August 06, 2021
Iranian-American Tali Farhadian Weinstein came very close but failed to win the Democratic nomination for Manhattan district attorney despite outspending all her opponents combined.
Eight people were seeking the nomination which in New York is tantamount to election. The primary was won by Alvin Bragg, an African-American prosecutor, with 32.0 percent of the vote. Farhadian, also a prosecutor by profession and Jewish, came in second with 28.7 percent.
Both of them beat the ultra-liberal progressive candidate, Tahanie Aboushi, who got only 10.3 percent. Aboushi is a Muslim who wears a headcovering.
The new district attorney will take over the issue of prosecuting former President Donald Trump. The outgoing DA has already initiated one case against Trump’s business, but not against Trump personally.
Farhadian had been widely expected to win a few months ago. But her immense spending on the campaign became an issue. Her husband is an extremely wealthy Wall Street broker and the Manhattan DA handles a lot of Wall Street prosecutions.
Her critics argued that the multimillionaire’s close ties to Wall Street presented a conflict of interest. Of the 27 donors who made contributions over $35,000 to Farhadian’s campaign, all but one were Wall Street or business leaders.
Farhadian, who worked as a prosecutor in Barack Obama’s Department of Justice and in the Brooklyn DA’s office, is married to hedge fund executive Boaz Weinstein of Saba Capital Management. She also contributed $8.2 million of their own money to her campaign in the final weeks of the race.
In total, Farhadian, one of the most moderate candidates in the primary, raised nearly $13 million more than five times the amount Bragg raised, in fact more than the amount the seven other candidates raised combined. Her powerful war chest allowed for a digital ad campaign and mailers that helped boost her name recognition. Only two months before the election, two polls showed Weinstein in the lead with twice as many votes as Bragg.
But as the June 22 primary drew nearer, the gap in the race narrowed. Buoyed by a New York Times endorsement, Bragg who ran on a platform to the left of Farhadian’s gained steam. A poll conducted by Data for Progress two weeks before the race showed Bragg tied with Farhadian, and a poll the following week showed him ahead.
Farhadian, who has called herself a “progressive prosecutor,” supported some criminal justice reforms, but her platform was more moderate than those of her opponents. Unlike the race’s left-most candidates, she did not promise to stop prosecuting nonviolent misdemeanors, seek sentences less than 20 years, fully decriminalize sex work, or dramatically change the focus of the DA’s office. These are all ideas generally pushed heavily by progressive candidates for DA all over the country. Two Iranian-American lawyers advocating such changes have won election in the last two years in Norfolk and Arlington, Virginia.
Weeks before the primary, a news report said she and her husband had paid almost no federal income taxes in four recent years. Farhadian and her husband maintained that their tax filings are completely legal because their net worth fell after significant losses at Saba Capital Management.
The race was an historically diverse one. Of the eight Democrats who ran in the primary, six were women, one was a Black male and only one was a White male and he came in last with just 2.6 percent of the vote.
Both outgoing DA Cyrus Vance and his predecessor, Robert Morgenthau, who held the office for 35 years, were the sons of cabinet secretaries Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and Franklin Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary Robert Mor-genthau.