City Hall basically just confessed to evading both the Freedom of Information Law and a court order to comply with a media FOIL request.
We’re talking, of course, of its failure to hand over several embarrassing emails between Mayor Bill de Blasio and corrupt donor Jona Rechnitz.
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.