Even before Zohran Mamdani, fresh off his successful mayoral run, found himself ensnared in controversy over a new hire’s antisemitic social media posts, his hastily convened transition team seemed to understand the risks of tapping activists who have been prolific on social media.
The team vetting potential City Hall appointees was asked to search for particular key words as they pored over social media accounts, said one person involved with the transition. Among them: homophobic slurs, variations of the N-word and references to Arabs and Jews.
Despite those precautions, a vetting debacle quickly exploded into the public domain. Mr. Mamdani named as director of appointments Catherine Almonte Da Costa, 33, who had, among other things, posted about “money hungry Jews” when she was 18.
The story of why her posts failed to come to light before Mr. Mamdani announced her hire remains imperfectly told, in no small part because Mr. Mamdani’s team has declined to answer specific questions about the matter. But there are some indications.
For one, vetters on the transition team never asked Ms. Da Costa for her social media handles, an individual involved with the transition said. Nor had she yet gone through a background check by the Department of Investigation, a spokeswoman for City Hall confirmed. (It is not unheard-of for a mayor to announce an appointment before a D.O.I. background check is complete.)
Ms. Da Costa promptly tendered her resignation, and Mr. Mamdani promised to strengthen his vetting operation, only to run into another buzz saw of criticism weeks later, when he tapped Cea Weaver, a well-known tenant advocate, to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. She had tweets that described homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” and said it was important to “impoverish” the white middle class. Unlike Ms. Da Costa’s posts, Ms. Weaver’s were known to Mr. Mamdani before she was hired.
But the fact that two high-level appointments so quickly thrust Mr. Mamdani’s fledgling mayoralty into controversy underscores the intense scrutiny he is under as he finds his legs. His response to the two episodes also demonstrates just how much, and what type of, controversy he’s willing to tolerate, and for whom.
The posts from Ms. Da Costa touched one of Mr. Mamdani’s most sensitive political nerves — his relationship with segments of New York City’s large Jewish population that distrust his longtime pro-Palestinian activism and his opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.
Arguably, it was politically untenable for him to retain someone with a history of antisemitic tweets, even if she had since gotten older, started a career, married a Jew and decided to raise her children Jewish.
For her part, Ms. Weaver, 37, had suggested a “no more white men in office platform” and argued that there were no good gentrifiers.
Her tweets did not overtly target one of Mr. Mamdani’s key vulnerabilities. But they quickly became a cause célèbre among right-wing media figures, drew the attention of the vice president of the United States, and are threatening to pose problems closer to home with Black homeowners and landlords.
Some have also questioned the decision to retain Ms. Weaver, who is white, while accepting the resignation of Ms. Da Costa, who is Latina.
“How can seemingly the same issue arise for a white woman and a Latina woman and the Latina woman be disqualified while the white woman is excused for her indiscretion?” said Kirsten John Foy, president of the civil rights group Arc of Justice, who said there was already concern among Black and Latino New Yorkers about what some see as a lack of diversity in the Mamdani administration.
The mayor has vociferously backed Ms. Weaver, and several New York leaders have risen to her defense, arguing that her ideological comments bely a sharp — and more measured — political mind. Ms. Weaver, who like Mr. Mamdani is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, is one of his closest political allies; Ms. Da Costa is not.
Asked this past week if he regarded the substance of their tweets as fundamentally different, the mayor replied: “The core issue at hand here is, what are we hiring this person to do? We are hiring them to stand up for tenants in a way that we haven’t seen before and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Dora Pekec, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said, “The conflation of these two is absurd.”
Every mayor-elect must contend with the complicated task of vetting prospective hires, a time-consuming process that must be completed quickly in order to take office with more than a skeleton crew.
Early in his tenure, former Mayor Eric Adams dealt with the fallout from his decision to hire two reverends, both close allies, who had made homophobic remarks. When a third appointment, this time to the Panel for Educational Policy, was found to have made homophobic comments in a book, she was quickly dismissed.
Mr. Adams did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but a high-ranking former official for his transition, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel decisions, said that he had been made aware of the comments of the two reverends through the vetting process and had decided that he would deal with the political fallout.
The former Adams official expressed surprise that Ms. Da Costa, who was going to be in charge of recruiting top talent, had not been more thoroughly vetted herself.
Ali Najmi, the chair of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary who oversaw the vetting process during Mr. Mamdani’s transition, did not respond to requests for comment.
One day after Ms. Da Costa’s job was announced, during a news conference at a Brooklyn library, she resigned and Mr. Mamdani rushed into damage-control mode, hiring a political researcher and, through his spokeswoman, telling reporters they were hiring outside lawyers to vet appointments.
“We have been clear that we strengthened our vetting process in response to Da Costa’s resignation, and we continue to stand with Weaver and have full confidence in her ability to deliver for tenants in this administration,” Ms. Pekec said in a statement. “We are surprised and disappointed to see The New York Times amplifying right-wing hysteria.”
Ms. Pekec declined to answer detailed questions about the nature of the new vetting process.
But the issue continues to reverberate.
In Brooklyn, Marlon Rice, a candidate for State Senate, questioned Ms. Weaver’s comments. He is running in a district that includes the neighborhoods of Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and parts of Fort Greene, areas with a concentrated number of Black homeowners.
The district is currently represented by State Senator Jabari Brisport, an ally of Mr. Mamdani and a fellow member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who is running for re-election. In a Substack post, Mr. Rice asked why Mr. Brisport had not opposed Ms. Weaver’s appointment, and suggested her stances “undermine or delegitimize Black homeownership.”
Protecting Black homeownership is one of the issues Mr. Rice plans to run on. Mr. Mamdani underperformed former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, his leading mayoral rival, in neighborhoods full of older, Black homeowners during last year’s Democratic primary.
“The truth is that homeownership is a central mechanism of Black wealth, the way in which Blacks in America have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps,” Mr. Rice said.
Mr. Brisport, who, like Mr. Rice, is Black, said in an interview that he agreed with Ms. Weaver that the federal government had historically used homeownership coupled with policies like redlining to “create wealth for white people and exclude Black people.”
He called Ms. Weaver a “fantastic hire” who had done a lot to improve the lives of tenants in the city.
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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