in the city, the people said.

The former president’s outreach on the eve of what has been a contentious election is notable, given how divided the Democratic establishment has been over Mr. Mamdani and the role that Mr. Obama still plays in the party.

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Judge Delivers Blow to Letitia James in Mortgage Fraud Case

A federal judge on Friday denied Letitia James’ request to force federal prosecutors to turn over all of their communications with the media after it was reported that Lindsey Halligan was exchanging text messages with a Lawfare reporter.

A couple of weeks ago, US Attorney Lindsey Halligan exchanged Signal messages with Lawfare reporter Anna Bower.

It is not unusual for a prosecutor to communicate with the press.

Lindsey Halligan pushed back on Anna Bower’s reporting in her exchange.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” the first message to Anna Bower read. “You are reporting things that are simply not true. Thought you should have a heads up.”

Click here to see the screenshots of Halligan’s Signal exchange with Anna Bower.

Letitia James asked Judge Walker to force the DOJ to keep a log of all communications with the press.

The judge delivered a blow to Letitia James.

Judge Jamar Walker, a Biden appointee, said Letitia James did not demonstrate that it is necessary for the court to force the DOJ to track communications with the media.

The New York Post reported:

The judge overseeing Letitia James’ mortgage fraud case on Friday denied a motion from the New York attorney general attempting to force federal prosecutors to keep a log of all their communications with the media.

Defense attorney Abbe Lowell filed the motion last week, when James was arraigned on bank fraud and false statements charges, in response to a report that US Attorney Lindsey Halligan sent a flurry of encrypted Signal messages about the case to a reporter.

“[T]he defendant does not demonstrate that it is necessary for the Court to order the government to track communications with the media in any particular form,” US District Judge Jamar Walker wrote in his six-page order.

“The defendant’s request that the government be required to keep a communication log is DENIED,” the Biden-appointed judge ruled.

Walker noted that Halligan’s Signal chat with Lawfare senior editor Anna Bower earlier this month was “unusual” but he declined to offer an opinion “on whether they were improper in any sense, either legal or ethical.”

James was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia last month.

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Nonprofit Executive Caught Instructing Illegal Alien to Vote in NYC Mayoral Election 

The O’Keefe Media Group on Friday released an undercover video of a nonprofit executive instructing an illegal alien to vote in the New York City Mayoral race.

La Jornada Executive Director Pedro Rodriguez told the OMG undercover journalist posing as an unregistered illegal to “vote for the guy that starts with ‘M’.”

Rodriguez instructed the ‘illegal migrant’ to vote for Mamdani, a Communist Muslim born in Uganda who is running against former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

Zohran Mamdani is a far-left radical who openly admits he will raise property taxes based on skin color – specifically, white people.

“Rodriguez acknowledges knowing the individual is “not registered” before advising him how to vote – a potential violation of federal and state election laws,” the O’Keefe Media Group said.

The O’Keefe Media Group noted that nonprofits are prohibited from participating in any political campaign.

According to New York AG Letitia James: “Charitable organizations, including houses of worship that receive a tax exemption pursuant to section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), are prohibited from participating in any political campaign on behalf of a candidate for public office.”

This includes: “Making statements in support of, or in opposition to, a candidate or a political party, whether orally, recorded, or in writing, including by in-person distribution, mail, email, text, or posting on social media or the internet;”

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INSANITY: Zohran Mamdani Plans to Tax Companies Even if They LEAVE New York City

One question that keeps coming up about Zohran Mamdani’s socialist fever dream for New York City, is how he is going to pay for all of the free stuff that he’s planning to give away.

This becomes especially complicated when you consider that some wealthy people and companies will flee the city if he becomes mayor.

Mamdani apparently has a plan for that. He is going to try to tax companies even if they leave the city. It’s not exactly clear how he plans to enforce this insane idea.

Townhall reports:

We suppose the silver lining of New York electing an avowed Democratic Socialist as mayor is that we’ll get to see how disastrous his socialist policies really are, and that’ll discourage the rest of the nation from voting for socialism. But we won’t pretend that learning that lesson will be hard, especially for the people of New York who didn’t vote for Mamdani.

In his latest tax-grab scheme, Zohran Mamdani vows to tax businesses that leave New York and, it seems, any company that merely does business in New York, even if they’re headquartered elsewhere.

“So the way that this tax works is it applies to any business doing business here. They could be located in Miami, but if they’re doing business in New York, it applies to them,” Mamdani said.

