Rep. Elise Stefanik challenges Hochul after call to fire ‘nightmare’ Mamdani transition team pick who has supported cop killers
Rep. Elise Stefanik fired off a direct warning to Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday after Mayor‑elect Zohran Mamdani added a controversial figure to his transition team. The person in question, Lumumba Bandele, has been linked to the Black Liberation Army and has publicly supported those convicted of killing police officers in New York and New Jersey.
Once a list‑maker for Mamdani’s Committee on Community Organizing, Bandele’s past stands in sharp contrast to what many expect from a city‑wide leadership team. Stefanik, who is eyeing a run against Hochul next year, blasted the move and urged the Democratic governor to pressure Mamdani into removing the activist from his staff.
In a statement to The Post, Stefanik said: “Kathy Hochul’s endorsed Mayor‑elect, Zohran Mamdani, just picked a man who supports the killers of cops in New York and New Jersey to serve on his transition team.”
She added: “Mamdani’s vision for New York is getting very clear and it’s starting to look like a nightmare. Kathy Hochul must immediately call on Mamdani to fire Lumumba Bandele from his transition team.”
Bandele, who later joined the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, had been active in a 2018 rally demanding the release of Herman Bell. Bell’s original crime—a 1971 shoot‑out that resulted in the deaths of two NYPD officers—had ultimately led to his parole in 2018 after the board judged him reformed.
The activist has long spoken of his relationships with figures such as Assata Shakur, the former life‑sentence prisoner who escaped to Cuba and was granted asylum. Later that year he appeared in a video praising both Shakur and Bell, recalling their long‑standing friendship.
Shakur died in September, but he was remembered by Bandele on Veterans Day 2024 as one of “the many soldiers that served valiantly in the people’s military to defend our communities.”
Both Mamdani’s transition team and Hochul’s office declined to comment immediately, and Bandele himself has not responded to calls for input. He sits on one of more than 400 community panels that will influence the incoming mayor’s first 17 committees, set to take office this January.
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