Daniel Goldman, the lead counsel in former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, plans to announce Tuesday he’s running for the open congressional seat that former Mayor Bill de Blasio, Rep. Mondaire Jones, Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou and former Rep. Liz Holtzman are all vying to win.
Goldman, 46, who’s lived within the recently redrawn 10th congressional district for 15 years, told the Daily News Monday that if he’s elected, he plans to focus much of his attention on voting rights, counteracting Republican’s efforts to erode those rights, gun control and abortion.
“Traditional models of politics, as usual, no longer work,” he said. “We need a different way of approaching these issues. We need to bring to light the degree to which Donald Trump and the Republicans are continuing to undermine our democracy, are continuing to pave the way for him to steal the 2024 election.”
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Goldman described the current situation as a “five-alarm fire, where our democracy is truly at stake.”
Asked how he’d convince Republicans to rethink their positions, or how he’d push change through a Congress that has been deadlocked on a number of key issues — voting rights and gun control, among them — he used a term common among prosecutors like himself: leverage.
“What I learned down in D.C. is that much of what Congress does — and the Jan. 6th committee is a great example of it — is bring transparency to everything that is going on. If people don’t understand or emphasize the degree to which our democracy is under attack, then you can’t have transparency,” he said, referring to the committee charged with investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that took place that day in 2021.
“We have to recognize that Republicans are bad actors. We are not going to pass any gun legislation if we play nice in the sandbox and Republicans like us,” he continued. “As a representative of this district, I will be thinking very creatively about how to use leverage to change the views of Republicans because traditional methods of trying to appeal to their good faith … have failed and will continue to fail because they are not operating in good faith.”
Goldman emerged onto the national stage in 2019 while serving as lead counsel for the Democrats in the impeachment investigation into Trump, an effort that was ultimately successful.
Before that, he served as an assistant prosecutor under former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in the Southern District.
As U.S. attorney, Bharara famously investigated de Blasio when he was working as the mayor. Charges were never brought against the former mayor, but in 2017 the U.S. attorney’s office found that de Blasio or his associates solicited contributions from donors seeking special treatment from the city and communicated with city agencies on their behalf.
At the time, de Blasio maintained he’d “acted appropriately.”
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Last year, Goldman briefly threw his hat into the ring to run for New York attorney general, but he withdrew after it became clear the current attorney general, Letitia James, would run for reelection after she considered a run for governor, but ultimately decided against it.
Along with de Blasio, Niou, Holtzman and Jones, Goldman could also be facing City Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, who recently appeared at a candidate’s forum for the seat.
Holtzman, 80, confirmed on Sunday that she’ll be running for the seat.
“Sometimes it takes someone who’s young because they’re hungry, but sometimes older people can do that, too,” she said. “It’s not just a matter of age. It’s a matter of guts, determination, skill and smarts, and I think I have that.”
With Chris Sommerfeldt
