When is a bribe not a bribe? NYC mayor says he did no wrong

Harendra Singh was in a losing battle with New York City over millions of dollars in rent on his waterfront restaurant. So, by his own admission, he opened his wallet and bribed his way out of the problem.

He donated thousands of dollars to the mayor’s election campaign and, as a result, got a meeting with top city officials in which he hammered out a more favorable lease.

Singh ultimately pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge. The man he admitted to bribing, Mayor Bill de Blasio, was not prosecuted.

That incongruity dogged de Blasio anew over the past week after Singh’s guilty plea, made in secret in 2016, became public for the first time. Reporters peppered the Democrat with questions about how someone could be guilty of giving him a bribe, but him not being guilty of accepting it.

“Everything we did on that matter and everything else we’ve done in this administration was legal, was appropriate. We hold ourselves to high ethical standards,” the mayor said. “The federal government looked at this exhaustively. I’ve got nothing else to say about it. We handled things in the appropriate manner.”

The mayor also suggested that Singh pleaded guilty only because he was in trouble for a variety of corrupt acts, many related to his dealings with political figures on Long Island.

“This man did a lot of bad things in a lot of places,” de Blasio told WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer. “This guy, to save his own skin, struck a plea deal with the federal prosecutors . ... He agreed to certain charges for his own self-preservation. But I’ve been 100 percent consistent. What he said happened did not happen period.”

Legal experts said there are pragmatic reasons prosecutors might go after someone who tried to pay a bribe without charging the person who allegedly received it.

“In practice, the bribe payer is almost always the easy case,” said Kelly Kramer, a Washington lawyer who leads the white collar criminal defense practice at Mayer Brown. “The bribe payer has a very clear motive. Often times, you’ll have internal email or text that makes clear what their objective is. The recipient, you tend to have less evidence about their intent. You might have a recording. Lots of other times it’s more ambiguous.”

“Bribery is not just about the payment,” he added. “Proving intent is always the trick.”

The former acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Joon Kim, announced last March that prosecutors had concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to charge de Blasio with a federal crime.

Investigators had examined both the mayor’s dealings with Singh and with another businessman, Jona Rechnitz, who admitted buying himself political access with campaign contributions.