Dear Editor:
It is with a mix of emotions that I announce my decision to step down from the New York State Assembly this summer. After much contemplation, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for me to embark upon a new chapter.
Serving as your Assemblymember has been the honor of a lifetime. I am deeply grateful to my community, family, staff, and my constituents of the 27th District for entrusting me to be your voice in the State Assembly.
Over the past six years, I have worked with one goal in mind: Make government work better for New Yorkers. I’m proud to say that our office took this directive to heart and made it our core mission. My team is proud of their commitment to constituent services and delivered assistance readily. We have had the pleasure of serving thousands of constituents by securing government resources, providing assistance during natural and health disasters, funding public institutions, and being an active voice in government. We’ve delivered over $10 million in funding to our schools, libraries, and local communal organizations. We’ve passed legislation to make medication more affordable and safer, combat rising hate crimes, and tackle food insecurity.
I also extend my deepest appreciation to my colleagues in the Legislature, with whom I have had the privilege to collaborate. Together, we have tackled challenging issues, bridged differences, and worked towards a common goal of serving the people we represent.
While this decision marks the end of an incredible chapter in my life, it also opens the door to new opportunities and challenges. I’m humbled to have the opportunity to join UJA-Federation, the largest local Jewish philanthropy, as their Vice President of Government Affairs to work on public policy, social services, and combating anti-Semitism.
Thank you again for the trust you have placed in me. Together, we have made a difference, and I am grateful to have been a part of this journey with you.
Sincerely,
Daniel Rosenthal
Dear Editor:
I would like to start off my letter wishing Warren Hecht a mazal tov on his daughter’s recent marriage. I would also be remiss if I did not thank David Pecoraro for his service (no, not as the former VP of the Rosedale Jewish Center) as a member of a federal grand jury. Both gentlemen addressed the latest Trump indictment in last week’s newspaper. Mr. Hecht said we should all read the details of the indictment before reaching any conclusions, and Mr. Pecoraro praised the grand jury and the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, in their efforts “to eradicate a cancer.”
Both Hecht and Pecoraro miss the larger point here. Trump’s guilt or innocence to the charges is a largely irrelevant secondary point here. This is entirely a political issue. Joe Biden has weaponized his Department of Justice to take out his main political rival before an election, accusing him of a crime that he himself committed! This is straight off of page one of the Third World, Banana Republic playbook. Mr. Pecoraro’s praise for Special Prosecutor Smith and the empaneled grand jury is misplaced. They are just the pawns here. Hyperpartisan Attorney General Merrick Garland and his boss, the head of the Biden Crime Syndicate, Joe Biden, could have stopped these proceedings any time they wished.
What Biden and most of his Democrat supporters fail to realize, but Mr. Pecoraro keenly picked up on in his letter, is the precedent this action will set for our country going forward. The next time a political adversary represents a threat to your power, just sic the Department of Justice on them! A parallel narrative ensued for Democrats about ten years ago. Then Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid was having trouble getting President Obama’s judicial nominees confirmed in Congress. So, he came up with a plan. He would simply get rid of the filibuster, a rule that was in place for hundreds of years. This would allow him to push the judicial nominees through with a simple majority. Others warned Reid that he was setting a terrible precedent that would ultimately backfire on Democrats. Reid, however, insisted on following through with his myopic plan. In less than a decade, after Republicans took control of Congress, Mitch McConnell took things one step further and got three conservative Supreme Court Justices confirmed with a simple majority.
As previously stated, the merit of this case, i.e., whether Trump possessed classified documents, is not a criminal issue; it’s a political one. If you think I’m wrong, you should ask yourself why Hillary Clinton isn’t currently behind bars. She set up a private server in her house that was filled with classified information that intelligence sources indicated was likely accessed by our enemies. When she feared the classified info would be discovered by law enforcement, she BleachBit her IT system and took a hammer to her electronic devices. To assuage the public, she assured us that the 33,000 emails she destroyed were only of “yoga and wedding plans.” This, of course, was a lie that unraveled when some of the emails showed up on the laptop of serial pervert Anthony Weiner. Yet Clinton was not prosecuted for any of the shenanigans she perpetrated, which were far worse than anything Trump has done. While Trump may be guilty of a crime, the obvious double-standard of prosecuting him for it may have far-reaching ramifications that Democrats may not have fully thought through.
