Title: Meet the Mayoral Candidates: Jim Walden

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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Hope you had a great weekend. For those of you who worked on the weekend so everyone else could play, thank you. The headline story in the New York City mayoral race this morning, according to multiple news organizations, former governor Andrew Cuomo will campaign for the job as an independent despite losing the democratic primary to State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani. That will make five candidates for mayor total on the ballot if the reports are accurate.

Here's the twist. The stories also say Cuomo will call on all the candidates, not named Mamdani, to make an agreement. Whichever one of them is leading in the polls in mid-September will stay in the race. The others will agree to drop out, so it becomes a one-on-one against Mamdani at that point. Now, that scenario sounds very much like what independent candidate Jim Walden had already proposed, the idea, of course, being that Mamdani is more likely to win if Walden, Cuomo, Eric Adams, and Republican Curtis Sliwa are splitting the rest of the vote.

We'll talk in just a minute to Jim Walden, and of course, we don't yet know if Adams and Sliwa will agree to that plan. For this show, as many of you know, we had all nine major candidates in the Democratic primary on with us for a closing argument special on the day before primary day. Now we've invited all five candidates in the general election for a round of fairly short interviews, around 20 minutes each, followed by your reactions. We'll hope to get them again for longer call-in segments before Election Day, whoever's still in.

So far, Jim Walden and Curtis Sliwa have accepted for this round. Mr. Sliwa is scheduled for Thursday, Jim Walden for right now. We'll talk about this Cuomo news and the idea of the four of them uniting against Mamdani, but it will also be a straight-up candidate interview, an introduction, which we think is only fair to the least known candidate of the five in the field.

Jim Walden has been a federal prosecutor here in the New York area, what they call the Eastern District, and an attorney in private practice. He's been on the show two times in the past. Once in 2018, as a lawyer representing NYCHA tenants organizations suing and advocating for better living conditions and public housing in the city, and Jim Walden was here in 2011, representing a group in Brooklyn that was opposed to the bike lane on Prospect Park West. Now, Jim Walden is here as an independent candidate for mayor. Mr. Walden, thanks for coming on and welcome back to WNYC.

Mr. Walden: I'm so happy to be here, Brian. Thank you so much for having me on.

Brian: Let's talk about your candidacy generally first, and then we'll get to this unified front against Mamdani that you and now, reportedly, Andrew Cuomo are suggesting. Why do you want to be mayor, and why do you think you would be good at it?

Mr. Walden: I've spent, as you alluded to, the 30 years of my career fighting for New Yorkers for every walk of life. As a federal prosecutor, I went hard at the mob. We put a generation of mobsters away during a very violent time in the city. I also went after international heroin dealers who were pumping our communities with heroin.

For the next 23 years, I fought just about every kind of fight that you can imagine, from poor people who were thrown off the food stamps program, to mentally ill and disabled people that were being denied Social Security benefits, to kids that were being bullied all across the New York State city school system, and the NYCHA case where NYCHA tenants were living in deplorable conditions where their kids were getting sick from lead paint.

I've turned smart law into good policy, and I want to do that now because all of the problems and challenges we have in a city that has so much promise and so much purpose and such a vibrant place that we can all be proud of, we have these nagging problems that we have not been able to solve, and they tie back to bad political leadership. We've seen it in particular over the last 10 years. I know that I can be a mayor that is results-driven, that is going to get solutions, that is accountable to people for actual results based on metrics, and without dragging the city into scandal or distraction.

Brian: Unlike Adams and Cuomo, who became independents recently when things weren't working out with the Democratic Party anymore, you've been an independent candidate from the start in this campaign. Can you talk a little about why you are not a Democrat and why you are not a Republican?

Mr. Walden: Sure. I grew up in a steel town in Pennsylvania that was very much a John F. Kennedy Democrat town. I was a Democrat until 2006, and I just saw at that time what was already happening to the country. We were entering a phase of bloodsport politics. There would be some terrible thing that one party would do, particularly at the national level, whether it's the Supreme Court hearings or other things, and then the next time the pendulum swung, the other party would do something worse.

