Ethics Panel Investigating de Blasio’s Nonprofit Is Said to Issue Broad Subpoena

 

By William K. Rashbaum 

 A state ethics panel investigating Mayor Bill de Blasio’s political nonprofit organization has served a sweeping subpoena on City Hall seeking communications among the mayor, his aides, the nonprofit, its donors and consulting firms that worked for it, people with knowledge of the matter said.

The scope of the subpoena suggests a widening of the investigation by the State Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which enforces state lobbying laws and has been focused on whether the group, the Campaign for One New York, illegally lobbied the city in 2015.

At the same time, several lawyers representing donors to the group who have been contacted by the panel said the inquiry also appeared to be focused on whether some donations from lobbyists or their clients who have business before the city actually constituted undisclosed gifts to the mayor. Any such undisclosed gifts would violate state lobbying laws.

The subpoena was served on Sept. 14, just four days after a State Supreme Court judge in Albany rejected the group’s effort to quash two earlier subpoenas from the panel. The judge ordered the nonprofit and several consulting companies that had done work for it and for Mr. de Blasio’s mayoral campaign to provide almost all of the documents sought by the panel, also known as Jcope. 

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Source: The New York Times (via The Empire Report)