De Blasio promises ‘evidence’ of no wrongdoing

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is promising to release a “whole lot of evidence” showing his administration, under investigation on multiple fronts, did nothing wrong, Politico reported.

De Blasio, who took about an hour of questions on Wednesday about the investigations, said he would provide proof showing city officials did not act favorably toward people who had given large amounts of money to his nonprofit, Campaign for One New York, or other campaigns.

{mosads}“Never do we allow any of those considerations to affect the government and policy-making decisions,” de Blasio said, according to the news outlet.

“In fact, as we will be showing you more and more in the coming weeks, a stunning number of donors and supporters not only did not get things they hoped they would get, they got rejection of things they hoped they would get, because we ran a government that was clean and appropriate,” he said.

There are at least five separate investigations surrounding fundraising for Campaign for One New York and other fundraising efforts.

The city’s conflicts of interest board ruled the mayor was allowed to personally raise money for Campaign for One New York if he did not solicit donors with business “pending or about to be pending before the city.”

Those donors were determined by de Blasio’s lawyers.  

“What we all obviously understand is that we need to protect the public trust and are fairly confident that the public trust was not actually violated here,” said counsel Maya Wiley, who appeared with de Blasio.

“It is absolutely permissible under the ethics rules for a city official to request donations from people who have business before the city,” Wiley said later, Politico reported.

“The distinction here that is complex and getting lost is ‘pending transactions.’ The process that we had in place was to review, to understand whether anyone had any pending transaction.”

De Blasio said Wednesday he doesn’t “accept the notion that in a Democratic society, it’s wrong for people to be involved politically.”

“What’s important is to have real clear standards and clear adherence to things on conflict of interest regulations and disclosure regulations,” he said.