Title: City Politics: Cuomo's Campaign Finance Troubles

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, our regular Wednesday appearance on the show by our City Hall reporter, Elizabeth Kim, who we used to call our lead Eric Adams reporter, but now that it's campaign season, she talks mostly about the mayoral race, as well as updating us on the actions of the mayor in office. Today, Liz has brought a guest star with her, none other than WNYC senior politics reporter Brigid Bergin, because of some developments in the mayor's race that Brigid has been reporting on. Happy Wednesday, Liz, as I say every week. Brigid, thanks for joining the party today.

Liz: Happy Wednesday, Brian.

Brigid: I love a party.

Brian: Brigid, let's get right to your reporting on a big fine placed on the Cuomo campaign by the city's campaign finance board, more than a $600,000 fine. What did the Cuomo campaign do?

Brigid: Yes, Brian. This is connected to an ad that was issued by an independent expenditure group called Fix the City. The campaign finance board put out a warning to campaigns last week, reminding them that campaigns and these independent expenditure groups can't be coordinating. In federal campaigns, it is not uncommon for candidates to have a portion of their website that is often identified with a red box with messaging that should a group like this, a super PAC or some other independent expenditure group want to use, they will understand what the message that candidate is trying to send to voters.

There was a portion of Andrew Cuomo's campaign website. It was very small. It said message to voters. It had some information about the types of voters they're trying to reach, the messages they'd like to use. The campaign finance board, in their announcement on Monday, said that they had reason to believe that this ad that Fix the City issued was not done independently of the campaign.

From their perspective, the definition of what would allow them to determine something was independent is if the group used information that the campaign made available and knew or should have known would have been used by a group like this. That $622,000 fine that was then docked from the Cuomo campaign itself was the amount that that group spent on an initial ad buy back on May 2nd.

Brian: Your latest article says the pro-Cuomo PAC is risking more such fines for Cuomo by running more such ads. What's the latest on that?

Brigid: This, Brian, is one of those fascinating issues of timing. These campaigns and these independent expenditure groups have different deadlines for when they have to file their disclosure forms. On Monday, there was a campaign finance board meeting. That was a meeting where the board was deciding about matching funds payments to candidates who had filed a disclosure statement last month. This was actually just cleaning up some corrections that candidates may have made to that filing.

The Cuomo campaign did have some errors in that filing. They blamed some technical snafus for not collecting all the required information from some of their donors. They worked rather feverishly to fix some of that information, which was what would allow them to get this payment on Monday in the first place. However, that $622,000 penalty that I talked about was withheld from the total amount that the campaign was seeking because of this preliminary investigation by the campaign finance board that found that this ad was potentially coordinated with Fix the City.

There was another filing from this independent expenditure group that hadn't published yet ahead of this meeting that showed that the group made another ad buy of $675,000 for the same ad. In my conversations with some good government advocates, they're saying if the campaign finance board is being consistent, they should then dock the campaign another $675,000.

The Fix the City committee, the spokesperson is Liz Benjamin. Some people may remember that name. She was a longtime writer for the New York Daily News. She's now a consultant. She gave a statement saying that the group is aware of the campaign finance board's guidance, but they are following the law. The spokesperson for the campaign itself, which has a party, declined to comment because they are separate entities.

Brian: Our Brigid Bergin, our Elizabeth Kim, as they cover the mayoral race. Liz, I see your latest article is about Cuomo and Brad Lander as candidates in the Democratic primary disagreeing with each other about how to fight antisemitism. Here's a clip you brought of Andrew Cuomo.

Andrew Cuomo: I underestimated the threat that antisemitism could rear its ugly head once again. Now accepting that painful reality, the question is, what do we do about it? Elie Wiesel once said, "The opposite of love is not hate, but the opposite of love is indifference." Silence is acceptance.

Brian: Here's a clip that you brought of Brad Lander.

