Behind the scenes on Thursday DOI notified Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter by letter it would sue him to gain access to the mayor’s computer and thousands of pages of documents it had requested that Carter censored.
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On Tuesday, the department also gave DOI access to the hard drives of Mayor Bill de Blasio and other City Hall staffers that they’d refused to turn over earlier in the investigation. De Blasio tried and failed to keep the site open to provide health care services, and the hospital was eventually acquired by a private development group.
The Law Department referred a request for comment to the mayor’s office, where a spokesman said that the department had now provided records beyond the administration’s legal obligation and “far beyond any useful scope” of the investigation. “This is so overheated and so off the mark”.
DOI later discovered from another source that the section Carter had whited out described another deed restriction waiver, this one involving the Dance Theater of Harlem.
The mayor then backed a Fortis Property Group redevelopment plan “for a series of apartment towers that would include 200 to 300 affordable units”, according to The New York Post. Allure then paid the city $16 million to lift the restrictive deeds, and later flipped the property to luxury condo developers for $116 million, sparking community outrage and local, state and federal fraud investigations.
“He made a career out of ripping people off, racking up billions in debt, and bankrupting his companies”, de Blasio said of the GOP nominee.
“This was not Law’s decision to make, and it wrongly withheld the document”. “I didn’t get into the weeds of it. But I thought his essential approach was right”. De Blasio was happy to have the Department of Investigation look into the complex transaction as long as the agency, headed by his former campaign treasurer, focused on functionaries out in the netherlands of the bureaucracy.
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“This is probably bigger than Watergate”, he said at a panel in Philadelphia, the Daily News reported, before going on to assert that the investigation would ultimately find his administration blameless. This, despite Mayor de Blasio’s repeated assertions that he was in the dark.
