The City Council is reviewing transcripts of sworn testimony by Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters in the wake of an independent probe that found he provided “materially misleading” statements at a hearing in March.
During a preliminary budget hearing on March 26, Peters was asked by two Council members about his attempt to incorporate an office that was created as a stand-alone entity to investigate the public schools into his own operation.
The attempted power grab sparked an independent probe by former federal prosecutor James McGovern, who raised red flags about Peters’ testimony amid wider findings that Peters’ actions had constituted an abuse of authority.
“My special counsel Rob Newman is someone who’s been working on this and looking at the testimony and the transcripts of our hearings and how that squares with the McGovern report,” Council Speaker Corey Johnson said Wednesday at City Hall.
“I think that it’s important for us to follow up on what that report said and to see if it squares [with] the interpretation of the staff and the lawyers here.”
McGovern’s Oct. 10 report found that Peters’ testimony at the budget hearing “contained several misleading statements and omissions that obscured the nature of the ongoing dispute” over his attempted seizure of the schools investigations office, known as SCI.
It pointed specifically to testimony by Peters that the schools investigator had always reported to DOI — a claim it said was “technically true, but materially misleading.”
Another Peters claim, that no one at the Department of Education had objected to his attempted takeover of the independent office was deemed “not even technically true” by McGovern.
His report found that Peters was informed that the Department of Education wouldn’t approve his maneuver unless it went to a vote before the DOE administrative board, the Panel for Educational Policy.
Even before the report, Mayor de Blasio had been contemplating removing Peters as DOI commissioner following a series of brutal probes by DOI of City Hall and several top agencies.
De Blasio has declined to comment on the McGovern report in recent weeks, saying he has yet to read it.