Jason Stark
Dear Editor:
Judaism is not a democracy. In democracies such as the United States, and to a lesser extent Israel, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and unless one is a conservative on social media being censored by the Big Tech/Big Government Industrial Complex, one is free to express his opinion.
Judaism does not operate this way. As adherents to Judaism, our default position should be one of deference to the Torah and to talmidei chachamim, which is why I must register my disapproval with Shmuel Sackett’s column last week. Sackett’s dubious analogy between t’cheiles and the modern State of Israel was bad enough, but his “disagreement” with Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz is beyond the pale. Sackett quotes Rabbi Lebowitz’s opinion on t’cheiles as it appears in his sefer: “Since g’dolei Yisrael do not wear this t’cheiles, it is proper for the nation to act as they do,” and then boldly states “With all due respect, I couldn’t disagree more.” Um, what?! Come again? You disagree?! Are you the purveyor of tens of thousands of shiurim both in person and online? Are you a respected poseik? A moreh horaah whose prodigious Torah scholarship is matched only by his humility? Rabbi Lebowitz is all of those. I re-read your bio under your column and these accomplishments were conspicuously absent from your bio. Where do you get the chutzpah to publish your flippant remark that you don’t agree with Rabbi Lebowitz? Before anyone makes any erroneous assumptions, I am neither a relative of Rabbi Lebowitz nor a congregant in his shul. I don’t even live in North Woodmere. I’m just someone who believes in showing respect and proper kevod haTorah to our talmidei chachamim. The one positive I will take from Mr. Sackett’s column is that Chazal tell us that in the Ikv’sa DiM’shicha, the time period immediately preceding the Mashiach, there will be an increase in chutzpah. Let us all hope that this is merely a sign that Mashiach is right around the corner.
Doniel Behar
Dear Editor:
It’s not a surprise that Moshe Hill’s response to the federal indictment of former President Trump is to mostly focus on President Biden and Hillary Clinton. He maintains that this isn’t simple “whataboutism,” a claim that rings hollow when he essentially just throws out a bunch of accusations without bothering to back them up with any facts.
First, let’s deal with Mr. Hill’s claim that Trump “did not sic his DOJ on [Hillary] as Biden did to him.” He must have forgotten the appointment of special counsel John Durham, who eventually turned his investigation into an effort to go after Hillary. But despite his investigation going on for far longer than Robert Mueller’s, he was only able to bring charges against one person even tangentially related to her 2016 campaign, in a case with evidence so flimsy that it was basically laughed out of court, as, among other things, his star witness kept on changing his story until he settled on one that fit Durham’s narrative.
And then there’s Hillary’s emails. Conservatives accuse Hillary of knowingly deleting classified emails to protect herself. But investigations have shown that after an order to preserve her emails came down, a technician panicked and deleted a group of emails that he was supposed to have previously deleted, after a standard review showed them to be personal emails that didn’t need to be saved. If you think there was actually evidence that Hillary lied and was knowingly involved in a plot to delete the emails as part of a cover-up but was not charged, then I have a bridge to sell you. Hillary did keep her communications on a private server, and that included classified emails (mostly designated as such only after-the-fact, with only a few having any type of classified markings on them). Now that was definitely unwise, but even if you say that is somehow comparable to taking and refusing to return highly classified documents that don’t belong to you, is there a criminal standard that should have been applied to her that is only being used for Trump? In detailing why she wasn’t being charged, the FBI explained that it wasn’t similar to other cases with criminal charges as they didn’t have proof of “clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or efforts to obstruct justice.” Just read Trump’s indictment and see if the same can be said for him. It really speaks for itself. And I won’t even get into the reports that Trump and his team often intentionally avoided communicating on their government-provided devices.
