For more than a decade, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-Hudson Valley) kept quiet about the night in 2012 when he was pulled over on the Palisades Parkway, failed a breathalyzer, and was arrested for drunk driving.
He did not mention it in his 2020 run for the state Assembly, nor did he mention it when he unseated Sean Patrick Maloney in 2022, or during his 2024 reelection campaign. It became public for the first time this month, after Lawler brought it up himself during a high school talk on road safety, then discussed it at length in an interview with News 12—in the middle of what both parties describe as the most competitive House race in New York.
Lawler said the arrest came the same day he learned his father’s cancer had metastasized to his brain. “I was going to see friends in the city that evening, and ultimately went down to the city and proceeded to drink and made a decision to drive home,” he told News 12.
A state trooper pulled him over on the parkway in Haverstraw. He failed a breathalyzer test and was arrested, then later pleaded guilty in Rockland County to a reduced charge—driving while ability impaired, or DWAI, a traffic violation rather than a criminal offense under New York law.
The then-25-year-old Lawler was already a fixture in state GOP politics: executive director of the New York Republican Committee, and soon after, campaign manager for Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino’s 2014 run for governor.
No public record of the arrest or court case was made available by Lawler’s campaign, and the incident had not been made public in any of his campaigns for Congress or the state Legislature, per The New York Times. A police blotter item in The Journal News listed the arrest time as 10:15 a.m., but Lawler spokesman Chris Russell told the Times that was inaccurate and the arrest happened at night.
Lawler has said the hardest part wasn’t the arrest itself but telling his father—a recovering alcoholic who had been sober for nearly 20 years. His father, Kevin A. Lawler, died of cancer in March 2013, less than a year after the arrest.
“It was certainly not my proudest moment and one I was deeply disappointed in myself about,” Lawler told Politico. “I was deeply disappointed in myself, but moreover disappointed that I let my dad down.”
He described the drive home as a decision made after realizing “the very likelihood that he wouldn’t have too much more time” with his father.
Lawler has since co-sponsored a bipartisan bill that would require breathalyzer technology in new vehicles and has previously received a “Legislative Hero Award” from Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
He has rejected the idea that the timing of the admission was political: “I learned a very important lesson from [it], and hopefully encourage others to make the right choices,” he told News 12.
Politico and Newsweek both framed the disclosure as landing just as Lawler’s record is drawing its closest scrutiny yet in a race both parties are pouring money into.
Lawler is facing Democrat Cait Conley, an Army veteran, in New York’s 17th Congressional District—the state’s only House seat rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report, and one national Democrats have named a top pickup target.
