A black mark on de Blasio

The answer to the Daily News Freedom of Information request arrived Friday: a thick package, nearing some 900 pages, with email addresses displaying notable names. The names were about the only thing legible. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page was shrouded in blocks of black. CIA? No. NSA? Nope. FBI? Uh-uh. These documents came not from federal Gmen, but from a different sort of “secret” agent — the well-connected advisers of Bill de Blasio dubbed “agents of the city” in City Hall’s attempts to mark their communications as internal deliberations, and therefore off limits to public scrutiny.

The mayor asserts that his relationship with these select outsiders grants them the right to give him unvarnished confidential advice as would an official staffer — despite some of them having clients doing city business with the city.

This was, from the start, a nonsense position. Several news organizations, including The News, filed Freedom of Information Law requests to obtain emails between the agents and City Hall.

Thus came hundreds of pages of emails between City Hall and agent-of-the-city John Del Cecato’s firm AKPD, dating from July 2015, when the political world wondered why former Hillary Clinton campaign manager de Blasio had yet to endorse his erstwhile boss.

Eighty percent of the emails are redacted. Even when the context make clear that the discussions are of a political nature, a spokesman characterizes them as “deliberative conversations concerning policy positions” taking place “in government.”

Excuse us, but that’s just nnnnnn ridiculous.