On the homefront
Rep. Lee Zeldin speaks at a news conference in Riverhead. Credit: Ed Betz
Good afternoon and welcome to The Point! We’re going on a swamp tour for Presidents Day this year. Ride along by checking out our Sunday editorial. Since we’ll be pretty muddy, there will be no Point on Monday. See you Tuesday.
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Daily Point
Zeldin’s home turf
As House members head home for the Presidents Day recess, political activists upset about the Florida school shooting will be waiting. Activists want action on the regulation of guns used in mass shootings, and now they likely will want assurances that the probe by special counsel Robert Mueller will be allowed to continue.
Back home in Suffolk County, GOP Rep. Lee Zeldin is going to face fury for his stands on both.
Zeldin has been an outspoken gun-rights activist and even was a co-sponsor of a recently passed House bill that would allow visitors who hold concealed-carry weapon permits in other states to carry concealed weapons in New York.
The previous major mass murder in the United States, in Las Vegas in October, led to a big demonstration at Zeldin’s Patchogue office that included at least 10 local and national progressive organizations, including members of the persistent group Let’s Visit Lee Zeldin.
Now Zeldin will probably face more demonstrators about his tweet Friday that rushed to defend President Donald Trump shortly after Mueller dropped a major bomb with 13 indictments regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“We have heard @realDonaldTrump repeat over & over again that he did not collude w/the Russians. After Rosenstein’s statement today, the extraordinarily dishonest narrative otherwise needs to end. Many in media & anti-Trumpers playing right into Russia’s hands.”
Anti-Zeldin groups say their next visit will be 3 p.m. Tuesday at that same Patchogue office at 31 Oak St. The theme is “Zeldin: Put Our Safety First — Protect the Russia Investigation/Gun Reform Now.”
On both Russian meddling and lax gun laws, many GOP politicians will hear impassioned pleas at home. Many, like Zeldin, have heard it before. The question is whether they’ll listen this time — and whether they need to.
Lane Filler
Pencil Point
More you know what
Talking Point
Inaugural committee’s sparkling tie to LI
File this one under the heading “Every big story has a Long Island connection.”
The fundraising and spending activities of President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee made big news this week, headlined by its payment of nearly $26 million to an event-planning firm created about six weeks before the inauguration.
The firm’s founder, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, was identified as a longtime friend and current unpaid White House adviser to first lady Melania Trump. Winston Wolkoff also was described as making her professional name as a planner for all sorts of galas for Manhattan elites, in whose company she often was photographed. And those with long memories conjured up her bloodlines — she’s a granddaughter of famed jeweler Harry Winston.
But the last part of her name is where the local interest lies. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is the daughter-in-law of Long Island developer Jerry Wolkoff. She married his son, David, in 2000 at Manhattan’s ritzy Pierre Hotel in what The New York Times described as a “ballroom resembling one in a storybook castle.”
Eighteen years later, Jerry Wolkoff is looking for his own storybook ending as he tries to get his huge Heartland Town Square project built in Brentwood. And if he succeeds, well, he knows someone who can plan the celebration.
Michael Dobie
Pointed
The ghost of Cuomo and de Blasio past
When I started at Newsday more than 20 years ago, I was a business reporter tasked with covering residential real estate. Sometimes, that would mean writing about and speaking with officials from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
At the time, HUD was headed by Andrew Cuomo, now the governor of New York.
So, perhaps it’s not surprising that New York City mayoral spokesman Eric Phillips, in the latest salvo in the ongoing bitter war between mayor and governor, would criticize Cuomo for not investing enough in the New York City Housing Authority.
“The decades-long federal and state divestment from New York City public housing that put NYCHA tenants in this position was presided over by HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo, Attorney General Cuomo, and Governor Cuomo,” Phillips wrote in a statement Thursday. “Mayor Bill de Blasio’s more than $2 billion investment in public housing aims to undo that Cuomo legacy and strengthen NYCHA for [the] first time in a generation.”
But as a local housing reporter, I mostly didn’t talk to Cuomo on HUD issues.
I talked to Bill de Blasio.
After all, de Blasio was a key Cuomo deputy at HUD, charged with heading the district that encompassed New York and New Jersey. And it was during the Clinton administration that the overall budget for public housing went from $20 billion to $30 billion.
Phillips told The Point Friday that the responsibility was Cuomo’s, since “Cuomo had budget authority and de Blasio as regional administrator did not.”
But isn’t “that Cuomo legacy” de Blasio’s, too?
Randi F. Marshall
