The United Nations General Assembly is back in session, and presidents, prime ministers, and their security details are on their way to Manhattan. Among them, due at the U.N. podium on Sept. 24, is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has called a war criminal and once vowed to have arrested. The New York Police Department will protect him.
The man the NYPD answers to, the mayor of one of the nation’s most targeted cities, cannot read the classified threat picture for that visit. Nearly nine months into his term, Mamdani still has no federal security clearance. City Hall says the process is ongoing and typical. Michael Bloomberg got his in roughly four months; Eric Adams, within five. Bill de Blasio waited just over a year, partly because he applied late.
So the delay, by itself, proves nothing. What matters is what it has already revealed, and what an adjudicator is paid to weigh.
MAMDANI’S TOUGH TALK EXPOSED AS DECEPTIVE VIRTUE SIGNALING
Start with the revelation. On Jan. 3, Mamdani posted that he had been “briefed this morning” on the U.S. military capture of Nicolas Maduro. Two days later, a reporter pressed him. The briefing, he said, was conducted by his team. Did he have a clearance? “No, not as yet.”
To be fair, nothing about Maduro’s capture was secret by then. President Donald Trump had announced it himself. But the arrangement the episode exposed has not changed. In January, NY1 reported, his police commissioner and his chief counsel were among those briefing him. Mamdani says several senior aides hold clearances and that the NYPD briefs him on intelligence that is not federally classified. In most organizations, information flows up to the person in charge. In City Hall, on the threats that matter most, it stops one step below him.
Now the weighing. I spent more than a decade in counterintelligence. A clearance is not a verdict on guilt, and it is not a prize for winning an election. Federal adjudicators apply a “whole person” standard, and their guidelines state the rule on doubt plainly: Any doubt is resolved in favor of national security. The question is not whether an applicant has committed a crime. It is whether granting him access is, in the words of the federal standard, “clearly consistent with the interests of national security.” And a clearance is only the first lock. Behind it sits need-to-know.
Here is what sits in Mamdani’s public record. None of it required a leak.
On Sept. 26, 2025, still a candidate, he met with Colombian President Gustavo Petro in New York. That same day, Petro stood on a Manhattan street and urged American soldiers to disobey Trump, and the State Department announced it would revoke his visa. A month later, the Treasury Department sanctioned him. In June, the State Department warned Bogotá that a second Mamdani-Petro event, arranged by the mayor’s international affairs commissioner, Ana Maria Archila, would violate the terms of Petro’s visa. The event was called off.
On July 7, the same commissioner was scheduled to meet Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Amir-Saeid Iravani, amid U.S. hostilities with Iran, months after American and Israeli strikes killed its supreme leader. The State Department, which had not been told in advance, stepped in, and the meeting was canceled. A State Department official called it unconscionable. Mamdani says he did not know about it until reporters asked. Take him at his word. Then consider what it means: In this mayor’s office, a commissioner could put Iran’s ambassador on the calendar without the mayor knowing.
In a 2017 song, Mamdani praised the “Holy Land Five,” leaders of a charity convicted by a federal jury in 2008 of providing material support to Hamas. In 2025, he posted a photo with Imam Siraj Wahhaj and called him one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders. Wahhaj was never charged, but prosecutors once listed him among people who “may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, and he testified as a character witness for the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman. Separately, the Unity & Justice Fund, a super PAC formed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, gave $100,000 during the 2025 primary to New Yorkers for Lower Costs, then the largest PAC backing Mamdani, according to campaign records.
The mayor’s wife, Rama Duwaji, is scheduled to leave on Sept. 20 for Syria and Lebanon, both under the State Department’s highest travel warning. City Hall said her NYPD detail would join her, on the NYPD’s own strong recommendation. The NYPD then said it does not send officers to Level 4 countries on discretionary trips unrelated to investigations. The mayor called it a miscommunication.
None of this proves disloyalty. A photograph is not a conspiracy. A song is not an oath. Family abroad does not disqualify anyone. Plenty of cleared Americans have it. But relatives in high-risk countries are exactly what the foreign-influence guideline asks about, and adjudicators are trained to see patterns: foreign contacts, judgment, and whether an office can keep its story straight with its own police department for one news cycle.
National security is too important for guilt by association. It is also too important to ignore a documented record because the man it belongs to won an election.
Then there is the paradox. On Sept. 1, Mamdani stood with Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) to demand that Washington release $87 million in counterterrorism funding for 12 bomb squads, fire department communications, and radiological response. “We are not talking about reports or studies or abstract security proposals,” he said. He was asking for money to counter threats whose classified assessments he is not yet cleared to read.
The debate has produced two shortcuts. Last November, eight House Republicans led by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) wrote to then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, urging a denial, citing Mamdani’s co-founding of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and his defense of the slogan “globalize the intifada.” In July, activist Laura Loomer claimed, citing an anonymous FBI source, that the clearance had already been denied. No one has confirmed it. De Blasio warns that a denial would disrespect the voters who elected Mamdani.
Neither shortcut works. Many conservatives spent years arguing that intelligence agencies have no business second-guessing elected officials. They should not abandon that principle because they dislike this mayor. And Mamdani’s defenders cannot pretend that winning an election waives the questions every Navy lieutenant must answer before seeing classified material.
The worst outcome is the quiet one: a delay without an end date, which denies the clearance without anyone having to sign the denial. That would not be counterintelligence. It would be avoidance.
I SPENT 12 YEARS IN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE. TRUMP’S DEFENDERS ARE SABOTAGING THEIR OWN CASE
The fix is not complicated. Adjudicate Mamdani under the same guidelines as everyone else. Decide within a defined period. And until then, put in writing who briefs the mayor in a crisis, what he may be told, and who answers for it if the summary is not enough.
Elections decide who holds an office. Counterintelligence decides what that office is allowed to know. For New York’s last three mayors, the clearance eventually followed. This month, with the world’s leaders arriving in Manhattan, it has not. His staff reads the file. The mayor of New York gets the summary.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.