Category: Politics

FRAUDTUITOUS: Gov. Kathy Hochul has spent the last four months beating the auto-insurance affordability drum and fighting the trial lawyers and unconvinced lawmakers who stand in her way.

She’s proposing limiting the ways car crash victims — especially those deemed at fault for the collision — can sue for damages, a move she says will cut the cost of auto insurance. She also wants to target insurance fraud and staged crashes.

It’s been a massive sticking point in negotiations to finish her now-late budget.

“If, God forbid, you are the majority reason that there’s an accident, you will no longer be entitled to pain and suffering,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters Wednesday. “That’s a pretty serious thing for people to accept. I mean, accidents do happen.”

But as Hochul hopes to draw the Assembly and Senate to her side, it just so happens that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York dropped indictments this week targeting a close personal friend of former Mayor Eric Adams and alleging a massive car-crash-victim-fraud scheme.

Perfect! Timing!

“This alleged scheme is exactly the type of fraud Governor Hochul’s auto insurance reforms are designed to curb in New York State,” Hochul spokesperson Kristin Devoe told Playbook in a statement.

Her office is arguing that the scheme might never have happened had Hochul’s proposed changes been in place.

“The Governor’s proposals would strengthen enforcement, allow more time to investigate suspected fraudulent claims and crack down on the networks and providers that make this type of fraud possible in the first place,” Devoe said.

Our colleague Chris Sommerfeldt reported this morning that federal prosecutors dropped a superseding indictment Thursday in their fraud case against Zhan “Johnny” Petrosyants, the man who hobnobbed, dined and clubbed with Adams during his tenure, as Hizzoner tested New York City’s nightlife “product.” The superseder alleged businessmen Vladislav Stoyanovsky and Dmitriy Khavko participated in the scheme as well. All three men pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors claim the men had car crash victims in medical clinics undergo dubious procedures conducted by clinicians who were part of the scheme. The indictment also alleges the men behind the operation billed insurers for procedures that never happened.

Petrosyants, Stoyanovsky and Khavko then allegedly filed no-fault claims to the insurance companies, who, under state law, are required to pay out the claims in just 30 days. The scheme brought in tens of millions of dollars, prosecutors said.

Hochul’s office wants to change that. The governor says she’d give insurers more time to investigate whether a no-fault claim is fraudulent. Right now, if an insurer delays a payout, it can’t defend itself in court by saying it was busy investigating the claim. Insurers would still have to pay interest on delayed payouts. And if someone sues to force a reluctant insurer to pay up, the insurer would have to cover attorneys fees.

The cost of paying out bogus insurance claims is a main factor in the high cost of auto insurance in New York, contends Team Hochul. Last year, insurance carriers reported 43,811 incidents of suspected auto insurance fraud to regulators, an 80 percent jump compared to 2020.

The Trial Lawyers Association says Hochul’s proposals would give insurance companies more time to delay and deny claims.

“Stripping away consumer rights while insurers rake in record profit is a giveaway to the industry that leaves New Yorkers to pick up the tab,” association spokesperson Sabrina Rezzy said in a statement. — Jason Beeferman

From the Capitol

TIGHTENING ALBANY’S BELTWAY: The much-derided I-787 — an asphalt apron familiar to Capital Region drivers who commute downtown to the statehouse — is one step closer to a makeover.

Hochul announced Thursday the state is opening a community outreach center amid an environmental review focused on how to improve waterfront access. I-787 runs parallel to the Hudson River.

“Reimagining the I-787 corridor is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shape the future of downtown Albany, so it is imperative that the people who live and work in the area have a major voice in how this project progresses,” Hochul said. — Nick Reisman

FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

BLACKBURN’S BONDI PAST: In 2016, years before she became one of the Trump administration’s most prominent and polarizing officials, then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi had a young intern in her office named Conrad Blackburn.

