Just weeks before the primary election, Manhattan District Attorney candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein has pumped $8.2 million dollars into her campaign, raising alarm bells among ethics watchdogs as she blows past the amounts raised by her seven rival candidates by more than $10 million.
Farhadian Weinstein’s campaign shelled out $1.46 million on campaign mailers, $3.4 million on television ads, and $448,000 on digital advertising, in the three weeks from May 17 to June 7, according to state campaign filings. Overall, her campaign spent $11.18 per voter, seven times as much as any other candidate in the race, according to a Gothamist/WNYC analysis of state campaign finance records through June 11th.
Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, which advocates for government accountability and transparency, called the 11th hour campaign contributions “anti-democratic.” While it’s legal to donate unlimited sums to your own political campaign per state and city election law, Lerner said it was an unethical choice.
“It's designed to get the least amount of scrutiny possible,” she said. “It’s an enormous amount of money to spend on a local DA race and it [seems like she’s] trying to buy justice.”
Campaign mailers that arrived at the author's Manhattan home in recent weeks.
Asked about the $8.2 million donation, Jennifer Blatus, a spokesperson for Farhadian Weinstein, pointed to a $500,000 contribution Lucy Lang made to her own campaign in April and $1 million from a national progressive PAC donated to former federal prosecutor Alvin Bragg, “both of which have given advantages to the other candidates,” she said.
“Our campaign is making sure that voters across Manhattan get a clear sense of the difference between the candidates in this race,” Blatus added.
Bragg, the second largest fundraiser in the race who was endorsed by the NY Times, has not responded yet to a request for comment. Jason Novak, a spokesperson for Lang's campaign had previously defended the $500,000 in self-funding.
“The reality is that Ms. Weinstein has repeatedly proven that her priorities are aligned with Wall Street as opposed to the millions of New Yorkers directly impacted by our criminal justice system every day," he said.
Unlike other local races, subject to a robust New York City campaign-finance system with strict rules for donations, the Manhattan District Attorney’s race is a county office, governed by more lax state laws. Individual donors can give up to $37,829 in New York State races; in city races, the limit for most races is $2,000.
Farhadian Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor who’s been endorsed by the editorial boards of both The Daily News and the New York Post, has come under scrutiny during the campaign. The NY Times reported she interviewed with the Trump administration for a federal judgeship position and THE CITY reported this week she was not a registered Democrat until 2017. According to The Appeal, when she ran the conviction review unit in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office only four people were exonerated.
Farhadian Weinstein is married to Boaz Weinstein, the founder of Saba Capital hedge fund and a former executive at Deutsche Bank. They live in a $25 million Fifth Avenue penthouse and spent most of the pandemic in their $13 million second home in the Hamptons. She has tapped into her circle of ultra-wealthy donors, dozens of whom gave her lump sums of $20,000 and above, Gothamist previously reported. Good government groups and her rivals have raised concerns about her ability to police Wall Street as Manhattan DA when she has such close connections to that world.
Farhadian Weinstein has said she would recuse herself if a matter involving her husband came before the DA’s office, but has not committed to doing the same if one of her deep-pocketed donors did.
And then she waited until late May, a month before the primary, to start cutting a series of million-dollar checks to her own campaign coffers, a move her opponents criticized.
“An average NYC family makes $64,000/year,” tweeted Tahanie Aboushi, a civil-rights attorney who is supported by the Working Families Party. “My opponent, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, dropped 128x that in just 2 weeks to buy this election.”
Eliza Orlins, a public defender who has the lowest average donation and the highest number of individual donations, said Farhadian Weinstein’s wealth made it an unfair fight.
“The Manhattan District Attorney’s office should not be for sale to the highest bidder — and voters should reject this transparent attempt to buy this seat,” she said.
Eight candidates are running to replace longtime Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. The office has no term limits and RANKED-CHOICE VOTING DOES NOT APPLY to this race. Learn more about the race and who is running here.
(This story has been updated to include a comment from Lucy Lang's campaign.)
