Mamdani's Judge-Pickers Have No Jews. The Man Who Vetted Them Defended Al-Qaeda.

Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, who came to Brooklyn from the former Soviet Union, went to law school here, and built a working legal practice before she ran for City Council, did not mince words. She is exactly the kind of lawyer the committee is supposed to represent and could not seem to find.

In a free country, the lawyer who represents the despised client is not contaminated by the client’s crimes. That principle once sat near the center of the liberal order. It protected the unpopular, the guilty, and the simply hated. It was the reason the American bar could claim to serve justice rather than power.

A coalition of New York City's Jewish bar associations wrote the mayor on July 27 to ask why his new Advisory Committee on the Judiciary had no identifiable Jewish members. City Hall did not dispute the count. It offered a reason. There had been a Jewish appellate justice in the running, John Leventhal, who served on the same committee under Eric Adams and was nominated again by Chief Judge Rowan Wilson. The administration passed him over. Press secretary Joe Calvello explained why, per Politico: when the administration learned Leventhal had represented Ghislaine Maxwell on her federal sex-trafficking appeal, it chose not to move forward. "Any suggestion that the decision around MACJ was motivated by religion is false," Calvello said.

So the administration has a standard. Represent a reviled client, and you can be disqualified from screening New York's judges.

Now look at the man who runs the committee.

Ramzi Kassem is the mayor's chief counsel, and he supervises the Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. He announced its new members and called them "a truly representative cross-section" of the city's legal profession. Before City Hall, Kassem founded the CLEAR clinic at CUNY School of Law and spent more than a decade representing prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. He was lead defense counsel in United States v. Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi al-Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty in connection with the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg and who is the brother-in-law of one of the 9/11 hijackers. His clients also included a detainee tied to the 9/11 plot, and more recently Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia protester detained by immigration authorities. We laid out that record in full when Mamdani made the appointment, in Mamdani's Dangerous Legal Pick. None of it is in dispute. When Mamdani introduced Kassem, he praised his "commitment to defending those too often abandoned by our legal system." He called the representation a virtue.

So the standard has a second setting. Represent an admitted al-Qaeda operative and you are standing up for the abandoned. Represent a sex-trafficking defendant on appeal and you are unfit. The difference between the two is not the clients. Al-Darbi is worse than Maxwell by any measure a New Yorker would use. The difference is who did the representing.

Nobody in this community begrudges Kassem his clients. That is the whole point, and it is the part the émigrés understand in their bones. In a free country the hated defendant gets a lawyer, and the lawyer is not the crime. That principle protected Kassem's clients. Jewish lawyers spent a hundred years defending it, because they knew what a country looks like when the principle goes. What they are watching now is that same principle kept for the mayor's own counsel and spent on the one Jewish justice in the room. A rule that applies to one man and not to the man enforcing it is not a rule. It is a sorting.

The bar associations were restrained about it. They did not allege a conspiracy. They said they were "deeply disappointed" and asked the mayor to "correct this exclusion" and to reaffirm that Jewish New Yorkers are entitled to the same representation, respect and protection as every other community. Elizabeth Forspan, who leads the Brandeis Association of Queens, made the quiet version of the point. In a city with this deep a pool of Jewish lawyers, former lawyers and law professors, she said, the absence of a single one is hard to read as an oversight. Rabbi Mark Goldfeder did the arithmetic. Pull eighteen New York lawyers at random and you would expect several to be Jewish.

Eighteen were pulled. Zero came up Jewish. In this city, with this bar. That is the number the community cannot stop looking at, and it is the number City Hall has not explained. This is the panel that decides who sits on the criminal-court benches where hate-crime cases are tried. Jewish New Yorkers are the people most often dragged into those courtrooms as victims. The letter went out days after a man attacked worshippers outside an Upper West Side synagogue. The associations put the empty committee next to the IHRA definition the administration will not adopt, and next to the city immigrant-community map that left Jewish neighborhoods off, and they called it a pattern. From inside the community it does not read as three coincidences.

The exclusion is not the whole of it either. The question underneath is who this administration counts as belonging. We traced that machinery in How Progressive Capture Actually Works. Kassem did not come to City Hall as a neutral judge of legal talent. He spent a career, and built a funding network, around a fixed view of which people the law exists to protect. That is his right as an advocate. Hand an advocate the job of choosing who chooses the judges, and he will choose for the view. The empty chair where a Jewish justice sat is that view in practice.

City Hall says the mayor has appointed Jewish judges and that the charge is false. Maybe he has. It changes nothing here. The question is not whether the administration can find Jews it approves of. It is whether the rule it used to remove the one Jewish justice is a rule it will use on itself. It will not. Everyone in the room can see that, which is why the room emptied.

The mayor can fix this before the week is out. Seat qualified Jewish members on the committee, as the bar associations asked, and apply the Leventhal standard to Kassem or admit it was never a standard. Short of that, the administration's own explanation writes the only honest caption for the picture. It had a rule. It used the rule one time. On the Jew.

Mamdani's coronation as mayor of New York City is not a fluke. It is an indicator of what is coming in more cities if the terrorist networks behind him are not exposed and dismantled.