Bruce Blakeman dials back support for Brooklyn congressional candidate who called 9/11 an 'inside job'

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman distanced himself Thursday from a Brooklyn congressional candidate he endorsed who said the Sept. 11 attacks were an "inside job."

Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor, endorsed Joel Anabilah-Azumah following a news conference in Brownsville last week. Anabilah-Azumah is a Republican and Conservative candidate running to unseat Democratic incumbent Yvette Clarke. His endorsement appeared in a video posted on YouTube. 

On Wednesday, the news outlet City & State reported Anabilah-Azumah had posted publicly that he believed 9/11 was "an inside job." In a 2024 social media post that appears on his campaign page, he wrote, "I don't even bother to argue it any more. You don't have to believe it, but that is what happened and history is pretty clear on that." He did not elaborate with specifics. 

Asked about those comments on Thursday, Blakeman said he was concerned with Anabilah-Azumah’s beliefs, but stopped short of retracting his endorsement.

"I didn't know this guy. I was asked by the county chairman in Kings County to endorse him, and obviously, if I knew the things that he said, I wouldn't have endorsed him," Blakeman told Newsday. "It's not a big deal."

A spokesman for Blakeman did not say whether Blakeman would formally retract his endorsement.

Anabilah-Azumah confirmed he had seen Blakeman at an event a couple months ago, but the two had not met before last week. He declined to comment on Blakeman's change of heart.

Democrats have since called on Blakeman to apologize for endorsing Anabilah-Azumah. Spokesman Addison Dick of the state Democratic Party wrote in a statement that embracing 9/11 conspiracy theorists was "disqualifying for anyone seeking the governorship of New York." 

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks claimed thousands of lives in coordinated strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Numerous conspiracy theories have cropped up since, including one that asserts explosives were deliberately planted in Building 7 of the World Trade Center, a claim that's long been debunked.  

Blakeman has a personal connection to 9/11 after his nephew, court officer Tommy Jurgens, 26, of Valley Stream, was killed helping a burn victim when the second tower collapsed. As he has done annually since the attacks, Blakeman plans to attend the 9/11 memorial and reading of the names of victims Friday in lower Manhattan.

Local Republicans have called on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to not attend the ceremony. Their calls, in part, center on criticism that the city’s chief legal counsel, Ramzi Kassem, was the attorney for an al-Qaida member who pleaded guilty to planning a suicide bombing attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen in 2002.

In a news conference earlier this week where Mamdani revealed former city officials misled New Yorkers about the air quality at Ground Zero, the mayor handed Kassem a ceremonial pen. Blakeman encouraged grieving family members to turn their backs to Mamdani in protest at Friday’s ceremony.

Anabilah-Azumah doubled down Thursday on his beliefs about 9/11.

In an interview with Newsday, he said members of the U.S. intelligence community planned and executed 9/11 to justify later invading foreign countries and increasing surveillance on its own population.

"People were not thinking about things like mass surveillance before 9/11," he told Newsday. "After 9/11, all of a sudden they started doing things like mass surveillance. ... And we had a more aggressive security posture."