Mayor Bill de Blasio took a page out of Rodney Dangerfield’s playbook — griping in an email that he gets no “respect” from the city’s news media, newly released records revealed Thursday.
In a Nov. 15, 2014, message titled “Familiarity breeds contempt,” Hizzoner whined to City Hall aides and an outside political consultant about how a column he’d penned about recent election results was rejected by The New York Times.
“Don’t take this truism the wrong way, guys,” de Blasio wrote.
“It’s not directed at you, but more at a reality we’ve become accustomed to: I’m not treated with the respect of previous mayors.”
In another email a month earlier, de Blasio said he wanted to “release the tiger” by having first lady Chirlane McCray appear on a left-leaning cable news channel.
“If the info we’re receiving is true, and Chirlane is about to be attacked in Republican State Senate mailings, then I propose a course of action: prep her and put her on MSNBC to defend herself,” he wrote on Oct. 13, 2014. “Let’s release the tiger.”
But his intel apparently turned out to be faulty, and McCray never got to bare her fangs.De Blasio’s candid remarks are contained in more than 14,000 pages of emails released by City Hall under cover of a day when the news was dominated by the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The Post and NY1 had to file suit to get access to the emails, which de Blasio claimed were exempt from the state Freedom of Information Law on grounds that his political consultants were “agents of the city.”
Those arguments were rejected by a judge and an appeals court.
Thursday’s dump included an email from just two months into de Blasio’s first term, in which he attacked an article published by the Capital New York website.
“Notwithstanding my willingness to try to evolve and improve, I have to note that this piece . . . is totally dick-ish,” he fumed on March 3, 2014.
“I think the truth is we’re dealing with a biased and ridiculous corporate media that was only too happy to give [predecessor Mayor] Michael Bloomberg a free ride.”
The emails also reveal that former de Blasio adviser Peter Ragone had a meltdown on Nov. 13, 2014, a day after the mayor showed up 20 minutes late for the 13th annual memorial of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed over in the Rockaways in 2001.
Ragone complained that the administration’s positive achievements were “blown out of the water by sleeping late.”
“Yesterday was literally one of the worst days from a media standpoint of the administration,” Ragone wrote angrily to mayoral aides.
He also pointed out that de Blasio, who was positioning himself as a national spokesman for progressive causes, had placed himself in a “precarious place” by endorsing Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his running mate, Lieutenant Gov. Kathy Hochul.“BDB campaigned for a conservative, gun-toting candidate dem in Hochul and not [Zephyr] Teachout or [Tim] Wu. He campaigned for Cuomo — charter loving, tax cutting Dem . . . We’re not intellectually honest here folks and hypocrisy will be messy in any setting.”
Teachout ran against Cuomo on the Working Families Party line that year. Tim Wu was the WFP candidate challenging Hochul.
Ragone did not include de Blasio on that email chain.
Other emails show that de Blasio’s Feb. 3, 2014, appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” was totally scripted, with a planned “Q&A” circulated among Hizzoner’s advisers six days before.
The proposed back-and-forth included a question about “the secret behind” mayoral son Dante’s afro.
But City Hall blacked out the answer — which wound up on the cutting-room floor — and cited the “personal privacy exemption” in the Freedom of Information Law.