I just thought that we would be better off having independent voters who stayed in a center lane that avoided the extremes and cared about good government that delivered results for people. I did two things. Number one, I resigned from the Democratic Party and became an independent. Secondly, I renamed the pro bono program that I was working on, the good government program, and focused a lot of my attention on cases that solved problems for communities that were either being misrepresented, unseen, sometimes victimized by bad government policy or actors.

Brian: Did you vote for Obama in either of his elections or Trump in any of his three races or Biden in 2020?

Mr. Walden: Let me try to remember this. I voted for Obama once, I voted for Harris the last election, and I never voted for Trump. If people care to look me up, it won't be too hard to find the positions that I took with respect to the president after January 6th, where I believed that he needed to be brought to justice. I was very clear about that.

Brian: If you're just joining us, independent New York City mayoral candidate Jim Walden is with us. We're talking first about the basics of his candidacy. Then we're going to talk about his proposal that Andrew Cuomo has either now signed onto or is proposing his own version of that would unite all the non-Mamdani candidates against whoever is in the lead among that group as the campaign goes on to create a one-on-one race there. I see that one of your core issues is fighting corruption. Why that as a centerpiece?

Mr. Walden: Because I think that corruption is at the root of so many of our problems, and we've seen it in the last two administrations. It has really grown and become much more significant in the Adams administration. We've really had a problem with corruption in City Hall since the Tammany Hall days, and we've never taken it seriously. I proposed taking existing city resources and putting them in a single agency that has citywide authority, that has prosecutors that are empowered to fully investigate, to make that agency independent of City Hall.

Right now, I think your listeners understand that the one agency that's supposed to be doing this, that does not have very much in the way of teeth, reports to the mayor. Mayors oftentimes appoint someone that is a safe pick for that agency. It's called the Department of Investigation. We've had some good commissioners, we've had some terrible commissioners who are conflicted with respect to their relationship with City Hall. I want to make it independent. I want to give it a special corruption court. I want to give that court the power to fast-track cases and the power to ban people from city service if they're convicted. When we have that kind of robust enforcement, we will get corruption out of City Hall.

Brian: I see you are centering corruption so much that you would create a new public integrity position that actually replaces the public advocate as second in line if the mayor had to step down. Why go that far? The public advocate is a position elected citywide by the voters. I think your public integrity officer would not be.

Mr. Walden: There are two different ways to do the independent, and obviously, this would require a charter revision. To have the second in line be a distinguished former federal prosecutor, which is one of the job requirements, and focused on corruption and having supervised an agency that looks into all of the other agencies, I think that that is a much better interim mayor than someone who has nebulous credentials.

When Bill de Blasio was elected as the public advocate, he had very little in the way of any sort of watchdog criteria. Jumaane Williams, same thing, not really a watchdog. If we were going to have an interim mayor, someone who has the professional background to be a guardian at the gate, if you will, while the new mayor is chosen through a special election, it seems to me is a much more sensible way to proceed.

Brian: I also see you oppose big outside money in mayoral campaigns. You denounced the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which enabled that, and you're saying to any of your supporters, "Please do not create a super PAC to spend money on my behalf." I guess like Cuomo had that big-dollar fix the city PAC with millions from Michael Bloomberg and others. Is that correct?

Mr. Walden: That is correct. I believe in good government. I always have. I'm not just saying this because I'm a candidate for mayor. I've lived this experience for the past 23 years, and I know that big money in elections is a terrible thing. I can't do anything about the Supreme Court's decision, but I can make a commitment to New Yorkers that when I'm mayor, I will get special interests out of City Hall, and it starts by walking the walk, not just talking the talk on my campaign.

I've got plenty of wealthy contributors and supporters who would love to start a PAC. I've said the same thing to them privately that I said publicly: "Don't do it." If you start a PAC, I can't stop you from doing that, but your name is going to go on a do-not-call list in City Hall. That's going to be a public list. If you make a written request, it is going to be put on the website and tracked so that every meeting or call that you have is there, and then the result of whatever came from your written complaint. There are ways to expose special interests and to give them less hold over City Hall, because at the end of the day, it should be average New Yorkers that have more access to City Hall. It shouldn't be all special interests.

