Mayor de Blasio set Monday for his State of the City address, but possibly more worrisome is the state of his personal finances — at least when it comes to financing his mounting legal bills.
Last week, we noted problems with de Blasio’s plan to set up a legal-defense fund to pay the lawyers representing him in several corruption probes. Those problems may be worse than we thought.
On Friday, Hizzoner admitted that not only does he need cash to cover the lawyers’ fees, he has yet to pay any of the bills he’s already gotten. Plus, he might not even disclose what those bills are, since they’re for his personal defense and will be paid for with private money.
Huh? The idea that the law firm is, in effect, extending him credit is troubling enough, since that can be seen as a “favor” — just as any lower-than-usual rates it charges would be. But how can a mayor up to his eyeballs in corruption probes try to keep such key info secret, especially when he insists he has done nothing wrong?
What makes the secretive deferred-payment deal particularly problematic is that the law firm, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, also lobbies city agencies on behalf of clients with business before the city. So de Blasio may return those favors in some shady way.
More: The mayor’s attorney at Kramer Levin is Barry Berke, who also represents the Campaign for One New York — a group de Blasio set up but that was supposed to be independent. CONY’s fundraising on behalf of de Blasio is also under investigation.
The conflicts mushroom: In 2014, de Blasio withdrew the nomination of another Kramer Levin lawyer, Marcie Kesner, to the Landmarks Preservation Commission because she’d have to recuse herself from too many land-use cases.
And Berke is also the mayor’s rep on the Lincoln Center board of directors and his ex-campaign treasurer.
OK, some of this may be technically legal — but the cloud over de Blasio’s head certainly isn’t getting any thinner.
As David Grandeau, a former executive director of the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, puts it: “If you give money to the defense fund, you’re benefiting the mayor [and] that would be problematic for those that are lobbyists or their clients.”
De Blasio whines that he has no choice about how he funds his defense, since “I’m not a billionaire like my predecessor,” Mike Bloomberg.
But he does have a choice about being transparent. Besides, if he can’t pay lawyers to defend him, maybe he should have made extra sure his team did nothing to spark all those probes in the first place.
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