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NEW: NYC’s Zohran Mamdani Embroiled In Major Scandal

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Zohran Mamdani, the pro-communist New York City mayoral frontrunner, has been accused of lying about his ethnicity on his application to Columbia University, according to a new report.

The 33-year-old Muslim immigrant reportedly identified himself as both “black” and “Asian” on his application to the elite Ivy League school, when he was a high school senior in 2009, the New York Times reported. Mamdani’s application was ultimately denied despite the fact that his father, Mahmood, was working at Columbia as the director of the Institute of African Studies at the time.

Mamdani, who emigrated to the U.S. from Uganda, told the outlet that he doesn’t identify as either race but rather “an American who was born in Africa.”

“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” the card-carrying Democratic Socialist said. He further claimed that he specified “Ugandan” in a section of the application that allowed him to further outline his background.

“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” the Queens-based assemblyman told the New York Times.

Mamdani, who is the odds-on frontrunner in the NYC mayoral race after clinching the Democratic Party nomination last month, further claimed that he was not trying to gain an edge in the admissions process. Other high-profile lawmakers, namely Senator Elizabeth Warren (R-MA), have admitted to lying about their ethnicity on college applications in order to gain an advantage.

Like many elite universities, Columbia openly factored ethnicity in its admissions process to the detriment of white and Asian applicants. The Supreme Court has since ruled against the practice, though many major institutions have side-stepped the race-based focus in favor of focusing on “socioeconomic factors” to reach the same goal.

The story broke after the New York Times gained access to records obtained by a hacker who stole data from more than two million Columbia University students, applicants and employees in a targeted cyberattack last week. In an anonymous letter released after the breach, the lone hacker claimed that they were seeking to determine whether the university was still using affirmative action in its admissions.

Mamdani has been on the receiving end of intense backlash both nationally and locally following the hack. “It’s disgraceful to exploit this country’s legacy of slavery that oppressed African slaves,” Matthew Schweber, a Columbia University Jewish Alumni Association member, told the New York Post.

“Zohran Mamdani’s exploitation of this category further exemplifies the fraudulence of his candidacy and the canard and pretense to speak on behalf of the oppressed. He is a child of privilege and two extraordinarily wealthy parents.”

Gerard Kassar, chairman of the state Conservative Party, accused Mamdani of deliberately misrepresenting his ethnicity in order to gain an advantage.

“Mamdani has got a lot of explaining to do. This is part of the fraud he has perpetrated on New Yorkers throughout the primary campaign,” Kasser, a Brooklyn resident, told the outlet. “His focus was to get admitted to Columbia on affirmative action. It just didn’t work out. He was trying to get into a school by lying about his racial background. Race is a scientific specification, not the country you’re from,” he added.