After resisting calls to step aside, Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters announced late Friday that he’s removing himself from the agency’s probe of the mayor’s 2013 campaign — on which he served as treasurer.
The mounting pressure included calls from Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito that Peters keep his word from two years ago to step away from any DOI probes of de Blasio’s campaign.
“A potential conflict may exist here and we believe a recusal is appropriate at this time,” her spokesman Eric Koch told The Post just hours before DOI issued a two-sentence statement saying Peters was out.
The feds are investigating the mayor’s campaign and non-profit groups as part of a growing look at alleged favor-trading between two businessmen and top officials at the NYPD.
Peters claimed earlier this week that no conflict of interest exists because the questionable donations to the mayor’s 2013 campaign occurred after he left as treasurer.
“His recusal at this time would only serve to impede DOI’s active investigation of this matter,” the agency said in a statement Wednesday.
But most of the donations to the campaign from real estate financier Jona Rechnitz were made when Peters was still serving as treasurer in October 2013.
Rechnitz bundled $41,650 for the 2013 race and his firm contributed $50,000 in January 2014 to the mayor’s non-profit, the Campaign for One New York.
The second businessman under the microscope, Jeremy Reichberg, raised at least $35,000 for CONY at a fundraiser in his Brooklyn home in May 2014.
Peters told a Council committee in January 2014 that “if the Campaign Finance Board were to make a referral to DOI involving the Mayor’s 2013 mayoral campaign then yes, for that I would recuse myself.”
He insisted that was unlikely since the mayor is so honest.
“I have not only no reason to believe that the Mayor would ever engage in unethical conduct, I am very confident the mayor would not engage in unethical conduct,” he said at the time.
DOI also separately said that Peters is recusing himself from a probe of the administration by four separate investigative bodies over a controversial real estate deal on the Lower East Side.