That fact is now being seized on by Blackburn’s critics as he runs for a Harlem-based Assembly seat as a democratic socialist and unabashed enemy of Trump.

“It is unconscionable that Conrad Blackburn chose to work for Pam Bondi at the very moment she was leading the charge to keep more than a million Floridians, including one in five Black adults, permanently locked out of the voting booth,” Uptown Democratic Club President Donna-Marie Gibbons told Playbook, referencing Bondi’s effort to preserve a Florida law that made it difficult for felons to regain voting rights after serving time. “Anyone who signed up to work in that office while she was fighting to preserve this racist, Jim Crow-era machinery has questions to answer about their commitment to our community.”

Trump fired Bondi as his U.S. attorney general Thursday.

Blackburn, who grew up in Florida, said criticism of his stint with the attorney general there says more about his haters than it does about him.

He told Playbook he took the unpaid, two-month internship in Bondi’s criminal appeals bureau while in law school — and the experience drove him to become a public defender, a role he continues to serve in to this day.

“I did not need very long to say that the system was broken and I needed to spend my time working to protect Black folks from it, with actions, not just words,” Blackburn said.

“I am happy to debate my record on its merits,” he continued. “But harkening back to my days as a 1L, as a poor kid trying to work in the criminal appeals bureau of the Florida AG’s office as some kinda gotcha? That is everything wrong with politics now. If the powers that be in this district focused on the issues, they would have to explain the lack of meaningful change in the community…Heck, if the powers that be did their jobs, I may not be running in this race at all.”

Blackburn is facing off in June’s Democratic primary against Assemblymember Jordan Wright, the son of Manhattan Democratic Party head Keith Wright.

New York Focus reported today that Charlie King, a longtime aide to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is launching a super PAC to boost Wright, whose district Mayor Zohran Mamdani comfortably won in last year’s election. — Chris Sommerfeldt

IN OTHER NEWS

— ARRESTS SURGE: ICE arrested more New Yorkers between November and January than in any comparable period since 2022, according to federal data. (Times Union)

— ONE MAN’S TRASH: Reports show that progress in New York’s composting push slowed after officials halted fines and enforcement efforts. (Gothamist)

— BLESS THIS MESS: Competing lobbying groups in Hochul’s car insurance reform fight are clashing over dueling clergy letters and even disputing who actually signed which. (City and State)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.

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President Donald Trump’s primetime address on Iran did little to relieve rising alarm from plugged-in Republicans in key states across the country who see the war as pushing costs higher and their midterm chances ever-lower.

Trump declared Wednesday night that the U.S. offensive in Iran is “nearing completion” but warned that military operations would intensify over the “next two to three weeks.” He attempted to clarify his goals for the war — to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities — and insisted it was never about regime change. And he shrugged off the spike in oil and gas prices as a “short-term increase.”

To a number of GOP strategists and local party leaders involved in key congressional and gubernatorial races, the message was too little, too late and too jumbled.

“What the hell did he just say?” one GOP strategist in a battleground state wrote in a text to POLITICO after the president’s address, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “A quick recap and a path forward would’ve been helpful. Instead, it was nonsense left for Sean Hannity to articulate.”

Trump’s decision to attack Iran, and the subsequent spike in oil and gas prices, are the latest sources of heartburn for Republicans who were already feeling queasy about public opinion that has turned against Trump’s domestic agenda. They heard little new information Wednesday night from the president that signaled a course correction.

Conversations with more than half a dozen operatives and party chairs across seven battleground states revealed their anxiety that the prolonged conflict is overshadowing the White House’s affordability message and could hurt their chances of holding onto power this November.

The Republicans who spoke to POLITICO were particularly concerned about Trump’s waving off the financial strain the war has put on day-to-day prices, touting “the strongest economy in history” with “no inflation.” Two different strategists compared the latter comments to President Joe Biden’s repeated insistence that the economy was doing better than they believed.