This policy proposal is insane. So insane, in fact, we don’t even know how to wrap our heads around it. That’s hundreds of thousands of businesses, including international ones.

In what world does any of this make sense?

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Mamdani Leads as Election Day Approaches in High-Stakes NYC Mayoral Race

New York City voters will go to the polls on Nov. 4 to cast their ballots in a three-way mayoral race that could have far-reaching consequences for the city and beyond.

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party nominee who describes himself as a democratic socialist, is heavily favored to win. He faces former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, and Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee known for wearing a red beret.

Previously, sitting New York City Mayor Eric Adams was also running for reelection as an independent, but he dropped out on Sept. 28 and backed Cuomo.

Cuomo has repeatedly called for Sliwa to back out of the race. Sliwa has rejected that demand.

Despite his rivals’ efforts to consolidate opposition to the self-described democratic socialist, polling shows that Mamdani is overwhelmingly favored to win the race in America’s largest metropolis.

Mamdani has led by double-digits in every poll of New York City voters taken since July. He has garnered about 45 percent of the vote in recent polls, compared to about 30 percent for Cuomo and roughly 15 percent for Sliwa.

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3 Reasons Why Zohran Mamdani’s City-Run Grocery Stores Will Fail

New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani says City Hall needs to get into the grocery business because New Yorkers are being “priced out” of private supermarkets. If elected, Mamdani says he’ll spend $60 million on opening one government-run grocery store in each of the five boroughs that would deliver healthier produce at lower prices. Here’s why that’s a terrible idea.

1. Mamdani-Marts Can’t Compete With Discount Grocery Chains

Mamdani says that New Yorkers should think of city-run grocery stores as a “public option” that would deliver cheaper food by saving on rent and taxes. And they wouldn’t need to make a profit.

Except profit margins for grocery stores are typically below 2 percent, and private grocers keep costs down by utilizing complex supply chains and economies of scale that Mamdani’s stores won’t have access to.

“The grocery business is really tough,” says Scott Lincicome, who is the vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute. Private grocery stores provide “a vast variety of fresh frozen produce and other goods that everybody wants all the time, which is actually really difficult to do, particularly at reasonably low prices.” In Kansas City, a government-run grocery store scheme lost nearly $900,000 just last year. 

Lincicome says that if New York politicians want to give their constituents access to cheaper groceries, they could allow Walmart in the Big Apple. But New York politicians have used zoning regulations to keep the nation’s largest and most affordable supermarket from opening a store anywhere in the five boroughs. 

“Walmart is the absolute leader in supply chain efficiencies,” Lincicome told Reason. It “does this via a truly global network of warehouses and trucks and airplanes and all of these amazing things that shave off fractions of a penny off of every transaction.” The idea that New York “could somehow try to replicate Walmart’s global supply chain and entire business model is just laughable.”

2. New York Has Fewer “Food Deserts” Than Any Other City 

Mamdani says his grocery stores will help address the problem of neighborhoods lacking easy access to fresh food. But Lincicome cites a recent study showing that “ranked the Big Apple the No. 1 U.S. metro area in terms of residents’ ‘equitable access’ to a local supermarket.”

“You can basically walk almost everywhere in New York City in 10 minutes and find a grocery store,” he told Reason.

Lincicome cites multiple studies (1, 2, 3) showing that new grocery stores don’t improve food access. But this is old news: In 2012, Reason covered three earlier studies that exploded the myth that adding neighborhood supermarkets improves the diets of their surrounding communities.

3. It’s a waste of money

Mamdani said that he is going to pay for his grocery stores by “redirecting” $140 million worth of city funding that is already being spent subsidizing corporate grocers. As the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney was the first to notice, that number is based on a misreading of a city website. The city subsidizes some private grocery stores at a cost of about $3.3 million per year.. As some Bronx residents told Fox News‘ Kennedy in a new video published by Reason, the city should focus instead on helping the homeless, dealing with “rats the size of cats,” and cleaning “all of the needles on the street.”

Direct assistance is a more cost-effective and less destructive way to support low-income households than government-run supermarkets, and it’s something the federal government already does in abundance. Through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, 1.79 million New Yorkers—20 percent of the city’s population—receive help purchasing groceries each month.

As one New Yorker told Kennedy in Reason‘s latest video, “you’re focusing on the wrong things, Mamdani.”

