De Blasio's Legal Bills For Federal Probe To Cost Taxpayers $2.6M

NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio's legal bills related to federal prosecutors' investigation of his fundraising practices will likely cost city taxpayers $2.6 million, the Law Department disclosed Friday. The department is seeking approval of a $2,627,500 contract with the Midtown-based firm Kramer Levin Naftalis and Frankel, according to a notice posted online Friday.

The firm aided de Blasio, a Democrat, as the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan probed his political fundraising practices. Federal prosecutors decided not to charge any city officials last year, but had harsh words for the mayor's conduct.

The Law Department disclosed last month that it planned to award the Kramer firm a contract "to provide legal services to the Mayor in connection with an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and related work," the notice says. The proposed contract runs through June 30 of this year.

The Law Department submitted the pact for approval nearly two years after the firm started work for the city in April 2014, according to the Law Department's January notice. That's because de Blasio decided to hire the firm before he made a final decision about whether the city would pay its bills, the Law Department said.

Other city officials' legal bills related to the investigation are expected to cost at least $11 million, according to the New York Post, which first reported the amount of de Blasio's bills.

There's a public hearing on the Kramer firm's contract at 10 a.m. on Feb. 15 at the Department of City Planning building at 22 Reade St. in Manhattan.

A mayoral spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday evening.

Federal prosecutors reportedly focused on possible favors de Blasio and other city officials did for big donors to de Blasio's 2013 mayoral campaign. Two donors, the real estate developer Jona Rechnitz and the restaurateur Harendra Singh, pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in 2016.

De Blasio initially said he would pay them with an outside legal defense fund, but changed course after learning that fund would be subject to strict campaign finance rules, the Post reported.

"I want to affirm I did try to go a different route," de Blasio said on WNYC in July, according to the Post. "And I thought a lot about it and I came to the conclusion it just didn’t make sense, that the consistent and appropriate thing is any employee who has not done anything wrong and obviously not as you said – clear, not indicted, et cetera – deserves legal representation from the City of New York."

The disclosure of the contract's cost comes a week after unsealed federal court records revealed Singh's October 2016 guilty plea to bribery and other charges. He agreed to cooperate with separate federal probes of de Blasio and two elected officials on Long Island.

The revelation of the plea has brought renewed questions for de Blasio about his dealings with Singh, whom the mayor described last week as "a bad human being who did bad things." He avoided several inquiries from reporters at a news conference Tuesday, saying he was done discussing the case.

"The federal government looked at this exhaustively. I’ve got nothing else to say about it," de Blasio said Tuesday. "We handled things in the appropriate manner."

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at an event in September 2016. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)