Mamdani transition team hires outside firm to support vetting process

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team is bringing on an outside firm to support its vetting process, after one of their top-level hires resigned due to past antisemitic tweets coming to light.

“This unacceptable oversight in the vetting process does not meet the Mayor-elect’s standards for this transition or the incoming administration,” transition press secretary Dora Pekec said in a statement on Friday afternoon. “We’ve taken swift action to bring on an independent firm for additional support.” Pekec did not name the firm or elaborate on what kinds of steps it would take, only saying that it would support the transition’s existing process.

The move comes a day after Cat Da Costa, who Mamdani had picked as his director of appointments (an ironic twist in hindsight), resigned before she even had a chance to start the job. (She was only announced as a top hire the day prior.) In tweets from 2011, she referred to Jewish people as “money hungry” and called a train in Far Rockaway the “Jew train.”

Mamdani told reporters on Friday morning that Da Costa’s resignation was voluntary. “I made clear that the comments were reprehensible. She expressed a deep sense of remorse. She offered to resign, and I accepted it,” Mamdani said. He said that he wouldn’t have hired her if he had been aware of the posts beforehand.

The tweets were first brought to light by the Anti-Defamation League, which called for an explanation from both Da Costa and Mamdani. Prior to her resignation, some spoke in Da Costa’s defense, including Council Member Lincoln Restler, who tweeted that Da Costa is not antisemitic and that “we should be careful about judging people based on problematic tweets from teenage years.”

While the incident prompted De Costa’s resignation, and her own apology for the decade-old tweets, it also shed light on a weakness in the transition operation. The fact that Mamdani – whose own five-year-old tweets criticizing the NYPD were weaponized by his opponents in the mayoral race – and his team didn’t review the new hire’s Twitter archives is somewhat surprising. Still, Da Costa previously served in former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, and the posts did not come up at that time.

Mamdani’s transition team did not provide any further detail about what changes might be coming to its vetting process – or what the current vetting process looks like, but a number of high-profile appointments remain, including commissioners of major agencies like the Departments of Education, Sanitation and Transportation.