‘Transparent’ Chutzpah

Don’t play poker with Mayor de Blasio — not when he can keep a straight face while telling enormous whoppers, such as the one about his latest mass e-mail dump. On NY1 Monday, de Blasio claimed the release of 14,000-plus pages of City Hall messages proves he’s all about “transparency” and openness.

One problem: He neglected to mention that the only reason those e-mails went public in the first place is that The Post and NY1 fought in court to get them — over the mayor’s furious objections.

And even then, City Hall carefully dumps the material on days plainly chosen to bury the often-embarrassing news. The latest release, for example, came last Thursday, while the entire nation was engrossed in the Brett Kavanaugh hearing.

That helped hide such revelations as the fact that de Blasio’s regular daily schedule includes three hours for the gym.

Yet to the mayor, the fact that the e-mails were made public at all is somehow a feather in his cap.

“Fourteen thousand pages being disclosed is a pretty rare thing in public life,” he declared. “And it’s all there, and people can analyze it all that they want and ask all the questions for days and weeks on end, so I would say it’s transparency.”

We’d call it something else. Because it certainly wasn’t transparent when de Blasio claimed his communications with outside consultants and political advisers were protected from public disclosure, simply because he’d dubbed them “agents of the city.”

It took a three-year court battle to finally pry de Blasio’s messages loose. Now he’s pretending their release was all his idea after all. That’s not transparency — it’s chutzpah. Two courts ruled in no uncertain terms that the public’s right to know overrides de Blasio’s desperate attempts to keep the seamier side of his mayoralty secret.

Actually, that was a victory for full transparency — but a defeat for Bill de Blasio.