It was not off-the-cuff stuff.
“We knew it was going to be asked, and there was some discussion internally,” says Andrew Bard Epstein, the communications director and later creative director for Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. “I certainly was pushing for him to make this arrest declaration.”
It wasn’t just about the recent news out of the ICC. In the intervening days, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo—then an inevitable but still undeclared Democratic mayoral candidate—had announced that he would join Netanyahu’s legal defense team at The Hague.
So Mamdani weighed in, full force, during the Zeteo interview. Then he was scarcely asked about the issue again—“until the final weeks of the primary,” Epstein says, “when he was finally taken seriously by the political establishment, by people in media and local New York City reporters, who then, I think, resuscitated that question.”
And then it mostly disappeared once more—until last week, when Mamdani sat for an interview with The New York Times. He was again asked whether he would order Netanyahu’s arrest if the prime minister came to New York City in September for the United Nations General Assembly, and Mamdani replied that he was in “an active conversation with our legal department” about whether he had the power to do so.
On Tuesday, he released the video making clear that his administration had concluded he did not have that power. By this point, it was nearly seven months into his term, more than a year after those caustic final days of the Democratic mayoral primary, and 19 months since Mamdani had made his first statement on the issue.
“During the campaign, it was reasonable to assume that if someone was subject to an ICC arrest warrant and they entered New York, local law enforcement might have a role in facilitating or executing that warrant,” a source close to Mamdani tells me. “Given that the NYPD regularly cooperates with federal and international law enforcement, it wasn’t a crazy idea.” (The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment, but spokesperson Delaney Kempner told the Times that the “NYPD’s position is entirely rooted in the law.”) At the time, Mamdani was an assemblyman without much knowledge of the legal particulars, the source says, and he didn’t have the lawyers on hand to assess them, but “he was absolutely interested in what his legal limitations and possibilities were.”
