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.
"It took years to build the case against him—two years of collecting evidence and tracking him down, four years of litigating and preparing for trial," she continued, noting much of the legal proceedings took place amid the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic. "We collected evidence from 6 continents, called 36 witnesses to testify at trial, and were able to get in front of two former ISIS fighters overseas who identified Kandic as one of their own."
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.
In an interview with the Free Beacon, Komatireddy said she’s ready for another uphill battle aimed at making Americans safer. While New York hasn’t sent a Republican to the attorney general’s office since Dennis Vacco won the job in 1994, Komatireddy says the Empire State is ready for a different kind of prosecutor.
"Dennis Vacco is a friend ... and he will tell you, if you ask him, that the conditions in New York now are very similar to the conditions in New York when he ran and won," she said. "It’s because safety is a top concern for New Yorkers, and when that’s the case, people want someone they can trust."
And, in Komatireddy’s telling, James is not up to the task.
"We know we’re less safe," Komatireddy says in her campaign launch video. "We can feel it. When I walk my kids to school, I hold their hands a little tighter now. Everyone does. Under Letitia James, crime in New York state is up 26 percent, drug deaths 63 percent."
Total index crime in New York City rose 45 percent from 2019—when James took office—through 2024, while aggravated assaults increased by 23 percent over the same period. Index crime decreased by 4 percent in the city and 16 percent in the state during the first half of this year, but still exceeds pre-pandemic levels.
Komatireddy told the Free Beacon that James—best known for her legal campaign against President Donald Trump—has her priorities out of order.
"She’s not focused on the safety of New Yorkers," Komatireddy said. "She uses the office in all the wrong ways. She uses the office to go after her political enemies and for her own political promotion, and that does not serve New Yorkers."
There is another reason why Komatireddy believes New Yorkers may be ready for a Republican attorney general: New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. The democratic socialist, who spent his campaign running away from years of anti-police rhetoric, has spooked the city’s cops to the point that one NYPD officer told the Free Beacon he expects "a few hundred" resignations.
Mamdani’s transition team picks have done little to quell those fears. One of the mayor-elect’s advisers, Lumumba Bandele, organized campaigns to free several prominent cop killers, including a Black Liberation Army member who admitted to murdering two NYPD officers. Another, "criminal legal system" adviser Mysonne Linen, served seven years in prison for armed robberies perpetrated against taxi drivers in the late 1990s. A third, "community safety" adviser Alex Vitale, is an outspoken supporter of either defunding or abolishing police, prisons, the U.S. Border Patrol, ICE, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI, among other facets of law enforcement in the United States.
"Mamdani’s election is what makes this an opportunity for a Republican to win as attorney general," Komatireddy said. "The inability to retain police officers, the effect on police morale could lead to a severe degradation of the NYPD. What you need to have is an attorney general who is prepared, if needed, to step in."
She floated the possibility of putting the NYPD under "state management" should that become necessary, adding her history as a prosecutor has prepared her to oversee such a transition.
Komatireddy cited a 2023 move by New Jersey attorney general Matt Platkin, who assumed control of the police in Paterson, N.J., after the killing of activist Najee Seabrooks. The New Jersey supreme court unanimously upheld the decision in July 2025. Komatireddy also said she plans to assert the powers of the attorney general in ways James has not.
"The state attorney general can prosecute any criminal case that a DA can prosecute," Komatireddy told the Free Beacon.
Komatireddy specifically mentioned the city’s treatment of those on college campuses who have broken the law by harassing and discriminating against Jewish students. Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, has become notorious for going easy on scores of left-wing activists like the man who violently stormed a Columbia University building, attacked a facilities worker, and allegedly broke a police camera while detained. Bragg dismissed trespassing charges against 30 Columbia protesters who had been arrested while occupying the university’s Hamilton Hall. Komatireddy told the Free Beacon she would take a more aggressive tack.
"New York state actually has very robust civil rights laws, and you can use them," she said. "I would treat [students] like we treat anyone else."
Komatireddy received both her bachelor’s and law degrees from Harvard University and lectured at Columbia Law School for more than a decade. Her familiarity with the United States’s elite academic institutions, though, has not softened her resolve to hold those on Ivy League campuses accountable when they break the law.
"I’ll just be frank: It’s really disappointing to see how they’ve handled the harassment of Jewish students in the last couple of years, and it’s unacceptable," she said, adding there are tools the attorney general can use in response.
Mamdani—who condemned "[Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s declaration of war" just a day after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack and a week later took to the street to demand Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) stop Israel from retaliating—has pledged to arrest Netanyahu should the Israeli leader visit New York City under a Mamdani mayoralty. He has also led efforts in the past to punish pro-Israel charities and organizations that do business within the Jewish state.
Komatireddy threw cold water on Mamdani’s designs.
"There’s no legal authority to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu," she said, promising that "no one would be targeted because they are a friend of Israel or they do business with Israel" with her as attorney general. "I don’t think that’s appropriate."
