Nowhere to hide, mayor

G

ive up the emails, mayor. Give up the preposterous fiction that your outside consultant Jonathan Rosen, principal of a connected PR firm, was an “agent of the city” whose correspondence with you is therefore off limits to the public. Just give it up. So says, in not quite those words, a damning, unanimous ruling by a panel of five state appellate court justices who just told Mayor de Blasio and Corporation Counsel Zachary Carter to stop stonewalling that “closes the door on government transparency.”

The mayor, the judges found, “had no reasonable basis to withhold the documents.”

It’s been three years since NY1 and the New York Post filed garden-variety requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law for emails between the mayor’s office and Rosen, who regularly advised de Blasio in 2014 and 2015 even as his firm Berlin Rosen handled media relations for developers and nonprofit groups doing business with the city.

FOIL makes crystal clear that government agencies must release their records to the public, with very limited exceptions.

Sorry, shrugged the mayor, I’ll only release some of them — claiming a right to withhold the rest, who knows how many pages, as internal government deliberations.

He used the same pathetic “agents of the city” excuse, pioneered by Mike Bloomberg in his futile attempt to shield emails exchanged during his courtship of short-time Schools Chancellor Cathie Black, to deflect requests to produce communications with other consultants, too.

It’s an insult to New Yorkers’ intelligence. Rosen didn’t work for the government. De Blasio paid Berlin Rosen via his Campaign for One New York nonprofit, funded by private donors (including Berlin Rosen clients).

No matter. For more than a year, the mayor’s office stalled. The news organizations sued. Two courts have now demanded the documents’ release. What’s more, under a new state law, city taxpayers will now have to cover attorneys’ fees for the news organizations that should have received the emails from the get-go.

If City Hall keeps fighting and the state’s highest court allows an appeal — which it oughtn’t on this well-settled matter — de Blasio and Carter will throw good taxpayer money after bad in pursuit of keeping the public’s business private.

Which leads to the necessary question: What is de Blasio hiding?

Not crimes; a pass from federal prosecutors for his dealings with donors, even those who’ve since pled guilty to bribing him, settled that.

What remains is the possibility of political embarrassment — embarrassment worse than the humiliating legal slapdowns de Blasio is already subjecting himself to.