Mayor de Blasio was on the hot seat for the first installment of his new TV show Sunday, as viewers grilled him on a federal probe of two of his campaign donors, a spate of Big Apple slashings, and his plummeting approval ratings.
Days after instructing his lawyer to contact US Attorney Preet Bharara to offer “help” with the investigation into donors who allegedly bartered gifts for NYPD favors, de Blasio claimed on “Ask the Mayor” that he still hasn’t heard from the feds.
“It’s a straightforward situation. We haven’t been contacted in any way, shape or form from any federal agency,” he told the show’s hosts Thursday, when it was taped. “We’re happy to help in any way we can. We still have not been asked any questions.”
New Yorkers peppered de Blasio with call-in questions for the interview, which was the first of four that will air on WNBC/Channel 4 this year. Unlike his predecessors, Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg — who took questions on weekly radio call-in shows — de Blasio has agreed to appear only quarterly each year.
One questioner asked whether a pending affordable-housing plan in East New York would push low-income residents from the Brooklyn neighborhood. Another wanted to know about de Blasio’s approach to making neighborhoods safer in light of recent knife attacks that have plagued the city.
“The slashings issue is real. We’ve seen the statistics grow,” de Blasio said.
He then added that the NYPD is now “flooding” neighborhoods with high concentrations of nightclubs to stem the tide and that “the rate of growth of slashings has started to slow.”
Co-host Chuck Scarborough got into the act, too, asking Hizzoner to respond to remarks made last week by Bharara about the “show-me-the-money culture that has been pervading” the city and state “for some time now.”
“I don’t know what he’s referring to . . . I was a little surprised by that,” de Blasio said. “The distance between the New York City of the past, which really was rife with corruption, and today’s New York City” is “night and day.”
The mayor agreed that problems with corruption “still pervade” Albany, but argued that city government is “highly regulated” and “cleaner and better” than it was decades ago.
De Blasio, who stumped for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at two Brooklyn churches on Sunday, also managed to duck a question from The Post about the $655,000 his campaign contributor Jona Rechnitz convinced the City Council to put toward a law-enforcement sensitivity seminar.
Last week, de Blasio noted that contributors are entitled to “nothing” in exchange for their campaign cash.
Additional reporting by Shari Logan