Saritha Komatireddy for NYS Attorney General

As the race for NY Attorney General entered its final days ahead of the November elections, the central debate shifted from typical partisan talking points to the fundamental questioning of the office’s core mission. Is the position meant to serve as a platform for national political battles, or is it a tool to protect public safety.

For eight years, New Yorkers have had an attorney general known chiefly for lawsuits against Donald Trump and for the dismissal of legal allegations against her because of technical errors. This year Republicans and Conservatives have nominated Saritha Komatireddy, someone with a very different resume. She is a thoroughgoing legal professional, and her supporters, from The New York Post to police unions upstate, are making a serious case for her, a case we think our readers should hear.

Saritha Komatireddy is a graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School. She clerked for then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the federal appeals court in Washington, then spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor successfully trying cases involving international terrorism, cybercrime, narcotics trafficking, money laundering and public corruption. She later served as chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Komatireddy’s supporters say that the state’s chief law enforcement officer should be someone who has enforced the law, and she has spent her career in courtrooms prosecuting criminals.

Her opponent, Letitia James, has not. Indeed, a frequent critique leveled against her is that she has focused too heavily on high-profile national political litigation using the law to insinuate herself into national policy differences – all at the expense of local crime fighting which has been left under-resourced.

James’s critics also note that her career in general has leaned heavily toward civil investigations and political office rather than criminal prosecutions. They rightly argue that the chief legal officer of the state should be a seasoned criminal prosecutor.

And they also accuse James of prejudging cases before they are fully investigated. In her first campaign for Attorney General, she shockingly declared that she was running in order to bring down Donald Trump. More recently, critics cite her public expressions of support regarding a high-profile sexual assault investigation at Cornell University.

To be sure, James defends her priorities, maintaining that protecting New Yorkers from federal overreach, corporate fraud, and deceptive practices is the core statutory duty of the state attorney general’s office. And she defends her public comments before all of the facts are in, as necessary expressions of empathy. More generally, she also contends that her focus on civil investigations, housing, consumer protection and affordability targets the issues that impact the daily lives of state residents.

But to us, James’s explanations only make the case for her to be replaced by Komatireddy. For one thing, Komatireddy has said, “If New York is not safe, nothing else matters.” For another, James seems bent on untethering the state’s chief legal office from traditional notions of due process and law enforcement in order to free her to pursue her own public policy preferences and ideas about some inchoate “higher justice.” It is time for a reset back to basics.

Additionally, for our community, Komatireddy’s commitments on antisemitism stand out. She has pledged to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, to staff the office’s Hate Crimes Bureau from her first day, and to use the civil rights laws to hold colleges accountable when Jewish students are harassed. At the October 7 debate between the candidates, Komatireddy recalled that Jewish students had barricaded themselves inside campus buildings and said of James, “She just stands there. She doesn’t do anything.”

Vote for Saritha Komatireddy!