Westchester Assemblyman Calls Teachout Independent Choice for AG
NEW YORK-Hours before a Westchester candidate forum in White Plains, Assemblyman Tom Abinanti (D-Greenburgh) endorsed Zephyr Teachout for Attorney General:
“Zephyr Teachout sees the big picture. She is an independent corruption fighter who is not beholden to big money or the political establishment – free to use her legal expertise to take on Washington and Albany. She gets it that those who the Attorney General may investigate should not finance the Attorney General’s campaign,” said Abinanti.
“Assemblyman Abinanti understands that we won’t have a true democracy for and by the people until we get big money out of politics. I’m the only candidate for Attorney General rejecting corporate money and I’m thrilled to have the support of reform leaders like Tom,” said Teachout.
Abinanti joins the growing wave of momentum for Teachout’s campaign, which is racking up support everyday. Just yesterday, the New York Progressive Action Network (NYPAN) flipped its position to endorse Teachout after previously saying it would remain neutral. Citing Teachout’s independence NYPAN co-chair George Albro said:
“At first, this was a difficult choice for NYPAN, especially for those of us who have a long relationship of support and collaboration with Tish James on many progressive initiatives. But in the end, we, along with many in the progressive movement, felt a deep bond to Zephyr, who has allied herself unconditionally and out of principle with a growing mass movement within the Democratic Party, led by fearless new leaders like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who has changed all the political rules and calculations for the better. Tish, on the other hand, has staked her political fortunes on an alliance with the old guard, like Cuomo, who has enabled the party of Trump to block most progressive proposals. In the end, the choice was obvious.”
List of Endorsements
Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats
Three Parks Independent Democrats
Four Freedoms Democratic Club
Muslim Democratic Club of New York
Indivisible Brooklyn
Indivisible Nation Brooklyn
Indivisible NY-24
New York Progressive Action Network (NYPAN)
Heather Stewart, Empire State Indivisible
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic nominee for the 14th Congressional District
Shaun King, Columnist and civil rights activist
Zenaida Mendez, Former President NOW-NY
Roberta Kaplan, LGBT and civil rights leader, lawyer and activist
Lawrence Lessig, Campaign finance reform advocate
Lawrence Tribe, Constitutional law scholar
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California)
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Maryland)
Terry Gipson, former NYS Senator
Assemblyman Phil Steck, (D-Colonie)
Julie Goldberg, Candidate for NYS Senate
About Zephyr
Zephyr Teachout is a law professor at Fordham Law School and an expert in constitutional law.
She grew up in a small rural town with a Constitutional Law Professor father who had been active in the civil rights movement, and a mother who is now a state court judge. From an early age, she learned how to herd sheep, weed potatoes, be polite to people that she disagreed with, and never back down from a hard fight.
She believes that Trump poses an existential threat to our democracy, and we’ve got to fight it with every thing we have, including going after illegality in his businesses. 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. After his election, she joined the Board of CREW, which has been at the forefront of investigating and bringing lawsuits against the Trump administration (she is currently on leave from the board because of this race).
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. Former Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, cited her anti-corruption research in his dissent in Citizens United.
She believes that corruption is at the root of so many of the problems we face: underfunded schools, overpriced rents, high debt, inequality, unaffordable health care, abuse of workers, environmental devastation.
She has been an independent voice calling out 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. She is a national advocate for reviving old principles of antitrust, and recently testified in front of the Congressional Antitrust Caucus.
She started her career representing people on death row, and 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: they must support discovery reform and speedy trials. 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.
She received a BA from Yale and graduated JD summa cum laude from Duke Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review, and clerked for Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
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