“Not sure people will buy the strong economy part,” Todd Gillman, a Michigan GOP district chair, said in a message Wednesday night. “Inflation is definitely more under control than it was under Biden, but the prices haven’t come down on a lot of things.”

Without any clear announcements from Trump on an endgame in the region, future markets for U.S. stocks recoiled and average national gas prices topped $4 per gallon. Crude oil prices soared to over $111 per barrel on Thursday morning.

Others were left wanting more specifics from Trump on an exit strategy and the factors that drew the U.S. into the war. “I think it could’ve been a little more specific or expanded on the exact threats that Iran poses to the U.S.,” said one Wisconsin-based GOP strategist. “I don’t know the extent he’s able to get into that stuff based off intelligence, but maybe he could have been a little bit more expansive there.”

Polls have consistently shown a majority of Americans oppose the military operation in Iran by double-digit margins. The conflict is already fracturing the president’s loyal MAGA base, alienating young men who believed in his “America First” message. And Democrats are beginning to go on the attack in campaign ads, accusing vulnerable GOP lawmakers of prioritizing the president’s multibillion dollar offensive over making voters’ lives more affordable.

One GOP operative working on a battleground House race found solace in Trump’s talk of an exit strategy, saying voters would be “relieved to hear that we’re not going to be sticking around.”

“On the other hand, I don’t think anybody has confidence that gas prices will just come down on their own,” said the operative, who was granted anonymity to deliver a candid assessment. “Overall, there’s really nothing in here that helps to sell this to the public.”

Some said the address may have come too late.

“It’s something that probably should have been done at the beginning of the conflict,” said Dennis Lennox, a Michigan-based GOP strategist.

Still, others in the party found that Trump’s address met the moment and lavished praise on the president. Mark Levin, a staunch Trump ally and conservative commentator, said he delivered a “PERFECT SPEECH” in a post on X.

Brent Littlefield, a GOP strategist involved in several races, including in Maine’s battleground 2nd congressional district, lauded Trump’s decision to speak directly to Americans and dismissed concerns that the remarks came too late in the conflict to help him articulate his case to voters.

“It was right for the President to wait to do that until after the conflict began,” Littlefield said. “He did not telegraph the move to the enemy of what the United States was planning to do.”

Samuel Benson contributed to this report.

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Democrats are opening a new front in their midterm offensive over Iran.

VoteVets Action Fund is rolling out a $250,000 ad campaign Wednesday targeting Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) over his support of the war with Iran, according to details shared first with POLITICO.

It’s one of the first examples of Democrats putting real money behind the issue in the midterms since President Donald Trump’s attack on the country more than a month ago. And it comes as Republicans grow increasingly worried that the war’s impact on prices could hurt the party at the ballot box this fall.

The ad attacks Van Orden, an at-risk Republican and combat veteran, for backing a Pentagon push for $200 billion more for the Iran operation as prices at the pump continue to rise, and after he called last year for cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The ad accuses Van Orden of backing cuts to veterans’ care — though in the hearing referenced, the Republican advocates for slashing bureaucrats to add more doctors.

The spot sheds light on how Democrats are working to weaponize the war: by arguing that Trump is spending big abroad while further pinching voters’ pocketbooks and, in VoteVets’ case, stiffing veterans.

“Look at that gas pump. We’re paying the cost every damn day of this war in Iran. But for Congressman Van Orden, we’re not paying enough. He’s going for another $200 billion dollars to spend in Iran,” a male Marine Corps veteran narrates in the clip.

“This is the same guy who backed big cuts to VA care for vets,” the veteran says, referring to significant staffing reductions at the agency since Trump returned to office, including thousands of medical personnel. “Vets like me, we understand the cost of war. But if we don’t have the money to take care of our veterans, we damn sure can’t afford another war. Call Van Orden on it.”

VoteVets, whose PAC works to elect Democratic veterans, intends to expand its Iran ad campaign into other battleground districts, with a particular focus on GOP veterans who the group argues are blindly following Trump in abandoning his campaign-trail pledge to end endless wars.

