Mayor Bill de Blasio was duped by disgraced donor Jona Rechnitz into a 2014 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that never came off, The Post has learned.
While it was known that Rechnitz had made the offer to broker the meeting in September 2014, emails obtained by The Post newly reveal that the mayor actually attempted to take him up on it.
The hastily arranged Sept. 30 tete-a-tete at the Palace Hotel in Midtown — which collapsed because Rechnitz couldn’t deliver — initially was orchestrated by de Blasio fundraiser Ross Offinger.
He responded to Rechnitz’s offer by saying that senior City Hall aide Avi Fink would be the point of contact.
Fink noted the meeting would have to be added to the mayor’s public schedule — which it was, at 5:45 p.m. — but without a time and location listed.
Eight minutes after the mayor’s schedule was updated, Fink told Rechnitz that “our [police] detail says they are hooking up with you.”
Fink then added that “we are gonna wanna move quickly from the lobby up to the destination pls on account of reporters snoopin around.”
It’s only then that the email trail suggests something went awry.
At 6:31 p.m., Fink wrote Rechnitz to ask, “Any word?”
Rechnitz responds a minute later, “No clue they confirmed 615.”
It wasn’t until 7:17 p.m. that City Hall updated the mayor’s schedule again, to say the meeting had been “postponed to later in the week.”
The exchanges came well before Rechnitz was outed as a power-broker wannabe who attempted to use his money to buy influence from City Hall and the NYPD.
He pleaded guilty in March to making contributions in exchange for advantageous treatment from government officials, but City Hall said he never got favors in return.
Asked what happened in those last moments the night of the near-meeting with Netanyahu, mayoral spokesman Eric Phillips said it turned out Rechnitz offered something he couldn’t deliver on.
“The meeting never happened and, like many other things involving this individual, the possibility of it appears to have been a figment of his imagination,” he said.
Despite their political differences, Hizzoner and Netanyahu did meet two days later at the Palace, and again last year in Israel.