Rep. Elise Stefanik issued a challenge to rival Gov. Kathy Hochul Tuesday over a member of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s transition team who has voiced support for infamous cop killers.
Black Nationalist Lumumba Bandele was picked to serve on the incoming mayor’s Committee on Community Organizing on Monday despite previously aligning with Black Liberation Army members convicted of killing police officers in the tristate area.
Stefanik, a Republican looking to run against Hochul in next year’s election, quickly blasted the decision and called on Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to pressure Mamdani to push Bandele aside.
“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 said in a statement to The Post.
“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, now of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, attended a rally pushing for Herman Bell’s release from prison in March 2018, according to the Workers World newspaper after Bell and two others lured two NYPD officers to a Harlem housing project and then gunned them down in 1971.
Bell was ultimately granted his freedom in 2018 after the parole board found he was reformed and remorseful over the sickening crime.
Bandele also mentioned how he met several times with Assata Shakur, who escaped from prison while serving a life sentence for killing a New Jersey cop and fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum.
He offered praise in a video earlier this month and talked about their longtime relationship.
Shakur, who died in September, shot and killed a New Jersey state trooper during a gunfight in 1973.
Bandele saluted Shakur and Bell on Veterans Day 2024 as among the “many soldiers that served valiantly in the people’s military to defend our communities.”
Mamdani’s transition campaign and Hochul’s office did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment.
A message was also not immediately returned by Bandele.
He is one of more than 400 community members and stakeholders to sit on 17 transition committees before Mamdani takes office in January.
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