Wiley: I’ll be open on ethics
Mayor hopeful rips Andy on book bucks, vows reforms
Mayoral candidate Maya Wiley unveiled her ethics reform plan for the city Friday outside Gov. Cuomo’s Midtown office, saying new rules are sorely overdue in light of the scandals that have rocked his administration.
Cuomo received an estimated $4 million as part of his book deal to write “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic” as first reported by The New York Times and allegedly used governor’s office staffers to help get the book finished while covering up the number of people who died in nursing homes due to COVID.
Wiley attacked Cuomo “for utilizing public dollars to make this book happen” and said if she’s elected to City Hall she’d ban city employees from getting city money to write books and will restore funding to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.
“Look, we do have a crisis, and it’s a crisis in leadership, and I’m going to call it,” she said. “I’m going to tell you that when I am mayor, if you walk this journey with me, I will make sure that we restore public trust in government by ensuring, number one, that there will be no city official or employee who can get paid with city dollars to write a book to profit off of the public.”
Wiley added that she’d beef up funding to the Conflicts of Interest Board, ban city employees who work for elected officials from doing “personal or political work” for them and prohibit administration employees from lobbying City Hall for the entirety of the tenure she hopes to have as mayor.
Right now, former administration officials are banned from doing such work for only a year.
Wiley, who served as Mayor de Blasio’s legal counsel, fielded several questions from reporters Friday about her own ethics quandaries during her time working for Hizzoner.
During her stint at City Hall, Wiley coined the term “agents of the city,” a designation she used for outside advisers to the mayor. She and the administration used the term as a defense for withholding email communications between the mayor and those advisers from the public. De Blasio ultimately had to release thousands of emails three years ago after a state Supreme Court ordered him to.
The outcome was a black eye for the administration with de Blasio notoriously speculating in one email about the premature demise of the Daily News.
“That would be good for us, right?” de Blasio wrote in May 2015 email to PR exec Jonathan Rosen.
When asked about how she came up with the “agents of the city” term Friday, Wiley responded that what she did “was tell folks what was happening, and what I’m going to do as mayor is be very transparent
with people about the rules of the road.”
“I will do what I have always done, which is follow the law,” she said. “I will make sure that there is no journalist that has to sue the government to make sure that we can see our emails. I will make sure that for example, when a lobbyist, or any donor to my campaign that has had city business, meets with me or any of my top officials, we will proactively make that public because there is nothing more important than public trust.”
Wiley also addressed a discrepancy between answers she and de Blasio gave when asking about the vetting of contributions to de Blasio’s Campaign for One New York, a controversial fundraising operation that the city Department of Investigation probed in 2018.
Wiley told DOI that she had “no significant involvement” over the vetting of donations, but the mayor indicated she and another aide “owned” the process.
When asked about this Friday, she said the primary role she served as counsel to the mayor was to “make sure that folks in City Hall and in city government knew the rules of the road, you know, knew what the law said and required.”
“That’s what I did,” she said.