‘Denied donor’ list is all of two people
Mayor de Blasio on Friday finally released a rundown of campaign donors who wanted favors from City Hall but didn’t get them — a year and a half after promising to do so.
But after pondering the issue since May 2016, he came up with just two examples not previously disclosed.
One was an unnamed real-estate developer who didn’t get a contract to run the city’s ferry service, and the other was an “important financial backer” allegedly seeking information on a land-use matter.
“I made clear that was impossible to say,” de Blasio wrote on Medium.com, referring to the landuse issue. “It didn’t matter how much money he gave my campaign. I would have given the same answer to anyone.”
A City Hall source identified the donors as Douglas Durst in the ferry deal and Don Peebles, who was inquiring about the Long Island College Hospital development.
In an interview last year, Peebles said de Blasio asked him to donate $20,000 during the hospital negotiations. When the proposal was rejected, Peebles demanded his money back, according to DNAinfo.com
De Blasio promised last year to provide an extensive list of campaign donors who were denied favors as questions swirled about in- vestigations into his campaign-finance practices.
“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 because we ran a government that was clean and appropriate,” the mayor had said at a testy press conference in May 2016.
But the article he produced fell far short of that “stunning number.”
The mayor even dredged up the previously disclosed cases involving two donors “whom we now know to be involved with a police-corruption case.”
De Blasio said both requested special favors but didn’t get them — without mentioning that they had special access to top mayoral aides.
The mayor’s claim of integrity doesn’t jibe with previous statements by prosecutors.
When they concluded investigations of the administration earlier year, both Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. and Acting US Attorney Joon Kim issued scathing statements about the administration.
“The transactions appear contrary to the intent and spirit of the laws that impose candidate contribution limits,” Vance said of his investigation into the mayor’s fund-raising on behalf of state Senate Democrats.
We will be showing you . . . a stunning number of donors [who] did not get things. Mayor de Blasio in May 2016