Brad Lander: I believe you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic. You can hate what the Israeli government is doing in Gaza and the West Bank without being antisemitic. Look, while most of us in this room consider ourselves Zionist, as I do, it's factually inaccurate to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Brian: What's the contrast between those two clips that puts them at odds on the issue in the context of the mayoral campaign?

Liz: I didn't have good tape of Cuomo saying this, but in that speech, I had some good tape of some of his opening lines. In that speech, in which he's essentially making the case that he's the best candidate to protect Jewish New Yorkers in this climate of increased antisemitism. At one point, he goes on to say, "It's pretty simple. Anti-Zionism is antisemitism." He said a lot in that speech. It was a pretty fiery speech, and he went very hard at the left and the Democratic Socialists of America.

He was trying, basically, to tie Brad Lander, who has been a member of the DSA, and Zohran Mamdani, another progressive candidate who is currently a member of the DSA, to their positions on Israel. They have been critical of Israel. They have been critical of the war. He's basically trying to say they're aligned with these "antisemitic forces."

Brad Lander, about a month later, delivered his own speech that he called a major address on antisemitism, and he gave it at the exact same synagogue that Cuomo delivered his address. It's a modern Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side. He had much fewer people at his audience. When he's talking about and saying something like it is factually inaccurate to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, he's speaking directly not just to Cuomo, really, but that is actually a view that's held. It's been an ongoing debate in the Jewish community, and the divisions around it have hardened since October 7th.

Brian: Mayor Adams, though no longer in the Democratic primary, has established a whole other ballot line for himself for November called the 'EndAntisemitism' Party. Liz, I watched his news conference yesterday, and he said this isn't pandering to one group because he believes in ending all kinds of hatred against all kinds of groups, but the hate crimes or bias incidents statistics the last year are that Jewish New Yorkers have been by far the most frequent target, like 50%, and everybody else makes up the other 50%. Maybe fair enough to look at those stats and where the surge in expressions of hate is. What are the politics of all this in the campaign?

Liz: That's absolutely right. The mayor made the point that more than half of the hate crimes last year were committed against Jewish New Yorkers. He feels that this is a moment in which the city should step up and target this type of hate crime. Brian, it's no secret that every time there's a big election, mayors will try to appeal to Jewish voters. New York City has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. How many times have you heard that? It's not a surprise that issues that are related to Jewish life and politics would shape a race like this. There are several reasons. It's not a monolithic community. Jewish voters tend to vote as Democrats, but they're very politically diverse along that spectrum. I think what listeners should--

Brian: Actually, hear from Brad Lander, for example, who is Jewish.

Liz: Yes, and I think it's very interesting now they're reviving a debate that has been going on in the community for a long time, but has now resurfaced and has new relevance in light of the war and how people are protesting the war. The other reason, too, for this kind of appeal is the Orthodox community, they tend to vote as a bloc. These are thousands of voters up for grabs in places like Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn, and they tend to be more pro-Israel and more conservative.

You can hear this pitch from Cuomo and Adams as a pitch that's directed not just to conservative voters, but also this very, very important bloc of Hasidic voters, and that's up for grabs. They will likely, I imagine, make an endorsement, but you can see how Adams and Cuomo are going pretty hard for that vote.

Brian: Brigid, back to the Cuomo-related campaign commercials fine. I was thinking about what you said earlier in the segment, and it made me wonder, could any of this disqualify Cuomo from the campaign finance board radio and TV debates coming up in a few weeks? One of those debates is ours. I'll be one of the questioners. Is Cuomo at risk of being disqualified?

Brigid: I think that that is unlikely. I can't tell you for certain. The next time the campaign finance board meets is May 30th, and that will be to announce decisions for the next round of public matching funds. The fundraising period ends on May 19th. Those filings are due on May 23rd. That's a huge date for a lot of other candidates in the field, particularly candidates who have not yet received any matching funds, Adrienne Adams, the city council speaker, state senator Jessica Ramos. Really, I think, their campaigns will be looking to see whether or not they qualify for funds after that May 23rd filing.

