Post story prompts City Hall to revamp email policy (NYP)
Hours after The Post revealed newly obtained emails that show how cozy Mayor Bill de Blasio once was with a crooked campaign fundraiser, City Hall said it’s revamping the policy for saving such correspondence.“We’re developing one,” mayoral press secretary Eric Phillips said Tuesday. “One didn’t exist in any meaningful way, as we’ve said.”
Last month, federal prosecutors at an NYPD corruption trial unveiled emails between de Blasio and developer Jona Rechnitz that had not been released by City Hall in response to a 2016 Freedom of Information request from The Post.
In response, a de Blasio spokeswoman said City Hall employees “are under no requirement to retain every e-mail ever written or received,” citing a policy developed by de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg.
FOIL expert Robert Freeman, executive director of the state Committee on Open Government, said any emails written by a government official should be kept if they “relate to the performance of one’s duties.
“We’ve all seen the portion of the communications . . . and it’s clear they relate to [de Blasio’s] capacity as mayor.”
City payroll shows de Blasio is spending big on 'special assistants'
City Hall withheld more emails between de Blasio and Rechnitz, court filing suggests
City Hall basically just confessed to evading both the Freedom of Information Law and a court order to comply with a media FOIL request.
Multiple messages have surfaced during Rechnitz’s testimony in the NYPD-corruption trial — some as evidence for the prosecution, others for the defense
The newest messages appear to have been transmitted via the mayor’s Blackberry, and the transcripts contain redactions obviously made by City Hall.
But all were plainly ones that City Hall should have produced in response to the request by The Post and other media outlets.
Team de Blasio refused that request until the courts intervened. And now we know that they still didn’t fully comply.
Last week, mayoral flack Eric Phillips insisted they’d given the media all the emails “in the city’s possession.” But late this week — after court filings proved that untrue — he changed his tune, claiming that the fresh emails surfaced because they’re now using “more aggressive search protocols.”
That’s laughable: It’s just not that hard to identify relevant info in a searchable electronic database, especially when you can sort for known senders.
And if the issue was recovering deleted emails, the technology was plenty good enough back when the city failed to cough up all the goods.
De Blasio, by the way, insisted that the city’s records-retention policy didn’t require him to keep every email. Yet apparently he kept more than he admitted.
If Team de Blasio had suppressed this evidence in a legal case, they’d face contempt charges. (This is likely why they finally surfaced in the criminal trial.) Will they escape sanction for defying the FOIL laws?
At the very least, this skulduggery suggests the judge in the criminal case should grant the defense’s motion to have the mayor testify in court about his relationship with Rechnitz. As the defense argued, since “the mayor did not preserve a number of emails, he is the only person who can testify about the exact nature of these communications.”
Then, too, when it comes to any future FOIL requests, all courts should now assume that Team de Blasio isn’t operating in good faith.
Requested de Blasio emails suddenly surface in corruption trial (NYP) 3:50PM
The Post in 2016 filed a request for “any and all emails” between de Blasio and his aides with campaign donors Jeremy Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz.
Rechnitz is now the key government witness against his former pal Reichberg, who is on trial in Manhattan federal court for allegedly bribing cops.
The other defendant is ex-NYPD Deputy Inspector James Grant.
Emails exchanged between the donors and de Blasio on his personal Blackberry were introduced at the trial Wednesday — but hadn’t previously been turned over to The Post and other news
outlets as legally required.
In a Nov. 3, 2014 email to de Blasio, Rechnitz urged the mayor to try to persuade then-NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks from retiring.
“What can we do for you to refuse Banks’s resignation and get him back in and for [NYPD Commissioner Bill] Bratton to see past Phil’s monstrous mistake?” Rechnitz wrote.
The Post later reported that Banks quit while being probed for unpaid taxes tied to investments he had made with Rechnitz.
That email was not included in City Hall’s Aug. 4, 2017 response to The Post’s FOIL request.
Neither was another February 2014 email introduced at trial in which Rechnitz offers the mayor tickets for a Knicks game.
De Blasio declined the offer but said he wanted to “profoundly thank you for all the help you’ve given lately. Means a lot to me. And fyi, it has been an absolute pleasure getting to work regularly with Chief Banks. His future is bright.”
Important
Mayoral spokeswoman Natalie Grybauskas said there is no requirement that all email exchanges involving City Hall employees be retained.
