‘Not guilty (like Hillary)

Blas group ripped, cleared

The city’s Campaign Finance Board on Wednesday took a page out of FBI Director James Comey’s playbook by clearing a nonprofit aligned with Mayor de Blasio of violating campaign-finance laws while slamming it for raising “serious policy and perception issues.”

Board Chair Rose Gill Hearn, a former commissioner of the Department of Investigation in the Bloomberg administration, said current laws allow politically connected nonprofits to run roughshod over the city’s campaign-finance system, which imposes strict limits on fundraising and spending.

The nonprofits, such as the mayor’s Campaign for One New York (CONY), have no such limits.

“The Campaign for One New York is very clearly not independent of Mr. de Blasio,” Hearn said in her slap. “The organization was established by the mayor to support and promote his policy agenda. It is run by the mayor’s closest advisers and staffed by personnel and consultants that ran his campaign in 2013.

“The fund-raising conducted by the Campaign for One New York plainly raises serious policy and perception issues.”

But in her announcement — reminiscent of Comey’s decision about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails — Hearn said there was no evidence the nonprofit was working to re-elect de Blasio in 2017, primarily because its spending to promote the mayor’s agenda occurred three years ahead of his reelection campaign.

Like Comey, who cleared Clinton of criminal conduct while rebuking her actions, Hearn warned that the board would continue to monitor the situation.

She called on the City Council to toughen the law, so nonprofits can’t haul in as much as $350,000 from a single contributor — as CONY did — while the maximum contribution to a mayoral candidate is set at $4,950.

The good-government group Common Cause asked in February that the board investigate both CONY and another de Blasio nonprofit, United for Affordable NYC, describing their activities as akin to a “shadow government.”

Common Cause Director Susan Lerner said the board’s decision was no shock, but still distressing. “I’m not surprised, although I am somewhat disappointed,” she said.

“I think the board was right that the situation points to a real gap in our campaign-finance law ... We don’t allow a pay-to-play atmosphere, and the mayor has gone around that, and there’s no excuse for that.”

De Blasio’s campaign team continued to maintain that CONY did nothing wrong. “It never engaged in any election campaign activity for any candidate, and shut down more than a year and a half before next year’s election,” said campaign spokesman Dan Levitan.

The fund-raising . . . raises serious policy and perception issues. —Campaign Finance Board Chair Rose Gill Hear non Mayor de B las io’ s Campaign for One New York