As the New York City mayor’s race entered its home stretch this week, a reporter for The Times of London, Bevan Hurley, sent an email to Bill de Blasio.
He wanted to know what the former Mayor of New York City thought about the upcoming race.
He received an incredible response. While de Blasio has supported Democrat Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, the former mayor confessed in an email to the New Zealand-born journalist that while he admired Mamdani’s ambition, the Democratic nominee was making dangerously “optimistic assumptions” about how much money new taxes would bring in.
“In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial,” de Blasio wrote.
The Times, part of the Murdoch family’s News Corp. empire that has been waging a broad campaign against the Democratic Socialist candidate, rushed to print with the explosive story that the former mayor had broken with his would-be successor. Its sister publication, the New York Post, quickly aggregated and amplified it. Melissa De Rosa, a top aide to Mamdani’s opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, weighed in to amplify the story.
The only problem? The email had not come from the former mayor at all. De Blasio responded with shock, demanding The Times retract the story. “It is an absolute violation of journalistic ethics. The truth is I fully support @ZohranKMamdani and believe his vision is both necessary and achievable.” The former mayor marveled, via text message to Semafor, that he’d never had this experience in 25 years of public life.