MAMDANI WATCH

News Releases

Personnel

Dean Fuleihan

Title: First Deputy Mayor

Fuleihan, 74, is a creature of New York fiscal policy, having spent his entire life working in shaping budgets in the city and in Albany. He’s widely regarded as a nonpartisan fiscal technocrat with decades of experience running complex government budgets and navigating Albany-City relations. Regarding issues relevant to the Catholic League, Fuleihan has no significant public record on religious liberty, Catholic institutions, or related policy fights.

Elle Bisgaard-Church

Title: Chief of Staff

Bisgaard-Church, 34, is frequently described as “Mamdani’s right hand” and the “brains behind the campaign.” Previously, she served as his chief of staff for his Assembly office and was his campaign manager for the primary. Following the primary, she became the campaign’s senior advisor. While Bisgaard-Church keeps a low public profile (she rarely sits for interviews and practically no social media footprint), it is safe to say she is a true believer in the radical agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Many of the policies championed by DSA conflict with Catholic teachings.

Maria Torres-Springer

Title: Transition Co-Chair

Torres-Springer, 48, most recently served as New York City’s First Deputy Mayor, following a series of senior roles in both the Adams’ and de Balsio administrations. Of particular note for Catholics, during her tenure in New York City politics, Torres-Springer was a rabid support of abortion and transgenderism. She mourned the Supreme Court’s decision to repeal Roe v. Wade, exclaiming that “My daughters’ generation will be the first one in 50 years that has lost their right to determine their future.” Furthermore, she championed the passage of the city’s “Sexual and Reproductive Bill of Rights.” This radical “bill of rights defines health as inclusive of access to sexual health care, birth control, gender-affirming health care, and abortion services.” She praised the bill by saying, “This Sexual and Reproductive Health Bill of Rights will enshrine the right to comprehensive reproductive health and family planning…to help all women, including transgender and gender expansive New Yorkers, thrive.” Additionally, Torres-Springer held a leadership role at the Ford Foundation and has been appointed President of the Revson Foundation, both prominent promoters of progressive policies.

Lina Khan

Title: Transition Co-Chair

Khan is the former Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where she pursued aggressive antitrust and regulatory actions. She previously worked for the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust Subcommittee. While most of her career has been on antitrust and other regulatory issues, Catholics should note that as FTC Chair under the Biden administration Khan made headlines for helping push the White House’s pro-abortion agenda. In 2024, she targeted Outlogic, a data brokerage firm, accused of selling people’s location data surrounding their trips to healthcare facilities. This fed into the liberal panic of the time that states with strong protections for the unborn could use these data brokers to target women who traveled out of state to have an abortion. While this was more of a symbolic gesture (Outlogic was only accused of selling people’s data regarding visits to their doctors and local pharmacies to big pharmaceutical companies), Khan claimed her actions were authorized by Biden’s executive order to protect women’s privacy to seek abortions. Khan also teaches at Columbia Law School, focusing on expanded federal regulatory authority.

Melanie Hartzog

Title: Transition Co-Chair

Hartzog is the President and CEO of the New York Foundling, a major social-services nonprofit founded by the Sisters of Charity and supported by substantial city contracts. She previously served as Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services and as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, serving in both the de Blasio and Bloomberg administrations. Most of her career has been in social-services management.

Grace Bonilla

Title: Transition Co-Chair

Bonilla is the President and CEO of United Way of New York City, a nonprofit closely tied to city-funded social-service programs. She previously served as Administrator of the NYC Human Resources Administration in 2017, overseeing welfare and benefits operations. Additionally, under de Blasio, she served as the first Executive Director of the city’s Taskforce on Racial Equity and Inclusion, an initiative in the wake of the George Floyd riots. Bonilla began her career in municipal government in the Bloomberg administration.

Elana Leopold

Title: Transition Executive Director

Leopold is a political staffer and strategist who served as a senior advisor on Mamdani’s campaign and previously held multiple roles in the de Blasio administration. During her tenure in the de Blasio administration, she was one of more than 230 staffers who signed a letter in June of 2020 demanding that the mayor “reduce the NYPD operating budget by $1 billion in Fiscal Year 2021, and reallocate that money to essential social services.” Leopold is also the co-founder of Seneca Strategies, a progressive consulting firm that specializes in helping leftist women get elected. Not only do many of the candidates the firm work to support abortion, but also the firm has worked on behalf of several pro-abortion campaigns such as #VOTEPROCHOICE.

