Independent mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo on Thursday again refused to release a list of clients he amassed as a private legal consultant in response to Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s video challenge to do so earlier this week.
Cuomo made the remarks during an unrelated Aug. 14 news conference, a couple of days after Mamdani released the social media video recounting news reports of incidents related to the former governor’s private consultancy — Innovation Strategies LLC. He founded the firm in 2022 after resigning as governor the previous year amid nearly a dozen sexual harassment allegations that he denies.
In the video, Mamdani — a Queens Assembly member — attempted to link Cuomo to accused child-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein via the former governor’s longtime friend: Andrew Farkas. Cuomo and Farkas worked together on a marina project in Puerto Rico, Mamdani says, citing The New York Times, after he resigned.
Farkas, he also noted, had at one point worked on a similar project with Epstein.
Mamdani also mentioned an April Bloomberg report that Cuomo advised a cryptocurrency exchange facing federal investigation and a Politico story that he did not disclose $2.6 million in nuclear stock options to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.
During Cuomo’s Thursday event, he told reporters that since resigning as governor he has “done podcasts,” “advocated for certain causes that are dear to me” and practiced law. He said that none of his clients had business before the city or state governments and that he had not done any lobbying work.
Even so, Cuomo declined to disclose the names of any of his consulting clients, as he has repeatedly done since at least April.
“They were private clients, and this is attorney-client privilege,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo’s spokesperson previously told the New York Post that Cuomo didn’t know Epstein and that you can “smell the desperation” from Mamdani in his video.
The spokesperson, Rich Azzopardi, sought to refute Mamdani’s other points in the video in a statement to amNewYork.
“The stock options were publicly disclosed for years by federal regulators and the only question was if and how to report them on ethics forms,” Azzopardi said. “They were properly documented after consulting to COIB the same day it was brought to our attention and the marina project never went anywhere and he wasn’t compensated.”
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 released the video as part of a nearly week-long mudslinging match with Cuomo. The kerfuffle began last Friday when Cuomo’s X account slammed Mamdani for living in a $2,300-a-month rent-stabilized Astoria apartment, despite his $142,000-a-year Assembly member salary and “privileged” background.
Cuomo has used Mamdani’s apartment to paint him as a hypocrite, due to his identity as a democratic socialist who is pushing a rent freeze for stabilized tenants as one of his core campaign proposals. He even went so far as to propose state legislation, named after Mamdani, that would require tenants to spend 30% of their income on rent in order to fill a vacant stabilized unit.
Cuomo then questioned Mamdani’s contention that he did not know the apartment was stabilized when he first rented it, calling on him to make his lease public. The slogan prompted Mamdani to counter with his video.
Outside of the video, Mamdani has mostly ignored Cuomo’s broadsides, saying, “I live rent-free in his head,” and accusing Cuomo of treating rent-stabilized tenants like “political pawns.”
