De Blasio’s office presses Bloomberg to release mayoral emails from private server: report

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office has pressed presidential candidate and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg to release emails from his mayoral staff sent from a private server.

These emails from more than a dozen of Bloomberg’s top city staffers during his tenure were hosted on Bloomberg.net services and have repeatedly been requested by de Blasio’s administration, according to almost three years of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

“Bloomberg LP still needs to turn over the emails,” Freddi Goldstein, de Blasio’s press secretary, recently told BuzzFeed News. “There is a responsibility to the public to turn over these records.”

It has previously been reported that the former mayor used private servers for emails during his 12-year term, which is allowed under city rules. But the records obtained by BuzzFeed News show how de Blasio’s administration spent years trying to get the emails to no avail.

“If you keep calling, after a certain period of time and no one is returning your calls or responding to your emails, you know, there’s other business to tend to, and it was clearly becoming fruitless effort,” an official in the New York City mayor’s office told BuzzFeed News.

The city’s law department began requesting the emails in April 2016. Bloomberg eventually gave over 1,590 emails but only ones in which he was personally the sender or recipient, according to BuzzFeed News and The City.

At least 15 members of his former staff including deputy mayors and top policy advisers were considered “significant users of Bloomberg.net while they were in the Mayor’s Office,” according to a May 2016 email from the city’s law department cited by BuzzFeed News. 

“They’re the people making the city run,” the mayor’s office official said. “I can tell you that staffers at that level are discussing everything from a snowstorm to major policy announcements.”

Bloomberg 2020 spokesman Stu Loeser did not answer questions from BuzzFeed News about why the emails were not disclosed and whether they were only used for nongovernmental work. But he mentioned the officials also had accounts from NYC.gov also operated by the city.

“Bloomberg LP provided to the City hundreds of thousands of bloomberg.net emails between the Mayor and his staffers regarding City business,” Loeser said. “The fact that some staffer used their terminals to message each other on non-City matters is no different than colleagues sending gmails to each other, which happens in every workplace.”