NY Senate candidate David Yassky’s aide pushed PAC fundraising coordination, claims it was deliberate deception

Text messages exchanged by two staffers on Brooklyn state Senate candidate David Yassky’s campaign point to potential coordination of fundraising efforts with a local political action committee — which can be illegal, the Daily News has learned.

But Yassky’s campaign manager, Sabrina Rezzy, who wrote the texts in question, said she made up the narrative about PAC coordination in order to wrestle control of their fundraising operations away from a “disgruntled staffer.”

”I wanted to take the phone banking operation from that staffer to improve it, and I knew he would object and resist at a time I was focused on running a winning campaign,” Rezzy said in a statement. “It was an error in judgment to say it was a (political action committee).”

Yassky, a former City Council member and adviser to ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was set to face incumbent Andrew Gounardes in Tuesday’s primary election for Brooklyn’s 26th state Senate District, which spans Bay Ridge, Gowanus and Red Hook as well as parts of Sunset Park and Park Slope. It was too early to call the race late Tuesday night.

The Yassky campaign staffer Rezzy exchanged texts with provided copies of the messages to The News this week on the condition that he not be publicly identified. The aide quit the campaign days after Rezzy sent the messages on Aug. 10.

In the texts, Rezzy asked the aide to forward her “the phone banking script” and a list of contact information for potential donors.

”Please send me ASAP. Someone outside is going to back up (our) operations free of charge. It’s an IE group I worked with in other campaigns,” Rezzy wrote, using an acronym for independent expenditure, another term for a political action committee.

Fundraising coordination between a candidate’s campaign and an independent expenditure such as a PAC is illegal, said Rachel Fauss, a research analyst with government watchdog group Reinvent Albany.

Unlike campaigns, PACs do not have to abide by monetary contribution limits as long as their operations are wholly independent of a candidate’s political operations.

”That’s why coordination is illegal, because it circumvents all the campaign contribution limits that help reduce the influence of money in politics,” Fauss said.

The enforcement counsel office at the Board of Elections, which has oversight over state-level fundraising operations, declined to comment on Rezzy’s texts.

Rezzy’s messages did not reference any specific PAC, and she reiterated that she made the whole thing up.

“They did not help with the phone banking script or fundraising outreach. This is just a disgruntled staffer who didn’t want to hand over information the campaign needed on their way out,” Rezzy said in her statement.

On Aug. 11, one day after Rezzy sent the texts to the staffer, public records show the Yassky campaign received a $7,500 donation from Striving for a Better New York, a PAC founded by Brooklyn Rev. Alfred Cockfield II that has a record of supporting centrist Democratic candidates.

Cockfield said his PAC’s involvement with Yassky’s campaign included no fundraising coordination, though. “We asked them to fill out a questionnaire and the Senate candidate filled it out and returned,” Cockfield said in a text Monday.