Jon Levine writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an interesting political campaign in a deep blue state.
Saritha Komatireddy believes in longshots, she told the Washington Free Beacon.
Komatireddy, a 41-year-old mother of four and former federal prosecutor, announced her candidacy for New York attorney general last week as a Republican in a state former vice president Kamala Harris won by double digits in the 2024 presidential election. Less than a quarter of the state’s registered voters are members of the GOP, and incumbent Letitia James, though securing a closer reelection victory in 2022 than her initial 2018 victory, has a built-in lead.
But Komatireddy told the Free Beacon her career in the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York’s office has prepared her for an uphill battle—one she compared to putting a deadly ISIS terrorist behind bars.
When Komatireddy joined the case against Mirsad Kandic in 2015, it was close to being abandoned. Even though the terrorist was on the United States’s no-fly list, he was able to make it from Brooklyn to Syria in late 2013 through a circuitous bus-and-plane trip to the Middle East. For four years, Komatireddy said, Kandic fought with ISIS terrorists; smuggled weapons, money, and fake IDs; and trafficked thousands of recruits from Western countries into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.
His travel was hard to trace, his communications encrypted and coded, and he lived in Turkey, which refused to extradite him to the United States. Most of the evidence against him was overseas, including every single eye witness, and “the case was considered extremely tough to make,” Komatireddy said. …
… A jury convicted Kandic after a three-week trial in 2022, and he is now serving a life sentence in the ADX Florence supermax prison alongside criminals like 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, and Boston Marathon terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