Alex Vitale

Title: “Community Safety” Adviser

Vitale is the Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. While his fawning acolytes in the liberal press champion him as a serious scholar offering timely and pointed criticism of law enforcement with an eye toward reforming the system to promote social justice, Vitale’s own radical rhetoric reveals his deep hatred for the police and public order. He has railed against law enforcement agencies all across the nation, going so far as to call police officers “violence workers.” In fact, there are very few law enforcement agencies that he has not called for the defunding or the outright abolishment of. He has previously gone after prisons, Border Patrol, ICE, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, and the Texas Rangers. Unsurprisingly, he is a proponent of open borders. Furthermore, Vitale’s 2017 book The End of Policing has been described as the “bestselling bible of the movement to defund the police.”

Tamika Mallory

Title: Transition Advisor

Mallory, 45, has been involved in activism promoting progressive causes for practically all her life. Growing up, her parents were deeply involved with Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN), and by the time she was 15, Mallory began working as a volunteer with the organization. By 2011, she became the youngest national director of NAN. While she would step down from this position in 2013 to pursue her own activism, Mallory remains involved with NAN. In 2014, she would work in the de Blasio administration leading efforts to combat gun violence. In 2017, she would serve as a national co-chair of the Women’s March, which was ostensibly to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump but evolved into promoting a number of anti-Catholic causes particularly abortion and LGBT issues. Much of the Women’s March pro-abortion messaging and iconography was inherently anti-Catholic. Mallory would go on to serve as the organizations co-president. In this roll, she took credit for being responsible for bringing in the abortion providing behemoth Planned Parenthood as a significant financial supporter of the Women’s March. However, Mallory would generate great controversy for her support for Louis Farrakhan and other anti-Semitic statements she made to a Jewish member of the organization’s leadership team. Ultimately, Mallory would be kicked out in 2019. After her unceremonious departure from the Women’s March, Mallory became actively involved in Black Lives Matter (BLM) following the death of George Floyd. Here, too, she would raise eyebrows. A family members of one person killed in a police involved shooting accused Mallory of being a “clout chaser.” This criticism was compounded after she appeared in a BLM-inspired Cadillac commercial, leading to accusations that Mallory was “commodifying activism.” Further, she downplayed the severity of the riots that swept across the nation inspired by BLM. More recently, Mallory has been hypercritical of Trump highlighting the extreme violence faced by Christians in Nigeria. She downplays the violence, arguing Trump is just promoting American imperialism.

Hassaan Chaudhary

Title: Transition Adviser

Chaudhary, 31, served on Mamdani’s campaign as a Muslim-engagement staffer. He was instrumental in pushing the campaign’s line that any criticism of Mamdani was rooted in Islamaphobia. Recently, old social media posts from roughly 2012 surfaced showing Chaudhary using a derogatory Urdu slur for Jews, praising former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling Israel a “cancer,” and posting other hostile language toward Israel and Jewish people. Chaudhary has since deleted his social accounts and issued an apology saying the posts do not reflect his current views. Additionally, he claimed on social media to be the “political-director” of the transition and inaugural teams. However, a spokesperson for the campaign denied that Chaudhary had that position. The spokesperson, though, did not condemn his vile comments.

Rabbi Abby Stein

Member of the Committee on Health

Stein is a man pretending to be a woman. He is currently a rabbi with the Congregation Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive Jewish congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He is an outspoken advocate for LGBT causes and a promoter of abortion. He founded a project called Sacred Space which is described as a “multi-faith project which celebrates women and non-binary people of all faith traditions.” Additionally, Stein is an outspoken advocate for the free Palestine movement. Most notably, he was removed from the 2024 White House Pride celebration after interrupting first Lady Jill Biden’s remarks to demand a ceasefire in the Israeli-Gaza conflict. He also participated in an interfaith meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian during the 2024 U.N. General Assembly.

Ramzi Kassem

Member of the Committee on Legal Affairs

Kassem is a professor of law at the City University of New York (CUNY). He has a history of being involved with the anti-Israel and pro-Palestine movement. In 2025, he provided legal representation to Mahmoud Khalil, the activist and Columbia student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after participating in pro-Palestine protests at the university. He is the co-founder of Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (known as CLEAR), a CUNY law school clinic with a history of associating with anti-Israel activists. CLEAR has also provided workshops for pro-Palestine protesting students on how they can avoid arrest.

Mysonne Linen

Member of the Criminal Legal System Committee

Mysonne Linen is a former rapper who served 7 years in prison for attempting to rob multiple cab drivers at gunpoint in the late 1990s. He has a close relationship with anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour—he and Sarsour founded the activist group Until Freedom. The organization has been involved with the Black Lives Matter movement and supports defunding the police. In response to the death of George Floyd in 2020, the organization stated that “firing officers isn’t enough for us.” Linen also has shown his support for Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam. In 2016, he met with Farrakhan, calling him “Honorable” and saying that his work “inspired and motivated me.”