Mr. Hill also brings up the documents found in Biden’s possession and pretends that is comparable to Trump’s actions. A special prosecutor is still investigating Biden, but if there is any evidence that this was more than the result of aides being sloppy in packing up papers, I challenge Mr. Hill to provide it. And, as with Mike Pence, once it came to Biden’s attention, he immediately and proactively cooperated with authorities. How can Mr. Hill say with a straight face that what Trump did was “in many ways lesser”? It seems quite clear that despite Trump’s initial taking of the documents appearing to be intentional, he was treated far better than an average person would have and was given every opportunity to return them and avoid being charged. It was primarily the steps he took after that point that led to his indictment.
Mr. Hill also refers to what he calls “credible accusations” that Biden took bribes, apparently referring to the old accusation that he received money from the Ukrainian company Burisma. I’m still waiting for someone to explain how that makes sense when Biden was pushing to remove the prosecutor who was declining to investigate corruption by Burisma? What has been sending Republicans into a tizzy recently is the revelation that there’s a single source who told a paid FBI informant in 2020 that he has evidence of these bribes. While the informant is said to have been trustworthy, there’s been nothing to suggest that the person who made these allegations to him is, and an accusation is only as credible as its source. And no one has seen any actual evidence of the bribes, despite Rudy Giuliani spending time in Ukraine specifically trying to dig up this dirt, and both Trump’s DOJ and Senate Republicans previously looking into it. Furthermore, congressional Republicans pouring over Biden’s financial records apparently haven’t found any evidence of these payments to the President (let alone to Hunter Biden). Just see how they deflect whenever they are asked if they have found anything concrete to support their allegations. At this point, I fail to see how the accusations can be called credible.
So, on one side you have an indictment voted on by a grand jury that was presented with detailed photographic, documentary, and sworn eyewitness evidence. On the other, you have some things that Conservatives wish were true, without any evidence to back it up, and others who clearly do not rise to the level of what Trump has done. Is the fact only the former is being prosecuted a scandal? I know Republicans filed numerous unsuccessful lawsuits (in addition to doing, well, other things) in an effort to overturn the 2020 election where the facts didn’t align with their invented claims (and yet that apparently didn’t qualify for the “win at all costs” accusation that Mr. Hill throws at the Democrats), but federal prosecutors should be held to a higher standard.
Regards,
Yaakov Ribner
Dear Editor:
Taxpayers should be concerned that up to ten percent, or over $400 billion of $4.2 trillion in federal government COVID-19 emergency relief funding may have been lost to waste, fraud, or abuse over the past three years. This is based upon recent reporting by the Associated Press. The Justice Department’s acting director for COVID-19 fraud enforcement, Mike Galdo, said this was an unprecedented amount of fraud. What was the amount of waste, fraud, and abuse of trillions more in regular federal government expenditures during the same time period?
In the rush to release funds, did federal employees and agencies responsible for managing these funds neglect their oversight responsibilities?
If your business lost ten percent of its revenues due to waste, fraud, or abuse, those responsible would be held accountable. They would either be demoted or fired.
President Biden and Congress should direct the General Accounting Office to look at all federal government agencies expenditures over the past three years. Ditto for each agency’s Office of Inspector General They should conduct a forensic audit for all agency programs. Many more billions could be found and returned to the Treasury Department All future federal agency grant programs should include a requirement for recipients to submit a cash draw-down plan and sunset date for completion. After a reasonable amount of time, any unused funds should automatically be returned to the Treasury Department.
Elected officials who lobbied Washington to quickly spend these funds without proper vetting and oversight should be held accountable by voters when running for another term in 2024.
Sincerely,
Larry Penner
Dear Editor:
Last week, Warren Hecht ended his column by mentioning that “there will be consequences” for the woman who gave the anti-Semitic speech at the CUNY Law School graduation.
Mr. Hecht is wrong again, as his thinking is often skewed - and not just because of his Trump Derangement Syndrome. It's because everyone knows that Democrats are never held accountable. After all, does anyone think there is much of a chance that the speaker at the graduation was a Republican?
So was there any peep from Charles Schumer or Jerry Nadler about the anti-Semitic speech? I certainly won’t hold my breath waiting for Mr. Hecht to write a column about that.
Choni Herschel Kantor
Kew Gardens, NY