It is true that, I think, people will also be watching to see are there any additional penalties that are administered to the Cuomo campaign or, frankly, any other campaign for any other violations. As I said, there's some good government folks who think that, really, there's a consistency issue here, that the Cuomo campaign should be docked for the amount of this additional ad. There are certainly his challengers who are looking for every way to take him down a notch, who say you shouldn't get matching funds at all. I don't think it's likely that he would be disqualified from the [crosstalk].

Brian: The $600,000 penalty, which you report could become double to $1.2 million penalty, is that substantial enough to disadvantage Cuomo in the home stretch of the campaign in a meaningful way, or does he have enough other money on hand not to really feel it?

Brigid: One of the big stories of the week that we credit our colleagues over at Politico for breaking is that Fix the City independent expenditure group got its single largest donation from DoorDash, $1 million from DoorDash. Altogether, that committee has more than $8 million. I was talking to some folks at the campaign finance board yesterday to try to get a sense of how does that match up against some other independent expenditure groups that have been spending in these campaigns since it was legal to do that post-Citizens United.

This does seem to be the largest independent expenditure group so far.

For whatever money Cuomo is docked, and I should note that not only was that money being withheld from his campaign in terms of what they can spend, it's being counted against his spending because it's counted as an in-kind contribution. There's a cap that the campaigns are up against in terms of how much money they can spend for the primary and then for the general. He's got these committees backed by billionaires, Bill Ackman, Ron Lauder, the CEO of the Hess Corporation, John Hess, who are putting huge amounts of money into this committee, whose leading purpose is to support his campaign. I don't think that there's any chance we won't see him on the airways anytime soon.

Brian: Last thing for both of you, I'm not sure which one of you is more on this, Brigid and Liz. This week, we had the head of Mayor Adams' latest Charter Revision Commission to discuss proposals they have for ballot questions for the voters this fall. One of them is to abolish party primaries and have one big unified nonpartisan primary that any registered voter could participate in, not just those registered as Democrats or registered as Republicans, and sticking in their lane. I guess my question is, Brigid, maybe you first, and Liz, you'll tell me if you have anything to add, who likes that idea and who doesn't? Whose interests would be helped or hurt by that?

Brigid: There is interest among some good government groups, Citizens Union among them, supporting this idea of having open primaries. That's in part because when you look at the current enrollment statistics of voters across New York City, the largest share of voters are registered Democratic voters, but the next largest share of voters, about over a million voters, are what are called blanks, non-affiliated voters. These are voters who are not in any party, which means because we have a closed primary system, they cannot participate in this huge election that we're talking about in June.

The push for open primaries among some of those folks is that we need to get more people involved in our democratic system. We need more people involved in these elections, making these very important decisions that then often are more competitive than the general election, with the asterisk of this upcoming November being a wild card in that department. I think opposing it, you tend to see parties and some people who are loyal party members who don't want to see the influence of their party diffused by the potential for having an open system.

It's interesting that the conversation has come up again. We've seen this conversation happen before here in New York City. Back in 2003, there was a lot of debate around a potential open primary push. Citizens Union also wants to see those primary elections shifted to even years from odd years, municipal elections, not just primaries, because they think that will also increase participation. Overall, it's, I think, trying to get more people involved in the process.

Brian: Liz, anything to add or anything else you're looking at next?

Liz: No, I don't have much to add to that. I guess what I would say is I have a question, is that what has changed since Bloomberg, the most prominent independent who was our mayor, tried to do this? What has changed in the landscape that would make this latest effort successful? I guess I'm a little bit skeptical as to whether they could garner enough support for it through this charter, whether they can even get on the ballot. That's the only thing I think I would say to that.

Brian: WNYC's Liz Kim, talk to you next Wednesday for our weekly. Brigid, we're always talking, so talk to you soon.

Brigid: Thanks so much.

Liz: Thanks, Brian.

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