471 days, zero credibility

It only took Mayor de Blasio one year, three months and two days to follow through on a bizarre promise of self-vindication made in the furnace of federal and state investigations into more than $3 million he and his operatives raised from donors pursuing deals with his government.

Despite that embarrassing delay, the supposedly exonerating missive he finally released Friday was a vague, unconvincing, self-serving sham.

Here’s the May 2016 pledge a bristling de Blasio made as reporters revealed detail after detail of the corrosive pay-to-play culture he had created:

“As we will be showing you more and more in the coming weeks, a stunning number of donors and supporters not only did not get things they hoped they would get, they got rejection of things they hoped they would get . . . we’re going to show you a whole lot of evidence of that.”

The stunning number turns out to be zero — the total donors named in a web post authored by the mayor that nods to exceptions proving the rule that de Blasio’s backers enjoyed an edge on his attentions. He instead sanctimoniously aggrandized his administration as a paragon of government integrity while attacking “the blaring headlines competing for your outrage.”

About that outrage: Work a bit up again as we remind you how the mayor put a “For Sale” sign on City Hall’s steps by establishing a political operation called the Campaign for One New York, then had his people lean on interests with business before the city to give. When they gave, they consistently got easy, quick and direct access to the powers that be — and often cold, hard deliverables.

There were the big-money donors behind NYCLASS, on whose behalf de Blasio squandered untold energy on the lost cause of persuading the City Council to ban carriage horses.

Campaign finance laws limit lobbyists like Steve Nislick and Wendy Neu to contributing no more than $400 each to any one candidate — a cap designed to thwart corruption. They gave de Blasio’s political operation $150,000 and got a regular audience at City Hall.

Then there was Joseph Dussich, $100,000 giver to the Campaign for One New York, who got fast-tracked to win long-sought contracts supplying mint-scented, rodent-repellent garbage bags to city agencies.

Then there was health care union 1199SEIU, which gave an astounding $500,000 to the Campaign for One New York, amid efforts to save Long Island College Hospital and a Lower East Side nursing home. Sure enough, the union “did not get things they hoped they would get,” to use de Blasio’s words, but not because his leadership team didn’t try to move heaven and Earth.

And then there was the money train — $245,000 in donations made by real estate developers along the likeliest route of the BQX streetcar proposed by $100,000 donor Jed Walentas and now fast-tracked by de Blasio.

“Merit-based bureaucratic decision-making is a little boring for the nightly news,” lectures de Blasio’s paean to his own incorruptibility.

On that point, he and we agree.