Mayor Bill de Blasio’s defense for misleading the public about lead-poisoned kids at city Housing Authority projects amounts to this: He didn’t actually lie; he just didn’t share all he knew.

At a press conference last November, de Blasio announced that four NYCHA kids had tested positive for elevated lead levels. Yet emails obtained by The Post show he was briefed the day before that it was 202.

The difference: The larger number covered the years 2010 to 2015, but de Blasio opted to share only the stat for 2014 to 2016.

On top of this, the four-page briefing for the mayor simply summarized info the administration had known for more than a year — but kept under wraps.

And de Blasio didn’t do a lot better in that first press conference, making it sound like his team was on top of the issue.

He said with a straight face that “four children in NYCHA tested positive for elevated lead levels, and they were in NYCHA apartments where physical fixes had to be achieved,” and the four had suffered “no lasting health impact that we can find at this point.” He also pretended he wasn’t minimizing things, noting that “four kids is the universe.”

This wasn’t coming clean: Deceptive misdirection was the strategy from the start.