A Red Flag Goes Up Against Daniel Goldman for Congress

For readers living in the Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods that make up New York’s 10th congressional district, please consider today’s column an intervention. On Tuesday, primary voters should vote against the frontrunner in the race, a former United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and an heir to the Levi-Strauss fortune, Daniel Goldman.Mr. Goldman has many advantages. Earlier this month the New York Times endorsed him. He has poured some $4 million of his own fortune into the primary race, according to Politico. He has been a fixture in recent years on MSNBC, as one of dozens of former prosecutors on that network predicting the latest rumor or investigation into Donald Trump will end with the ex-president in a jumpsuit and shackles. Mr. Goldman made his reputation in recent years as the lead Democratic counsel in the 2019 and 2020 impeachment of Mr. Trump. He got that job after impressing a notorious dissembler, Representative Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, at a chance meeting in an MSNBC greenroom.Let’s start with Mr. Goldman’s role in the first impeachment. He was a lead author of the intelligence committee’s report on Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to announce an investigation into President Biden’s son, Hunter. That was fair game. Mr. Trump issued a sarcastic endorsement of his nemesis.The committee’s report, though, also published phone records the committee obtained through a subpoena to a telecom company of journalist John Solomon’s call records. That was an unprecedented action on the Fourth Estate. As Marc Ambinder, no friend of Mr. Trump, wrote at the time, “in revealing whom Mr. Solomon talked with, and when, Mr. Schiff and his committee have created a new pathway for the government to find and reveal a reporter’s sources and to question his or her motives.”Mr. Goldman was also a United States attorney on the team that successfully prosecuted an investor and gambler, William T. Walters, for insider trading in 2017. An appeals court, though, chastised the prosecutors for leaks of grand jury information before Mr. Walters was charged. Last year, Mr. Walters sued Mr. Goldman along with four other defendants claiming that they were “instrumental in the concerted campaign” to defame him before he was indicted.Then there is Mr. Goldman’s role in hyping the conspiracy theory about the Trump campaign’s collusion with the Kremlin. That was as a former federal prosecutor on cable networks like MSNBC. In a piece he co-authored for the Daily Beast in 2018, Mr. Goldman actually defended the FBI’s decision to use Democratic Party opposition research, known as the Steele dossier, to seek and renew a surveillance warrant on a low-level Trump campaign adviser.All of this should be a red flag for voters who care about preserving the democratic legitimacy of federal law enforcement. Mr. Goldman has had multiple roles in recent years in eroding the public trust in the Justice Department and the FBI; as a United States attorney, an impeachment lawyer in Congress, and as a frequent guest on cable networks promising the walls on Mr. Trump were forever closing in.In this respect it’s ironic that Mr. Goldman has campaigned on protecting democracy and fighting disinformation. In an interview with the New York Times editorial board, he came out in favor of expanding the government’s role in regulating social media companies.“It affects not only our democracy and our elections,” he intoned. “It affects climate denialism. It affected Covid. So one of the things that I have been pushing for is we need to regulate social media companies more, but we also need to expand the public broadcasting media arm to include independent online media platforms.” To recap, a former prosecutor who hyped disinformation about the 45th president to defend FBI abuses later discovered by the justice department’s inspector general now wants to regulate social media companies to protect the public from disinformation.Fortunately, New Yorkers in the 10th have a better option than a hyper-partisan censor.Also on the ballot is a former public defender and crusader for public school reform, Maud Maron. She has made New York’s inexplicable decisions to close public schools during the pandemic a centerpiece of her campaign. To hear more from her directly, listen to episode 19 of my Re-Education podcast.

A Red Flag Goes Up Against Daniel Goldman for Congress

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