Ali Najmi is suing the city over the Central Park carriage crash — a clear conflict of interest with his work as the head of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s judicial-nominations board.
Yes, Romanch Mahajan’s family has every right to an attorney in their case over their 18-year-old son’s fatal fall from a runaway Central Park horse carriage.
But being their lawyer renders Najmi unfit as any kind of city official, certainly one involved in choosing future judges.
Actually, his other conflicts should have kept him out of that role in the first place.
It’s not simply that he maintains his own private practice, specializing in criminal defense, civil rights and election law; he is also “of counsel” with Liakas Law — a firm under federal investigation for allegedly operating as a fraudulent enterprise that exploits immigrants and the vulnerable through a scheme of sham lawsuits and padded medical bills.
There’s a policy issue, too: The ambulance-chasing Najmi benefits from Scaffold Law cases — which drive insurance premiums sky-high and ballooning housing construction costs by as much as 10%, undermining the mayor’s affordable-housing agenda.
Najmi had earlier served as Mamdani’s campaign lawyer; we understand why he might trust him — but also wonder if he’s one of the reasons the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary has not a single Jewish member.
Given how very many New York lawyers are Jews — including plenty of radicals who’d enthusiastically support the mayor’s agenda — it’s impossible not to think this was intentional discrimination.
City Hall says it did consider retired Appellate Division Justice John Leventhal for the committee, but he “did not pass our vetting process” because he “served on [Ghislaine] Maxwell’s legal team.”
Huh? If Team Mamdani is going to start holding lawyers’ past clients against them, they’d be unable to hire practically any criminal-defense lawyer.
Heck, Najmi runs that committee and is a top Mamdani political adviser, despite plenty of questionable clients.
We’re no fans of anyone in the mayor’s inner circle, but (setting ideology aside) Najmi has to be most questionable.
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