“There’s absolutely no doubt that voters throughout the country, and particularly in Rep. Van Orden’s district, are very aware of the fact that every single day we spend billions of dollars [on] this war in Iran is yet another day that not only is the affordability crisis ignored, but it’s getting even worse,” said former Rep. Max Rose, a New York Democrat who serves as a senior adviser to VoteVets. “What this first video represents is our commitment to holding every single Republican veteran in the House of Representatives accountable for their lies, hypocrisy and absence of courage.”

Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, slammed VoteVets as a “running joke in the veteran community” in a statement to POLITICO. He expressed support for Trump’s military operation and the supplemental funding plan that the White House has been reviewing. But Van Orden stressed that he continues to oppose putting uniformed troops on the ground in Iran.

“Iran has been at war with the United States for 47 years. When we start putting a price tag on American citizens’ lives, we’ve already lost sight of our responsibility,” Van Orden said. “Every single American murdered by these radical Muslim mullahs is priceless, and every American life we can save is beyond value.”

The 30-second spot will run during NCAA games and other live sporting events, as well as on broadcast, radio, streaming services and social media platforms. It represents an escalation in Democrats’ rhetoric and aggression as the party seizes on growing voter backlash to the now monthlong conflict that Trump is threatening to intensify.

Democrats have already been hammering Republicans over affordability as the average price of a gallon of gas soars over $4. Now they’re eyeing ways to connect other cost concerns to the ballooning spending on the war amid reporting that Republicans are considering further reductions to federal health spending to bankroll the military effort — returning to some of their signature issues of the cycle to argue that the GOP is prioritizing fealty to the president over voters’ pocketbooks.

Other Democrat-aligned groups are joining in. Battleground Alliance PAC flew a plane over a minor league baseball game in Pennsylvania over the weekend with a banner targeting Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie that read “Mackenzie: Your Iran Vote = Sky High $$$Gas.” The group is planning similar stunts in more than half a dozen other swing districts across Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio.

“We’re in a war of choice, which is spending an enormous amount of money, and we’re going to get more health care cuts and oil price increases,” said Andrew Grossman, a senior adviser to the labor-backed Battleground Alliance PAC. “And so the cost of living — like the chaos and the Republican Congress just saying yes always to President Trump — is hitting Americans in our pocketbooks, and that is the single most important issue of our moment.”

Mackenzie’s campaign manager, Andres Weller, dismissed the move in a statement as “the same political stunts that people are tired of. An outside group did the same thing at the same place in 2024, and all it accomplished was annoying people who were trying to enjoy a baseball game with their family and friends.”

Democrats’ ramp-up comes as Republicans are increasingly fearful a prolonged war will hurt their chances of holding onto power in the midterms. The conflict is already fracturing the MAGA coalition. And polls show a majority of Americans are against the operation in Iran, including an Ipsos survey released Tuesday that found two-thirds of Americans want the U.S. to end its involvement even if the president does not achieve all his goals, and that 56 percent expect the conflict will have a negative impact on their personal financial situation.

Voters are “going to look to their members of Congress to see if they double down or be an independent voice [on Iran],” Samuel Chen, a Pennsylvania-based GOP strategist, said. “If they’re doubling down on it in these tight seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and other places, that could be the difference.”

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When the U.S.-Israel war with Iran began a month ago, the tragic potential reverberations of past conflicts echoed quickly for Virginia state Del. Dan Helmer, who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and is now running for Congress as a Democrat.

“In 2002, a president lied to the American people and sent my friends to die in a war of choice,” he told POLITICO in an interview, noting that next month marks the 22nd anniversary of his first friend’s death in combat. “And once again, President [Donald] Trump has circumvented the democratic process to launch a war of choice without strategic insight in Iran. … The consequences of reckless military intervention are pretty clear. And the challenges in enacting regime change to get a predictable outcome have defined my experience in the military.”

