‘Legit Question!’ Scott Jennings Brawls With Abby Phillip Over Cuomo’s Mamdani-9/11 Crack

Scott Jennings brawled with other members of a Thursday evening CNN NewsNight panel over comments New York City mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo made about his opponent, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, during a radio appearance earlier in the day.

During a conversation with conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg, Cuomo said, “You wake up as mayor, you wake up as governor — any morning, there’s a prison uprising. There’s a mass shooting. There’s Legionnaire’s Disease. There’s going to be a physical collapse…any given morning there’s a crisis, and people’s lives are at stake. God forbid, another 9/11 — can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?”

“Yeah, I could — he’d be cheering,” shot back Rosenberg.

“That’s another problem,” agreed Cuomo with a chuckle.

On CNN that night, Abby Phillip argued that the race was “getting predictably very nasty, and specifically along these lines of Mamdani’s faith.”

Ashley Allison concurred, calling Cuomo’s behavior “disappointing,” and even “disgusting” before Jennings took his at-bat.

“Well, he [Cuomo] was talking about his [Mamdani’s] experience. I mean, if you watched the debate last night, most of Cuomo’s best moments were about Mamdani’s experience. In this particular case, I think he was making two points, actually,” submitted Jennings.

“One is, if he did, God forbid, have a massive emergency like that, would you really want someone in the mayor’s seat who has never had a job, never run anything, certainly never run anything at this level?” he said. “And that’s been his entire argument, number one. Number two, it is true that Mamdani was taking a picture with an unindicted co-conspirator from the World Trade Center bombing the other day and called him a pillar of the community.”

“Cuomo didn’t make him take that picture, Mamdani took that picture, and seems to be pretty proud of it. That’s a legitimate thing to debate. But I think in this case of the radio show, the core issue was Mamdani literally has no experience and if you had a 9/11-scale event, would you want somebody who can’t prove that they can do anything in the chair?” he continued.

“Legit question!” Jennings exclaimed.

“Is it fair to say that he would cheer on 9/11?” inquired Phillip.

“He’s taking pictures with unindicted co-conspirators from the World Trade Center bombing,” answered Jennings.

“But I mean, are you willing to say that you really think that he would cheer on 9/11?” asked Phillip again.

“He’s taking pictures with unindicted co-conspirators from the World Trade Center bombing,” repeated Jennings as Allison attempted to interrupt.

“But I’m asking Scott, because Scott seems to think that’s like a totally above board line of attack,” said Phillip after some cross-talk. “Do you think that that’s true?”

“I can only tell you what I see on my phone. I see a picture of Mamdani with a guy who was an unindicted co-conspirator from a terrorist attack in New York City,” replied Jennings. “Do you think that was a good picture to take?”

Watch the full exchange above via CNN.

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