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Zohran Mamdani Brandished Handgun in Music Video—Then Called To Ban Them

As the rapper formerly known as Young Cardamom, Zohran Mamdani donned fatigues and brandished a handgun in a music video for a song glorifying militant violence. As a politician, the socialist has called for a ban on “all guns” to remedy the “scourge of gun violence.”

The video for the 2016 song “Wabula Naawe” is “set in the Luwero Triangle in 1981 during the days leading up to the Ugandan Bush War,” our Jon Levine reports. It “opens with a spray of gunfire” before depicting “armed militants shooting firearms from the back of a truck—to the words ‘let’s get together and settle this thing once and forever.’ It later portrays a man being shot in the head at point-blank range as Mamdani raps lyrics like, ‘I’ll finish you like food on a plate,’ ‘You are about to run like a chicken,’ and, ‘You’ll pray for death.’”

“Mamdani has taken a more critical stance on firearms since entering politics,” writes Levine. As a state assemblyman, he called to “ban all guns” and voted for a bill placing restrictions on firearms marketing. He has since pledged to spearhead a “nationwide ban on assault rifles.”

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Woman who screamed ‘f–k these cops’ after purposely mowing down NYPD officer handed light sentence

A woman who screamed “F–k these cops” after purposely running down a police officer and breaking his leg with her car got “not nearly enough” time in prison at her sentencing Wednesday, a cop union said.

Sahara Dula, 25, was sentenced two years behind bars after she admitted to intentionally plowed over an NYPD cop while driving high into oncoming traffic on the Upper East Side in January 2024.

“The sentence is not nearly enough. This individual tried to run down a New York City police officer. She could have killed him,” railed Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry.

“We’re glad she is going behind bars instead of walking free, but our justice system needs to send a message that there will be zero leniency for attacks on police officers.”

Dula, who infamously admitted to mowing into police “on purpose,” appeared for sentencing before Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Melissa T. Lewis, after she pleaded guilty to assault in the second degree on June 16.

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Zohran Mamdani’s Mother Says He Is ‘Not an American at All’ in Resurfaced Interview

Zohran Mamdani’s mother, in a resurfaced interview with the Hindustan Times from 2013, said her son is “not an American at all.” She also used terminology that many view as derogatory to the United States.

“He is a total desi,” filmmaker Mira Nair said about her son while he was attending Bowdoin College. “Completely. We are not firangs at all. He is very much us. He is not an Uhmericcan (American) at all. He was born in Uganda, raised between India and America. He is at home in many places. He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian.”

In Hindi and Urdu, the word “firang” refers to foreigners, particularly Westerners. But Mehek Cooke, an attorney born in India who now works as a consultant for the GOP, told Fox News the term is not “some harmless cultural term,” but rather a “slur.”

“It’s the word used back in India to mock outsiders, to say you don’t belong,” Cooke said. “Using it here about your own child raised in the United States carries the same tone as calling someone a derogatory word — or worse. It’s flippant, divisive, and dripping with contempt for the very country that gave your family a better life.”

“When Mamdani’s mother says her son was ‘never a firang and only desi,’ it’s a rejection of America. It’s ungrateful, disrespectful, and frankly repulsive to live in this country since age seven, receive every freedom, education, and opportunity America offers, and still deny being American,” she concluded.

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Trump’s Lawyers Seek Dismissal of President’s Criminal Conviction

Lawyers for President Donald Trump late on Oct. 27 asked an appeals court in New York state to throw out Trump’s criminal conviction for falsifying business records.

Evidence in the case was insufficient to convict Trump, his lawyers told the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division in a brief. They also said the court had wrongly ruled against the theory that presidential immunity means that official acts cannot be used against a president.

“In addition to all this overwhelming error, the trial was conducted by a judge who refused to recuse himself despite having made political contributions to President Trump’s electoral opponents and despite having disqualifying family conflicts,” the lawyers wrote. “For each of these independent reasons, President Trump’s conviction must be set aside.”

Trump, at the time a candidate for president, was convicted in 2024 of falsifying business records.

After Trump won the 2024 election, Justice Juan Merchan of the New York State Supreme Court handed down a sentence with no jail time or fines, citing “legal protections afforded to the office of the president of the United States.”

Merchan, who was overseeing the case, had previously turned away Trump’s arguments against evidence in the case and assertions that the president was protected by presidential immunity.

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