Mamdani Hands 9/11 Pen to Gitmo Lawyer

Dennis Warchola, whose brother Michael was a Ladder 5 firefighter killed in the North Tower, told the Post: "It's bulls--t. How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?"

Retired NYPD detective Michael Alazar told the paper he believed the gesture was deliberate. "It was calculated," he said. "It happened during a ceremony meant to be about the victims, and no one else. 9/11 families didn't come to City Hall to watch Mamdani spotlight someone whose work intersects with the very ideology that took their loved ones." He added that Tisch "was reduced to a prop."

Queens Republican Councilwoman Joann Ariola called the episode "breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful," telling the Post that "on the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult."

Councilwoman Vicki Paladino, also a Queens Republican, said Mamdani's "participation in anything related to 9/11 is an insult to every New Yorker who survived that day, and indeed all Americans."

Former Democratic consultant David Sivella wrote on X that it was "a bit tone deaf to be signing this 9/11 Executive Order with your Chief Counsel, Ramzi Kassem, a former al-Qaeda defense lawyer, in the shot."

In his remarks at the signing, Mamdani said: "Twenty-five years may have passed, but for the families who still grieve someone who never came home, or who got sick from the toxic air in the years after, the grief remains fresh." He added that "every New Yorker knows the words 'Never forget,' and the meaning they carry."

The Post reported that City Hall did not immediately return its request for comment on the pen.