Even Richard Nixon was never this contemptuous of the people’s right to know. Or as two-faced a hypocrite, either.
Turns out that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “agents of the city” were secret agents: secret from the public, and even from themselves.
The Wall Street Journal reports several had no idea they’d been so designated as a way to keep their communications with the mayor from the public.
Moreover, they don’t want it.
Some of de Blasio’s own aides reportedly pressed him to release emails he exchanged with one of those “agents,” Jonathan Rosen — whose lobbying business has boomed since the mayor took office — but he overruled them.
So it comes as no surprise that de Blasio and his lawyer are the only people who think he has any legal basis whatsoever for keeping those exchanges private.
Four of the five “agents” are political consultants whose firms have raked in big bucks from de Blasio’s main slush fund, the Campaign for One New York. Rosen’s firm has been subpoenaed by prosecutors probing de Blasio’s political fundraising.
And most also represent clients who do substantial business with the city.
Those are precisely the kind of people whose correspondence with the mayor should be publicly available — not filed away because de Blasio insists the public has no right to know.
What exactly is an “agent of the city”? No city political veterans have heard of it, and the mayor’s aides won’t say how someone earns the title and what — if any — rules they have to follow.
Odds are, there are no rules — after all, de Blasio himself doesn’t follow any. He defies a subpoena from JCOPE, the state ethics agency, saying it’s out to get him. He refuses to show up at a state Senate hearing on mayoral control of the schools, insisting he’s already answered all possible questions.
This from the self-righteous mayor who campaigned for the job by blasting everyone else in city government for “blocking information that belongs to the public.”
Bill de Blasio isn’t interested in transparency or accountability. He’s an imperial mayor who “strictly” follows the law — but only as he, his aides and the secret agents in his shadow government define it.