NO NONSENSE
City’s top prober rips Prez’s allergy to truth
In her first week on the job, Mayor de Blasio’s newly appointed chief investigator took a few shots at Team Trump’s aversion to facts.
Speaking at an ethics symposium at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan Thursday, Department of Investigation Commissioner Margaret Garnett scolded those who would embrace nonsensical “deep state” conspiracy theories or label any truth they don’t like as an “alternative fact.”
Garnett, appointed by de Blasio after he fired his first DOI commissioner last month, at first tried to keep her critique bipartisan, stating, “We are living in a time when it has become fashionable — across the political spectrum — to run down public servants and government workers.”
Noting that she came from a military family and that she’s spent her entire career in public service, she defended government workers and criticized those who “mock public employees as incompetent or people who just couldn’t cut it in the private sector” or “spin wild conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ acting for their own interests.”
But she wound up clearly going after Trump’s “fake news” mantra and his reflexive habit of dismissing facts he doesn’t like as fiction made up by a news media he’s dubbed the “enemy of the people.”
In an obvious reference to Trump’s top adviser Kellyanne Conway’s assertion that the media present “alternative facts,” Garnett stated, “We’re in what seems like a dark time for the truth, when the idea of objective facts is under assault.”
Garnett, whose former jobs include federal prosecutor in Manhattan and chief of the state attorney general’s criminal division, promised to continue DOI’s tradition of pursuing both specific criminal corruption cases while also uncovering agency-wide failures that merit reform.
“One aspect of being a prosecutor is hard and sometimes frustrating — that is being limited to doing your cases, with almost no ability to think about broader issues or do anything about them,” she said. “What is exciting about DOI is its dual role as both a criminal investigator and an oversight agency that is charged with identifying systemic issues of waste, mismanagement or vulnerability to fraud.”
Already this week, the chairman of the city council’s investigations committee, Ritchie Torres, has asked Garnett to open investigations into whether the mayor hid from the public some of his personal emails with a corrupt donor and how NYPD handled a top chief accused of abusive behavior on the job.
Asked about both of these requests Thursday after her speech, Garnett declined to comment, noting DOI’s policy of not talking about ongoing inquiries.