Brian: I see you're also calling for a carbon-neutral city. Am I using the right phrase?

Mr. Walden: Yes, it's consistent with the city's current goals. It's critically important that we are much more muscular about the way that we're both creating resiliency to the impacts of climate change, as well as decreasing our carbon footprint. For example, the CoolRoofs program was a really great program where the city had an ambitious goal. I thought that de Blasio did a very good job on this when he was mayor of trying to convert roofs with reflective coatings, because that reduces the environmental needs of the building by 10% to 30%.

That has dropped off significantly during the Adams administration, and we need to get back on track. We need to build electric infrastructure. If we could convert the entire city fleet to electric cars and the taxi cabs to electric taxi cabs, that would have an immense impact on our carbon footprint. We don't have the infrastructure to do it because we don't have political leadership that makes it a priority. I will.

Brian: About being mayor, potentially during the Trump administration, I see your website says, "Plenty of cities are defending themselves against the Trump administration's brutal budget cuts. New Haven, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and 13 other cities just won an injunction against the cuts. Where was New York City in that case? Nowhere. City Hall has the resources but lacks the will. Mayor Eric Adams could have directed the New York City Law Department, the largest collection of lawyers on earth, to fight. Instead, Adams did nothing. He is compromised by the devil's bargain he made with Washington to avoid prosecution for fraud." Your words?

Mr. Walden: Those are my words. I wrote it.

Brian: What would you do as mayor with a legal background to defend the city from Trump cuts or other things you see as Trump versus New York?

Mr. Walden: First, I would convene a specific set of lawyers that have significant litigation experience to look through every single aspect of what's going to be coming, whether it's based on the written words of Project 2025 or others. Secondly, I would run my government to eliminate the waste in the city budget to try to have more money to insulate ourselves from these sorts of actions by Washington by making us less dependent on federal money. Those two steps are critical.

Brian: If you're just joining us, my guest is independent candidate for mayor of New York, Jim Walden, who is one of five currently on the ballot: Republican Curtis Sliwa, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, who reportedly is going to start campaigning now as an independent, and Eric Adams as an independent. Now let's get to this unified front you're proposing for all the candidates who are not Mr. Mamdani.

You heard the news in the last day that Andrew Cuomo will reportedly begin to campaign actively as an independent, but is also calling for eventual unity behind the strongest candidate against Mamdani. I also read in City & State that you had spoken to Cuomo directly about your proposal on this. As far as you know, is he accepting your idea, or is he proposing something different in some way?

Mr. Walden: Just from a chronological perspective, I put out the idea first. It's in writing every policy that I commit to. I put in writing the way that Mayor Bloomberg did so that there's transparency. I called for this idea, I think, about 10 days ago, before Cuomo. I'm glad that, however he phrases it, I don't really care who gets the credit. However, he phrases it, it's a good thing.

The Democrats got a special dispensation from the regulators, and that's that even though you're not supposed to be cross-endorsing other candidates, the Democrats were allowed to do that during ranked choice voting. The idea that I had was really just to do the same thing on the side of those candidates who are not Democrats. That creates parity and equity between the two sides.

Given the fact that I view Zohran Mamdani's election as a very, very serious problem for New York, I know that it's more likely that he will be elected if we're splitting what I'll call the free market vote among the four candidates. I'm glad that Andrew Cuomo is on board with it. I very much hope that Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa join because I think it's a critical time in our city for all the candidates to show New Yorkers that we're going to put New York City's interests above our own vanity or political ambition or whatever you want to call it.

Brian: Mr. Sliwa is scheduled for here on Thursday, so at very least we'll ask him then. Do you have any indication that he or Adams would or would not go along with this idea?

Mr. Walden: I don't know the answer to that, but I do think that it took Andrew Cuomo a better part of a week, and it wouldn't surprise me if they needed some time to ruminate over it. I just think that it's super important, and I hope that they will join in aligning to do what the Democrats did and make sure that it's a one-on-one battle. It's effectively a one-on-one battle, assuming that we get the same approval that the Democrats did from the Campaign Finance Board. It'll be a better result for New Yorkers because I do not believe that centrist Democrats, who have largely controlled the elections in New York City's history, are going to vote for someone as extreme as Zohran Mamdani.

