‘Stop’ lying!
Files show train held up for mayor
ATTENTION, passengers: This train is being held due to a mayoral photo op, despite phony claims by the mayor’s staff.
Documents reviewed by the Daily News show that despite vehement denials from his staff, Mayor de Blasio's Brooklynbound R train was indeed held in the station for him at the end of his press conference Tuesday.
The documents relating to the dispatch of the specific train de Blasio was boarding contain notes from a dispatcher listing a stop for a “police check” at the City Hall station at 6 p.m. — just when he made his hasty exit from a subterranean press conference where he insisted the city should not foot the bill for fixing up the subways.
Another document showed when the train hit the station’s entrance and exit beacons, which are not exact measures of arrival but are used for countdown clocks that tell commuters when the train is arriving. According to the beacons, 3 minutes and 20 seconds elapsed between when the train hit the “in” beacon and when it hit the “out” one.
The documents were shown to The News by a source with knowledge of the situation, who would not allow them to be copied or photographed.
“We didn’t hold the train. Any suggestion to the contrary is nonsense,” the mayor’s spokesman, Eric Phillips, said in response to the documents. “If for some reason the train was being held it certainly wasn’t being held by us ... We don’t run the subways.”
But the documents aren’t the only evidence the train was held. An announcement on the platform said as much — telling commuters the train was being held at City Hall for a “police investigation.” While many officers staffed the mayor’s event, they did not appear to be investigating anything.
None of that stopped Phillips from spending his day Wednesday insisting reporters were lying about the train being held.
“You were on the train. I was on the train. It was not held. Your story is not true. And I actually think you know that, sadly,” he told one reporter.
When a News reporter asked about the announcement, Phillips responded that the person wasn’t on the train and was “reporting breathlessly on events she didn’t witness.” When told another News reporter was on the train, Phillips responded: “Please.”
The repeated denials — despite reporters witnessing the announcements — came after the mayor’s staff also denied the existence of a memo urging police to sweep subway stations to removed homeless people before he took a ride Sunday. That memo was later published.
On Wednesday, de Blasio said it wasn’t city policy to do such sweeps and that the memo might have been faked. He was thoroughly disinterested in the NYPD email that called for homeless people to be tossed outside.
“I don’t care, my friend, because it does not matter,” de Blasio said. “Read my lips: I don’t care.”