A 'WORKING CLASS' POL? THAT'S RICH!
B’klyn Dem ran on family trust fund
Brooklyn state Sen. Julia Salazar — who has been called out for falsely painting herself as a working-class immigrant — was living off a trust fund while mounting her socialist-themed run for office, new campaign-finance disclosures reveal.
The fact-challenged freshman lawmaker filed papers saying the trust was worth $10 million — although she now claims that the figure was an error and that the family trust she dipped into actually holds around $400,000.
Salazar, 28, reported to the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics in a signed May 15 financial disclosure that she received $18,000 in 2018 from her late father Luis H. Salazar’s trust.
In the handwritten disclosure, she appeared to value the fund at $10 million, classifying the cash stash as “Category DDDDD” — a code used in campaign paperwork to signify amounts of “$10 million or more.”
Asked about the largesse on Thursday, Salazar said she meant to write “Category D” — to indicate a range of $5,000 to $20,000 — referring to the $18,000 trustfund disbursement.
She said she misread the sheet provided by JCOPE outlining the categorizations, claiming she mistook the Category DDDDD designation of “$10,000,000 and over” as saying “$10,000 and over.”
“I looked at it in a cursory way,” she told The Post.
“I mistook the comma versus the decimal point, so it added it extra zeros,” she added.
Still, she followed the instructions correctly on the next line, where she reported her income as a community organizer for Jews for Racial + Economic Justice as “Category E,” or $20,000–$50,000.
Since she doesn’t control the trust fund, Salazar is not required to state its value on JCOPE disclosures.
The Democratic socialist said she needed the inherited dough to pay her bills while she was running for office.
“The $18,000 was used to support myself, because I had to stop working in order to campaign, and I had to go on unpaid leave,” she said. “Basically, seven months of living expenses on top of savings that I had from working.”
The fund, which she says currently holds less than $400,000, was cobbled together from her late father’s retirement savings, life-insurance policy and real-estate sales proceeds, according to Salazar.
She said her aunt in Colombia controls the fund, which benefits Salazar, her brother Alex and other unidentified family members.
Court papers said the fund had “in excess” of $600,000 in 2011, according to media reports.
She resubmitted her financial disclosure to JCOPE on July 11 — noting the trust income as “Category D” — after a state worker flagged the inconsistencies to her.
Salazar made headlines in her 2018 run for the north Brooklyn district by bending the truth about her family and background.
She claimed to be a workingclass immigrant but was revealed to have been born in the US and raised in tony Jupiter, Fla., where she lived next door to former Mets slugger Keith Hernandez.
“We were probably what you would consider upper middle class,” her brother told New York magazine last year.
“My father was a commercial airline pilot and did well, and he had a successful business, as well, that he had at the same time.”