Council Speaker Corey Johnson called on scandal-rocked Bronx lawmaker Andy King to resign Wednesday, just hours after the release of a blistering ethics report that found he engaged in self-dealing, abused his staff and retaliated against witnesses to his bad behavior.
“This is totally unacceptable and inappropriate, and I condemn it in the strongest terms,” Johnson said late Wednesday. “I think it’s going to be hard for him to continue to discharge his duties as a council member.”
He added: “I think he should resign.”
But Johnson was unwilling to say the Council should expel King.
“This is the strongest level of sanction the Council has ever leveled,” he said, defending the punishment recommendations from the ethics panel that probed King.
The Council’s Standards and Ethics committee recommended that King (D-Bronx) be suspended for a month without pay, stripped of his committee assignments, pay a $15,000 fine and have a monitor appointed to run his office, which would protect his staff against further abuse.
Johnson has scheduled a Monday vote to ratify the punishments.
The ethics panel’s 48-page report determined that King repeatedly retaliated against his staff as they testified about his misbehavior in two separate probes over the past three years, allowed his wife to use city resources to aid the labor union where she works and even forced his staff to help arrange for his stepdaughter’s wedding in the US Virgin Islands.
Johnson said he had referred the ethics findings to other agencies for further investigation, but he declined to say if the additional probe would be criminal and which agency would probe.
The report also revealed that King compared a picture of Johnson dancing with former Councilwoman Rosie Mendez — who is also openly gay — at New York’s 2015 gay pride parade to “child pornography.”
“As an openly gay man, as an openly HIV-positive man, the comments that I read, that were in that committee report were disgusting to me,” Johnson said.
“But it goes even beyond that individual comment,” he added. “This is the most egregious thing I have ever seen in my six years on the City Council.”