Brian: Now, supporters of Mamdani might say this is kind of a Mamdani derangement syndrome, to use a political term that people use to allege an overly alarmist response to a politician. This is in the news these days: Trump supporters say Trump derangement syndrome. Bill Clinton supporters back in the '90s used to say Clinton derangement syndrome about people who thought he was so dangerous for whatever reason.

In this case, one might argue that you're running against public corruption, and you've identified Eric Adams as corrupt. You're running against super PACs in politics, and Cuomo has attached himself to those. You're running against Trump as a malevolent influence, and Republican Curtis Sliwa voted for Trump last year and would presumably enable much of his agenda here because he agrees with it as a member of the same party.

On experience running anything, you've admitted publicly that you don't have that experience either in terms of a big organization. Despite all of that, you would unify with any of those other guys against the Democratic nominee, who he would say he's running on universal child care, a rent freeze, and free buses, and taxing the wealthiest among us by a couple of points more is the heart of his platform. Why does this unity you're proposing make sense, given your views of the histories of those other candidates, make sense as not an overreaction to Mamdani?

Mr. Walden: I'll start from the fundamental proposition that I've got confidence in my own candidate because of my ability to get results and to do it without any scandals or distractions and with a high degree of integrity, and that I hope to be the front-runner at that time, and I don't have to make this decision. I come to echo what you just said. What's happening with Mamdani is a little bit like what happened with Trump, where we had an election and then there were a lot of disclosures afterwards, and those people that supported him just dug their heels in, no matter how bad the opposition research.

The Democrats didn't do New York City voters any favors for doing such a poor job on the opposition research on Mr. Mamdani and his background. It came out just at the very, very tail end after people had made up their mind. Any fair journalist, any diligent candidate could have found the information that I found and started coming out, and it is abundantly clear that he has consistently shown support for terrorists, he's embracing antisemitic policies and plans to continue them in City Hall, and he has shown extreme bigotry for the police.

All of these are just more scandals and distractions waiting to happen, but ones that will really hurt New Yorkers fundamentally. Yes, I wish that Mayor Bloomberg were one of the people running in the race for me, and I have called out other candidates for all of the things that you said, so all of those things are fair.

At the end of the day, I believe that it would be a terrible, terrible mistake for New York City, the capital of capitalism, the site of 9/11, to embrace a candidate that has literally shown support for terrorists, espoused antisemitic views, supported people calling for the destruction of Israel, and shown extreme bigotry to the police. 49% of our police officers are Black and brown, and Zohran Mamdani essentially paints them all as wicked and has literally said that he wants to dismantle the police. If we've learned anything from Trump, when people use words, believe those words.

Brian: On Mamdani and the police, many Democrats were calling for defunding to some degree or another around 2020, and are not any longer, including Mamdani, who says he would work with the police, and he's not calling for further cuts to the force. On Mamdani and antisemitism, his supporters would say he has never uttered an antisemitic word. His position that Israel shouldn't exist as a Jewish state is that it should be a pluralistic democracy with equal rights for all, kind of like the United States, because look what has happened to so many Palestinians since 1948, and especially since the West Bank, et cetera, occupation began in 1967.

Agree or disagree, many would argue that's not the same thing as being antisemitic, and he's got Jewish supporters like Congressman Jerrold Nadler, who's been no slouch on this topic, as I'm sure you know, plus Brad Lander and others. Meanwhile, Cuomo agreed to be a lawyer defending Prime Minister Netanyahu's approach to the war in Gaza, and Cuomo refuses to endorse a two-state solution, deferring to Netanyahu on that. Is it not more complicated, supporters of Mamdani would ask, at very least on this topic, than a slogan about Mamdani that Cuomo may have been pushing in the primary?