“City Hall only retains emails when they are certain types of public records, like audits, personnel actions, policy memos, final reports, or emails that are subject to ongoing information requests or litigation. This is a Bloomberg-era email retention policy that has not changed. City Hall employees are under no requirement to retain every email ever written or received,” she said.
Dr. Jekyll and Mayor Hide: De Blasio, who professes to care about transparency, kept important emails from the public(NYDN)
A mayoral spokesperson swears they've looked high and low for the missing emails. Which if true means that de Blasio hit delete, delete, who ...The Emails That Mayor de Blasio May Not Have Wanted Anyone to See
New York Times-13 hours ago
Mayor Bill de Blasio and his staff are required to keep records that are connected to his government work. That includes emails about public ...
The Charter Revision Commission did not take up two provisions not subject to those cash limits — independent expenditures and “bundlers,” who collect money for candidates.
The mayor said independent expenditures — uncoordinated spending for or against a campaign — “have been a fairly minor factor to date.”
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Data and Fields
Working Families Party candidates warned about financial dealings with Data and Field Services firm (NYDN)
The City Campaign Finance Board on Wednesday fired a warning shot across the bows of candidates that have hired a consulting group tied to the Working Families Party, telling them to be careful going forward about their financial dealings with the firm.
A
number of candidates have paid Data and Field Services thousands of
dollars in consulting and campaign staffing fees, including public
advocate hopeful Bill de Blasio and City Council candidates Daniel Dromm, S.J. Jung, Brad Lander, Deborah Rose, Lynn Schulman, James Van Bramer and Jumaane Williams.
That
means candidates have to report any help they get from the party, like
making phone calls or handing out leaflets, as either an in-kind
contribution from the party or as a campaign expenditure.
Data and Field Services performs tasks like canvassing, leafleting and making calls for candidates.
"Based
on information acquired by the board to date, it is the board's
understanding that DFS exists as an arm of the Working Families Party,"
the board said in a statement.
De Blasio has two contracts with Data and Field Services totaling $90,140, a campaign aide said.
WFP spokesman Dan Levitan said the party shares the board's "interpretation of the law" and is confident of compliance.
De
Blasio, who has already reported paying Data and Field Services $31,305
this cycle, said the campaign sought guidance from the board on this
matter and is in compliance.
All have been endorsed by the WFP. None have been penalized by the board.
The
board says going forward it will consider whether candidates have
gotten unfair discounts from the group, and whether the work runs afoul
of contribution limits.
NYCLASS PAC
NYCLASS which was used to destroy mayoral front runner Speaker Quinn race for mayor by forces close to de Blasio is now being sabotage from within to please the unions and other special interests who want to keep carriages rolling in the park. It is not the voters who were behind the horse carriage ban, 70% of New Yorkers support the horses. It was the money the NYCLASS PAC made available during the campaign that was the goal of the de Blasio conspiracy team.
Campaign for One NY
Some of the largest contributors to the anti-Quinn effort then helped fund his first political entity, Campaign for One New York.
City Hall will not say who the 6 taxpayer-funded aides on leave to work on
De Blasio, beneficiary of donors' largesse, calls for reform at union rally (Politico)
Mayor Bill de Blasio joined union and political allies at a rally Thursday to push for his campaign finance reform initiative, and ended up having to defend his own record on the issue.The mayor is urging voters to approve three ballot questions that his Charter Revision Commission devised this year — one to lower campaign donation limits for city candidates, another to establish a mayoral commission for civic engagement and a third to limit the terms of community board members.
“Most people don’t know rich people. I’m not sure rich people want to know most of us,” the mayor said. “They’ve got their own world. But if you’re ready to run for office and all you hear is, ‘Well where’s all the money,’ it’s horrible, it’s discouraging.”
The mayor has participated in the city’s campaign finance program since his first run for office in 2001, agreeing to limits that are regarded as some of the most stringent in the country.
But he also accepted money during those campaigns from the same types of donors he decried at the rally — lobbyists, real estate executives and high-level attorneys, for instance.
As mayor, de Blasio has also opted to raise limitless cash from developers, unions and others with business before his administration through four separate entities — including one that was the subject of a multi-year federal investigation that did not yield any charges.
When asked Thursday, de Blasio said he was simply playing by the rules set in motion through the 2010 Citizens United decision, in which the Supreme Court protected corporate and union spending in elections as free speech. He predicted the ruling would be overturned one day.
The Mayor Wife and PAC
