De Blasio Says Donor Admitted Bribery To 'Save His Own Skin'

NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Bill de Blasio maintained his innocence of bribery allegations Friday even after court records revealed one of his campaign donors admitted to bribing a city official. De Blasio said the donor, Harendra Singh, pleaded guilty to bribery and fraud in 2016 to "save his own skin," not because anything was amiss in City Hall.

"He agreed to certain charges for his own self-preservation," de Blasio said Friday on WNYC's "The Brian Lehrer Show." "But I’ve been 100 percent consistent – what he said happened did not happen, period."

Singh, a Long Island restaurateur, admitted to Long Island federal prosecutors in October 2016 that he bribed an unnamed elected city official to secure a more favorable lease deal for his Queens restaurant, according to court records unsealed Wednesday.

The unsealed records describe de Blasio without naming him, The New York Times reported. A Times investigation last July detailed how de Blasio directed aides to help Singh with his restaurant deal after Singh raised thousands of dollars for his 2013 mayoral campaign.

Singh reportedly agreed to cooperate with Manhattan federal prosecutors' probe of de Blasio's fundraising efforts. That investigation ended last March without any charges against the mayor.

De Blasio, a Democrat, has maintained that city officials acted appropriately and only made decisions based on the merits of Singh's case. But on Friday he suggested Singh wasn't telling the truth.

"This is a guy who obviously is a bad human being who did bad things and was caught doing bad things, and then when people do that, all they try and do is lessen the punishment to save their own skins," the mayor told Lehrer. "But this has been looked at really carefully. Nothing that he describes as having happened, happened, period."

Lehrer pressed de Blasio, saying his defense resembled President Donald Trump's attacks on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

But de Blasio said the two cases are "apples and oranges" because the City Hall probe closed without finding any wrongdoing. He declined to discuss the matter further, saying he's answered questions about it "a thousand times."

Singh, who has not been sentenced, was the second de Blasio donor to admit to bribery. Jona Rechnitz, a Brooklyn businessman who raised thousands of dollars for the mayor's 2013 campaign, pleaded guilty in June 2016 to bribing the head of the city's correction officers union. Rechnitz was a witness in the federal corruption case last year against the union's former president, Norman Seabrook.

Singh also pleaded guilty to bribing two Long Island officials: former Nassau County executive Edward Mangano and former Oyster Bay Town Supervisor John Venditto. Singh cooperated with an investigation that led to their indictments last October.

In a statement, Singh's lawyer, Anthony La Pinta, said Singh "pleaded guilty to his crimes because he is, in fact, guilty of those crimes."

"He is prepared to testify truthfully irrespective of his past relationships with his co conspirators or their public status," La Pinta said.

In an interview with the Times published Monday, Joon H. Kim, the former acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan who announced the office's decision not to charge de Blasio, disputed the mayor's claim that the investigation with which Singh cooperated found no evidence of unethical behavior.

"We do not ask the question, "Is the conduct ethical or appropriate?'" Kim told the Times. "As a private citizen, I certainly hope that a decision by a prosecutor not to bring criminal charges is not the standard that we should expect from our leaders."

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at a rally in January 2017. Photo by D Dipasupil/Getty Images)