Teachout Announces Exploratory Committee for
New York Attorney General
Today, Zephyr Teachout announced that she will form an exploratory committee to consider running for Attorney General of New York State. She will make a final decision in the next few weeks.
“The next Attorney General of New York should be an independent fighter and a voice for the people, ready to take on corruption and lawlessness at the highest pinnacles of power. She must be ready to pursue aggressive litigation against the lawlessness in the Trump administration, and investigate corruption in Albany, in real estate, and on Wall Street. We’re living through a crisis in democracy, and it’s up to all of us to consider how we may best serve to repair it. I’ll be considering that question very deeply in the coming weeks.”
Background
Teachout has spent her life fighting corruption and standing up against powerful interests. Three days after Donald Trump took office, she was on the team of lawyers that filed Citizens for Responsibility in Ethics in Washington v. Trump against Trump because of his violations of the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution. Her book on the history of anti-corruption laws in the United States, Corruption in America, is widely recognized as a groundbreaking analysis on the subject. And former Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, cited her anti-corruption research in his dissent in Citizens United.
She has been an outspoken critic of the corruption in Albany, speaking and writing about the trials of Sheldon Silver, Joseph Percoco, and Dean Skelos. After the 2008 financial crisis, she co-founded an organization, A New Way Forward, bringing grassroots voices to work on Dodd-Frank, and calling for increased prosecutions of financial crimes. In recent years, she has become a national advocate for reviving old principles of antitrust, and recently briefed the Congressional Antitrust Caucus.
A former death penalty defense lawyer, she co-founded an organization dedicated to training young lawyers in underfunded defense trial work. She believes that prosecutors must play a key role in criminal justice reform, and be leaders in the fight against mass incarceration, cash bail, and discriminatory policing. As the former national director of the Sunlight Foundation, she knows the importance of transparency, and believes that the Attorney General should lead the fight for greater transparency in government, corporations, non-profits, and policing.
Teachout is currently an Associate Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where she teaches, among other things, a course on Prosecuting Public and Private Corruption. She is working on a book about the importance of reviving antitrust in America.
Her exploratory team includes Middle Seat and Aisle 518 Strategies, leaders of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 digital team; BrownMiller Group, which won six “Pollie” awards for its mail and field work in 2018; ALG Research; and the award-winning Putnam Partners, whose past clients include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and past Attorney General races include Kamala Harris and Roy Cooper.
