The Battle to Be Trump's Javert in New York
NEW YORK—Technically, the headquarters of Zephyr Teachout’s campaign to be New York’s next attorney general are in a former doctor’s office in Spanish Harlem, a drab ground-floor storefront where the Fordham University law professor plots electoral strategy, lawsuits, and prosecutions.
But the heart of her bid—metaphorically, politically, substantively—is about three miles south, on the sidewalk across from Trump Tower. It is there where Teachout launched her campaign in June, and it is the president’s business empire that she wants to investigate, prosecute, and even dissolve if the voters of New York make her the state’s chief law-enforcement officer this fall.
“Donald Trump’s businesses are here,” Teachout explained on a recent Tuesday morning. “What the New York attorney general can do, and as attorney general I’ll make a priority, is investigating those businesses. That power extends to, in the case of extreme illegality, dissolving businesses.”
Teachout, 46, was sitting in an exam room that was empty except for a metal desk and a pair of chairs. The medical business that had previously occupied the office had apparently vacated the suite so quickly, she explained, that one of her aides found a lab coat hanging on a door when they moved in.
The attorney general’s race had begun just as hastily two months earlier. Until this spring, the campaign was expected to be a sleepy reelection for Eric Schneiderman, the 63-year-old Democrat in his second term who had made a national name for himself going after Wall Street banks, payday lenders, fantasy-sports websites, and, of late, Donald Trump and his administration. But Schneiderman abruptly resigned on the evening of May 7, just three hours after The New Yorker reported that four women had accused him of physical assault. It was perhaps the swiftest political downfall in an era—and a state—that has seen plenty of them. And it immediately set off a spirited primary campaign for a statewide post that has served as a launching pad to the governor’s mansion for two of its most recent occupants, Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo.
Letitia James, the New York City public advocate, quickly threw her name in and earned endorsements from Cuomo and a, soon followed, as did Leecia Eve, a former aide to Cuomo and Hillary Clinton. Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a House Democrat in his third term, joined the race in June, waving aside concerns that his victory could endanger a competitive congressional district for Democrats. The Republican nominee is the Manhattan attorney Keith Wofford, but whichever Democrat wins the party’s September 13 primary will be heavily favored in November.