Michael Bouchard sees things differently. The Michigan Republican House candidate and Bronze Star recipient served in the Army and National Guard, including a counter-ISIS deployment in Iraq for most of 2025 — which encompassed the last Israel-Iran war. Bouchard thinks the current conflict is a necessary, limited mission against a regional menace that has endangered and targeted U.S. service members for decades.

“I’ve seen peace through strength save my friends’ lives, and that’s what this is,” he said. “No one wants to go to war less than somebody who’s been to it. But we can’t just put our heads in the sand and hope things don’t happen.”

Dozens of military veterans running for Congress across the country, both Democrats and Republicans, have now adapted their campaign messaging to befit a nation at war. In a rapidly changing landscape — with ceasefire talks, military escalation and global energy crisis all on the table on any given day — candidates from each party have starkly opposed perspectives on the conflict. But for many of them, the costs and the imperatives of war feel deeply personal.

New York Assemblymember Robert Smullen, who spent 24 years in the Marine Corps and is campaigning in an Upstate GOP House primary, has done multiple Strait of Hormuz transits and studied the enrichment process as a White House fellow at the Energy Department. Montana Democrat Matt Rains, who flew Black Hawks in South Korea and Iraq, is also a rancher watching crucial diesel costs rise. Zach Dembo, a former Navy JAG officer running as a Democrat in Kentucky, has been on two of the aircraft carriers now deployed to the Middle East.

All of that intimate knowledge leads them to some pretty different conclusions.

What they agree on: More than half a dozen Democratic and Republican veteran candidates who spoke with POLITICO said they oppose the autocratic Iranian government and wouldn’t be sorry to see it go.

Beyond that — and respect for the troops — there’s little consensus across the partisan divide.

Democrats are fuming that Trump didn’t make the case for war and get buy-in from the American public, Congress and foreign allies. They argue that the U.S. approach has lacked clear plans and strategic goals. And they deeply fear that what they see as Trump’s recklessness will lead to another forever war, needlessly sacrificing soldiers’ lives without achieving any big-picture goals.

“I don’t see an endgame here, and it makes me really worried,” Dembo said.

“This idea that you can just briefly drop bombs on a nation … and they’ll just like raise the white flag and beg for us to come put a new government in there, I mean, is asinine,” Rains said.

Many Democrats also see the war as a costly distraction from Americans’ economic struggles. “The amount of money we are spending on this war and on this conflict right now, when we have so many issues here at home that are not being addressed … that’s where the real disconnect is,” said Jessica Killin, an Army veteran running in Colorado.

GOP veterans say they oppose endless wars, too. But that’s not how they see this one. Hewing closely to Trump’s messaging, Republicans told POLITICO that Iran has been the real belligerent for 47 years. They agree with their Democratic counterparts that the U.S. needs to have a clear plan and not let the conflict drag out for too long — but they have much greater trust in Trump to achieve those goals, principally stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

“I understand veterans’ issues. I understand the cost of what they’ve given, their families have given,” said Oregon Republican Monique DeSpain, an Air Force veteran and JAG who’s worked with veterans for 30 years. “That’s why I feel strongly [about] swift removal of any threats to our country … Congress needs to understand national security: The cost of delay and inaction is irreversible.”

It remains to be seen how voters during wartime will receive these and other veterans running for Congress, many of them in crowded primaries or swing districts. Those who spoke with POLITICO said they think they’re uniquely positioned to speak with authority: Democrats pitching their national security expertise to lay bare the war’s flaws, and Republicans reassuring skittish voters about why the U.S. strikes can succeed and bolster American security.

“I’ve been in their shoes, and I actually know what they’re doing and what they’re facing, because I dealt with the same thing after September 11th,” Smullen said of the troops currently being deployed. “It’s a mission that needs to be done. It’s about time that we did it.”

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