Ousted city Investigations Commissioner Mark Peters has delivered his formal response to being fired, and it’s a bombshell: Peters charges Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly pressured him to quash reports exposing his administration’s failures.
But what — if anything — will the City Council do about it?
In a letter to the City Council, Peters says his independence is the real reason he’s the first Department of Investigations chief to be axed in the agency’s 145-year history.
The point, he argues, was not just to silence him but also to “cause any successor to think twice before conducting” future investigations of City Hall’s misdeeds.
The mayor’s office denies it all. But Peters’ explosive litany of allegations, dating back nearly two years, has a strong ring of truth.
Peters writes of “a late night screaming call from the Mayor” and “a pattern of intimidation” each time DOI was about to issue one of its scathing reports — as it did on the City Housing Authority, the Administration for Children’s Services, the NYPD and other city agencies.
On top of de Blasio’s personal interventions, Peters says he faced repeated pressure to hold back from First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris. “Taken as a whole,” he writes, “these incidents demonstrate a pattern in which the Mayor and his senior staff believe that I owe a duty of loyalty to the Mayor rather than to the City.”
Peters’ firing also comes right after he notified the council that DOI has investigations underway in which the mayor and senior aides could be implicated.
All that said, Peters’ letter leaves another nagging question: If this unacceptable behavior has been going on since early 2017, why is he first revealing it now — and only after getting fired?
All this should be fully aired at a City Council hearing. Peters has volunteered to testify, behind closed doors if necessary. Yet the council doesn’t seem interested — not even Peters’ longtime defender, Investigations Committee Chairman Ritchie Torres.
This reeks. At the very least, the City Council needs to resolve these claims before OK’ing de Blasio’s choice of a successor, Margaret Garnett. Peters’ allegations are far too serious to leave up in the air.
