{"id":7640,"date":"2025-03-24T21:49:33","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T21:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/espaillat-sues-manhattan-dem-leader-over-attempted-expulsion\/"},"modified":"2025-03-24T21:49:33","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T21:49:33","slug":"espaillat-sues-manhattan-dem-leader-over-attempted-expulsion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/espaillat-sues-manhattan-dem-leader-over-attempted-expulsion\/","title":{"rendered":"Espaillat sues Manhattan Dem leader over attempted expulsion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

NEW YORK \u2014 In a serious escalation of a long-running political feud, Manhattan Democratic Party Chair Keith Wright scheduled a vote on whether to expel Rep. Adriano Espaillat and three allies from their roles as district leaders.<\/p>\n

The move toward an expulsion vote comes after an ethics report found the member of Congress tried to cheat in an election for a party position in 2023.<\/p>\n

Now Espaillat has filed a lawsuit to block the Thursday vote, saying the report was politically motivated and invalid since the Manhattan Democrats\u2019 ethics committee chair actually lives in Westchester County.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ethics Committee has operated as an arm of a factional political agenda,\u201d Espaillat\u2019s attorney Ali Najmi wrote in the suit filed Monday<\/a>. \u201cCounty Leader Keith Wright has demonstrated a long-standing hostility towards Congressman Adriano Espaillat.\u201d<\/p>\n

The situation is inflaming longstanding tensions between Espaillat and Wright \u2014 and threatens to weaken Espaillat\u2019s hold on his local base of power.<\/p>\n

Wright\u2019s side is downplaying the controversy, saying the party is just following a process and Espaillat is overplaying his hand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just another ridiculous thing in a long history of Adriano not paying attention to the bigger things in life,\u201d Manhattan Dems Executive Director Kyle Ishmael said in an interview. \u201cHe\u2019s paying attention to whatever small fight he can pick with Keith [Wright] or some proxy battle. It\u2019s ridiculous and unnecessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Espaillat and Wright have been locked in a heated rivalry for more than a decade. In 2012, and again in 2014, then-Assemblymember Wright stood with former Rep. Charlie Rangel when Espaillat challenged the veteran congressmember\u2019s reelection. When Rangel retired and picked Wright as his successor,<\/a> Espaillat ran against Wright and won. The battle turned ugly, with accusations of racist voter suppression<\/a>, and became a referendum on the Upper Manhattan district\u2019s African-American population in Harlem, represented by Wright, versus the growing Dominican population centered in Washington Heights, represented by Espaillat. The tensions have continued, with Espaillat and Wright regularly finding themselves backing candidates on the opposite sides of elections big and small.<\/p>\n

It was a small election that kicked off the saga resulting in the lawsuit. Espaillat and three aligned district leaders backed Assemblymember Harvey Epstein<\/a> for county chair over Wright\u2019s pick, Nico Minerva in October 2023. County chair is the number two position in the party, behind the leader. But Manhattan is a reform party organization, where the leadership holds relatively little power over the party.<\/p>\n

Minerva ended up narrowly winning the vote<\/a>, but accusations flew that Espaillat and his fellow district leaders \u2014 Assemblymember Manny De Los Santos, Maria Morillo and Mariel De La Cruz \u2014 had tried to cheat by reporting that Minerva didn\u2019t get a single vote from their district\u2019s county committee members when he had actually received 23 votes. Espaillat and others denied wrongdoing, blaming the mixup on procedural issues caused by Wright\u2019s party leaders.<\/p>\n

The county party\u2019s ethics committee opened an investigation last year and released a report Feb. 10, 2025<\/a> finding that Espaillat and his allies \u201cintentionally misreported votes\u201d which \u201cconstituted a deliberate attempt to suppress votes for Minerva.\u201d The report also found Espaillat and allies violated other party rules at the meeting and \u201cengaged in obstruction and intimidation.\u201d The ethics committee offered three options for the party\u2019s district leaders: permanently expelling Espaillat, De Los Santos, Morillo and De La Cruz as district leaders; suspending them for ten years; or adding two additional district leader seats in Espaillat\u2019s home Assembly district that could not be held by members of his political club.<\/p>\n

The roughly 70 district leaders are volunteers with limited formal powers, but expulsion could limit Espaillat\u2019s influence in the party \u2014 and would keep him from ever becoming county leader, a job that some suspect he would like to take away from Wright.<\/p>\n

After Wright announced the report would be discussed at the party meeting Thursday, Espaillat filed the suit, asking a judge to block the party from taking action on the report.<\/p>\n

The suit notes that two of the five members of the ethics committee have publicly dissented with the report, and that a third, Chair Denny Salas, actually lives in Westchester County, which would make him ineligible for a party position in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is inherently problematic \u2014 and unethical \u2014 for someone who no longer is legally qualified to be registered as a voter in New York County to deceive members of the (county party) and then attempt to oversee ethical standards and compliance within the Manhattan Democratic Party,\u201d Najmi, the attorney, wrote in the suit.<\/p>\n

Najmi provided video of Salas, who works as a lobbyist with Gotham Government Relations, answering the door at his home in the village of Ossining and saying he had not lived at his previous address in Manhattan for two years.<\/p>\n

Salas declined to immediately comment on the suit and his residency. Wright\u2019s spokesperson denied the party leader was using the report to hurt Espaillat.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a Keith Wright report, it\u2019s not a Keith Wright ethics committee. Because the whole party had to vote on the ethics committee,\u201d Ishmael said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to continue following the process, which includes at least discussing the report on Thursday.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 In a serious escalation of a long-running political feud, Manhattan Democratic Party Chair Keith Wright scheduled a vote on whether to expel Rep. Adriano Espaillat and three allies from their roles as district leaders. The move toward an expulsion vote comes after an ethics report found the member of Congress tried to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}