Bill’s secret agents

Gawk at but don’t be distracted by the Thanksgiving-eve unveiling of hundreds of emails between City Hall staff and mayoral media guru Jonathan Rosen and associates: The deeper story here is the ocean of communiques the public still isn’t seeing, and must.

Attorneys for Mayor de Blasio are fighting a lawsuit seeking public release of emails to and from Rosen and four other unpaid outside advisers to the mayor, by wielding the absurdist fiction that the men are “agents of the city.”

Invoking the magic words, they hope to convince Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Joan Lobis that de Blasio is entitled to classify an unknown number of messages as internal government deliberations that he has no duty to release under state Freedom of Information Law.

And so City Hall has shared only the most banal correspondence, mostly tedious email chains attempting to schedule meetings between the mayor’s people and Rosen’s.

To read between the lines is to perceive the troubling implications of the mayor’s suppressing substantive discussions between himself, his aides, and communications consultant Rosen; political consultants Bill Hyers and Nicholas Baldick; message-meister John Del Cecato, and U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard. Last month, de Blasio also threw the “agents” cloak over campaign organizer Josh Gold.

All except Gaspard masterminded de Blasio’s Campaign for One New York, under investigation by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara for the possibility City Hall dispensed favors to its donors.

First, wince at the spectacle of Campaign for One New York fundraiser Ross Offinger emailing Rosen and top de Blasio deputies Tony Shorris and Emma Wolfe a list of real estate developers “I am shooting for” — including Rosen clients who had big projects awaiting city approvals, Jed Walentas, Bruce Ratner and Stephen Green.

Then contemplate other messages indicating Rosen was scheduled to join an August 2014 meeting with city officials about de Blasio’s housing program, poised to unleash vast new development opportunities, as it gelled.

Were Rosen a city employee, no way would city ethics rules allow him to moonlight for companies seeking actions from City Hall.

Not an employee, not an agent, not a nothing — any more than Cathie Black was an “agent of the city” when Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s lawyers made that claim in a failed attempt to suppress emails related to frenzied efforts to install her as schools chancellor.

“Wholly devoid of merit,” a judge deemed the “agents” claim in ordering the Black emails’ release.

Lobis has no reason to rule differently. De Blasio should spare the city its mounting legal costs defending the preposterous — and release the damn emails already.