Official for Cuomo’s New York Mayoral Campaign Worked for Ferociously Anti-Trans Group

“The company you keep says a lot about you.”

Andrew Cuomo / Diana Robinson

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo stepped down from office in October 2021 amidst rampant allegations of sexual misconduct and the apparent mishandling of nursing home deaths during the COVID shutdowns. Now, he’s making a comeback — with a senior campaign official who worked for a prolific anti-trans, anti-abortion organization, the founder of which brags about purportedly detransitioning his child.

As reported by The Gothamist, Kristofer Graham has been appointed as Cuomo’s campaign treasurer after he oversaw fundraising compliance for the Coalition to Protect Kids. The lobbying organization is led by Dennis Hannon, a former FBI consultant, who seemingly launched an all-out media blitz against his ex-wife and child. He accused his ex-wife of forcing the child to be trans, publishing his child’s and wife’s names.

New York courts found him to be acting against the child’s best interest, and Hannon lost medical authority and custody of the child during the process.

Now, Hannon boasts that he “saved” his child from “unilateral gender conversion,” and that he “has dedicated his life to ending ‘gender affirming care’ for minors.”

Also on the board of CPK is Rev. Jim Harden, CEO of CompassCare, which “pioneered the first measurable and repeatable medical model in the pregnancy center movement,” helping over 650 pregnancy crisis centers nationwide. Pregnancy centers are notorious for using deceptive marketing tactics to lure in unsuspecting patients seeking an abortion or reproductive health care, who may not know these organizations are explicitly pro-forced birth. This is by design.

Richard Azzopardi, a campaign spokesperson for Cuomo, said Graham is merely “a compliance person for the New York City campaign finance system” whose clients include Democratic candidates Gale Brewer, Susan Lee and Eric Yu.

“Let’s look at Andrew Cuomo’s record — getting marriage equality passed through a legislature that killed it a short time earlier, legalizing gestational surrogacy, ending conversion therapy, enacting GENDA, [and] codifying Roe vs. Wade into state law years before the Supreme Court overturned it,” Azzopardi told Erin in the Morning.

However, when asked whether Cuomo would protect gender affirming health care for trans people in the city as mayor, Azzopardi did not reply.

Some New Yorkers have pushed back against the characterization of Cuomo as an LGBTQ ally. “Anyone familiar with disgraced Governor Cuomo’s track record knows he has only supported queer and trans New Yorkers when it’s convenient or when it can net him a laudatory headline,” said Émilia Decaudin, a New York-based trans rights activist and former New York State Democratic Committee member.

Cuomo faces a crowded field for the mayoral bid. Current Mayor Eric Adams is up for another term, but has been embroiled in scandal; almost two dozen Adams staffers (and Adams himself) have either resigned or been fired, arrested, raided and/or indicted since Adams took office in 2022. Cuomo may be the frontrunner to take his place, early polling shows.

“The company you keep says a lot about you — and Andrew Cuomo’s is anti-choice, anti-trans activists and billionaires,” said Zohran Mamdani, a New York State Assemblymember running for the mayoral seat, whose political profile is rising steadily — especially among progressives.

“By now, we know that Cuomo will campaign as a Democrat but govern this city to the right and threaten the rights of New Yorkers in the process,” he told Erin in the Morning. “For the sake of New York City’s children, we need to keep Cuomo as far away from City Hall as possible."