Blas ‘delete deceit’ on missing e-mails

Mayor de Blasio on Friday refused to say whether he deleted e-mails from a shady donor that surfaced in a federal bribery trial this week

“Did you delete those e-mails?” the mayor was asked by WNYC radio’s Brain Lehrer during his weekly appearance on the program.

“We turned over thousands of e-mails. We gave everything we had,” de Blasio responded, without answering the question he was asked.

“I really don’t know the specifics of it,” he continued, getting testy during a prolonged exchange. “I just told you — anything we had we turned over.”

The mayor also claimed the issue isn’t even worth discussing.

“There was nothing that happened here that was consequential,” he insisted.

The newly revealed e-mails contradict de Blasio’s repeated contentions that he was never close with mega-donor Jona Rechnitz, now a government witness who has admitted to bribing government officials.

The Mayor’s Office delivered a batch of Rechnitz e-mails to and from de Blasio in response to Freedom of Information Law requests from news organizations including The Post. But two key e-mails were omitted.

In a Nov. 3, 2014, e-mail to de Blasio’s personal account, Rechnitz urged the mayor not to allow then-NYPD Chief of Department Philip Banks to retire.

“What can we do for you to refuse Banks’s resignation and get him back in?” Rechnitz wrote.

The e-mail, which got de Blasio to meet with Rechnitz shortly afterward, was not included in City Hall’s Aug. 4, 2017, response to a FOIL request by The Post.

Additionally, a February 2014 e-mail introduced at trial, in which Rechnitz offers the mayor tickets for a Knicks game, was also excluded from City Hall’s response.

When he tried to dismiss the Nov. 3 e-mail as inconsequential, Lehrer asked him, “Do you think that an e-mail from a major donor asking you not to accept the resignation of an NYPD official is not government business?”

The mayor responded, “We do our best to be transparent. I don’t know why people keep coming back to it because it’s been covered and covered and covered.”

Rules set by the Department of Records and Information Services for retaining government e-mails appear to forbid the deletion of Rechnitz’s e-mails to the mayor.

But City Hall officials insist their own policies allow for the deletion of a significant number of government e-mails.

On Friday, de Blasio blasted Rechnitz as a “very troubled person who’s committed crimes and has lied incessantly.”

I just told you — anything we had we turned over. Mayor de Blasio (left), insisting that his administration handed over all e-mails he sent to and received from corrupt mega-donor Jona Rechnitz