Mr. Walden: Again, I've learned from my experience with President Trump that when someone uses words, you believe them, and you believe those words, especially if they were uttered out of the context of a campaign. Don't believe, oftentimes, what candidates say during a campaign, because they'll tell you what you want to hear in order to get elected. Zohran Mamdani went way beyond saying defund the police. He called the police wicked.

He said that they were corrupt, the entire police force. He called for their dismantling, not defunding, dismantling. I'm not characterizing or mischaracterizing the words. Those are the words that he used. He went way beyond the normal defund the police position, which, from my perspective, was always terrible policy. I don't care which way the political winds blow. I would have said that even at the time.

On Israel, I'm not going to get into the geopolitics of this all. I'm just going to make this very real. He has said in no uncertain terms that when he is mayor, he is going to enforce the boycott, divest, and sanction approach with respect to Israeli businesses. Israeli private equity has about $26 billion worth of investments in New York and New York City. There are a tremendous number of businesses and institutions that also have contracts with Israel. This is an antisemitic policy.

Why do I say that? Because he's not asking us to BDS China. China has had the most audacious, destructive, violent approach toward Muslims of any country. They've literally locked millions in essentially concentration camps, gang raped Muslim women, forced them into marriages with non-Muslims. Why is he asking for the divestment of Israel, but not China, and all of the other countries where there has been horrific violence against Muslim populations? I've asked that question multiple times. I've urged him to answer that question. I've heard silence. To me, that is an anti-Semitic policy, and it has no place in the city of New York.

Brian: All right. Listeners, we've had Mr. Mamdani on the show talking about this topic. We've invited him back. We expect he's going to come back. We've had a couple of Mamdani supporters on the show recently, so obviously, we are getting multiple points of view on this continuously in the context of this campaign. Last pitch to listeners in 30 seconds. Why support Jim Walden for mayor?

Mr. Walden: Support Jim Walden for mayor because he is going to be accountable for results. I've been my entire career about one thing and one thing only, and it's solving big problems. If you speak to anyone that knows me, obviously, I'm a father, I'm a husband for 25 years, I love my community, I'm philanthropic. That's all great, but the thing that people will tell you time and time again is that I get the most satisfaction, joy, happiness out of helping people and solving people's problems.

I will be the mayor that will not only solve the problems with innovative solutions, like on corruption or climate or the subways, but I will do it in a way that if I ever fall down, I will be accountable for it, and I will be honest about it. I'm not going to put lipstick on a pig, I'm not going to put band-aids on bullet wounds. I'm going to have solutions and not have measures.

Brian: By the way, do you support a two-state solution in the Middle East, or are you aligned with Cuomo on that?

Mr. Walden: I am not going to get into the geopolitics, Brian. I'm not an international expert. It's a very, very complicated area. I don't want to be the Secretary of State. I want to be the mayor of New York. Frankly, in terms of me being an independent thinker, but as an independent candidate and an independent voter, I'm going to stay out of the issues that don't concern the city of New York and focus on great policies, ambitious plans, and solutions for things like the housing crisis, the safety problem that continues to plague so many communities, especially in the Bronx. Our public schools, they're still failing elementary school kids who can't read or write at grade level. Those are going to be the things that I focus on like a laser.

Brian: Although most of what you had to say against Mr. Mamdani had to do with foreign policy, you might call it, no?

Mr. Walden: No, I'm talking about his policy with respect to New York. When I talk about his antisemitic BDS, it is a policy that he has said very clearly that he's going to implement when he's mayor. I take that to mean that he is going to call on the cancellation of any contract with any Israeli business or any company that does business with Israel. That's the way BDS works and has worked since the time of the South African divestment. That is an antisemitic policy. It's got nothing to do with foreign policy. He's bringing foreign policy in. I'm going to focus my agenda on delivering the results for New York, for these long-standing problems that other people can't seem to solve.

Mr. Walden: That's independent mayoral candidate Jim Walden. We'll continue with this round of candidate interviews on Thursday with Republican Curtis Sliwa. We're waiting to hear back from Eric Adams, Andrew Cuomo, and Mr. Mamdani, who's who've all been on in the previous round. Mr. Walden, thanks very much for today.

Mr. Walden: Thank you for having me.

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