This week's biggest Winners & Losers

On Monday, the Congress member won overwhelmingly in an unofficial poll conducted amongst New York’s Republican party leaders, making him the “presumptive nominee” for governor. Zeldin received 85% of all votes from Republican county leaders which means that he’s likely to go head-to-head with Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the upcoming gubernatorial election. All we want to know is who’s going to break the news to Andrew Giuliani? 

Hard work pays off. Rivera and Woerner received Cuomo’s signature of approval when he signed off on their bill earlier this week that will require opioid settlements to be used for addiction services, which are in high demand due to COVID-19 further exacerbating the issue of substance abuse. The money will go into an Opioid Settlement Fund, and will be approved by an advisory board before it trickles down into treatment and recovery efforts. “Ensuring funds recovered from opioid settlements and litigation go where they’re needed — to fund prevention, education, and treatment programs — is a massive step in our efforts to end the opioid epidemic and provide justice to its victims,” said state Attorney General, Letitia James. 

Sealing the deed with a handshake and a hug, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson and Mayor Bill de Blasio set in stone New York City’s largest budget yet Wednesday afternoon. De Blasio and Johnson, who are both term-limited out of office at the end of this year, hammered out the $98.7 billion budget without too much of the belt-tightening rhetoric that’s marred previous budgetary agreements thanks to an influx of federal COVID-19 aid funds. Particularly notable in the budget is the city’s focus on education initiatives like providing 100% of the money for Fair Student Funding, as well the fact that the New York City Police Department will receive about $200 million more than it did in last year’s budget.

Is there ever a New York City election that doesn’t leave voters groaning about the incompetence of the city’s election system? The city Board of Elections’ latest snafu came when it gave a preview of this year’s election results using the ranked-choice voting system – but accidentally left in 135,000 test ballots that incorrectly inflated the number of votes calculated. The blame can be pinned in part on Dawn Sandow, the agency’s head for the time-being, who at least one insider called unqualified to run the board. What came next was predictable: calls for New York to fix the patronage-ridden and frequently incompetent agency and conservatives arguing in bad faith that the screw-up validated former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud. And on top of that, critics of ranked-choice voting are using the screw-up to question the city’s ability to handle the new system.

James has shown little hesitation in taking on the country’s tech giants, but the attorney general faced a setback this week in her efforts as an antitrust crusader. James led a coalition of many other state attorneys general in a lawsuit that sought to break up Facebook, but their case was thrown out by a federal judge this week. James and another coalition of states struck out in an earlier monopoly-fighting attempt to block the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint.The good news for James is that there are plenty more battles to be fought in the war on Big Tech.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office has been circling around the Trump Organization chief financial officer like a team of sharks the past several months with the hope Weisselberg might be pressured into lending a hand in its investigation against former president Donald Trump. Now, Cy Vance is baring his teeth as Weisselberg faces criminal charges of grand larceny while the company is accused of fraud. Whether or not the threat of heading to prison might make him work with prosecutors down the line, Weisselberg isn’t having a great time.