Yesterday, the City Council held our hearing on Randy Mastro’s nomination for Corporation Counsel – the top lawyer for the Mayor, the City Council, and all of the city’s agencies. His resume is impressive, but his record disqualifies him for this position.
Few dispute Mastro’s skills and experience as an attorney. From his public roles – federal prosecutor, Chief of Staff and Deputy Mayor to Rudy Giuliani – to his private work at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Mastro has a decades-long record of representing high-profile clients in challenging cases. He fights hard.
But the Corporation Counsel must represent the City Council and the Mayor with equal vigor, and always in service of the public interest. What we heard yesterday was that Mastro, time and again, has instead used his talents to take extreme positions on behalf of powerful executives, defending their abuse of power, and fought against the public interest.
For example, when Mayor Giuliani sensed that a string of state audits could threaten his 1997 re-election campaign, he sent Mastro – the Deputy Mayor – on offense. Mastro publicly trashed the State Comptroller to the New York Times, accusing him of “compromising the integrity of his office.” In reality, the Comptroller was simply requesting routine information on agencies’ performance in cleaning trash, fighting crime, and distributing public benefits.
But Mastro didn’t stop at public attacks. He evicted state inspectors from the offices of city agencies. He ignored 17 separate subpoenas from the State Comptroller. And by the time New York’s highest court ruled that what Mastro did was plainly illegal, Giuliani had run down the clock long enough to dodge public accountability and win re-election.
Episodes like this litter Mastro’s career. There was the time he chaired a Charter Revision Committee in a failed attempt by Giuliani to block a rival from succeeding him as Mayor. There was the time he mailed anti-City Council attack ads from City Hall to almost a million New Yorkers during the 1998 budget fight. There was a period when Mastro helped the Mayor use the City’s Department of Investigation to collect intel on political opponents and their staff.
And then there was his work on the Bridgegate scandal in 2014. The public – not a private client – paid Mastro and his firm $8 million to investigate whether Governor Chris Christie had closed lanes on the George Washington Bridge to exact revenge on a political enemy. During this investigation, Mastro – a normally meticulous attorney – interviewed 70 witnesses and reviewed 250,000 documents, but somehow kept no notes or transcripts of his work. His report cleared Christie of any wrongdoing, and his failure to keep any records prevented the public from challenging his findings.
Mastro’s conduct was so egregious that a federal judge said it had the “same effect” as shredding documents. The judge condemned his report as a “calculated strategy” of “opacity and gamesmanship” rather than the transparent, thorough inquiry that the public deserved.
There is a pattern here. Mastro has made a career of using his incredible skills to help ambitious, unprincipled politicians gain and wield power. In his public roles, instead of serving the public interest, he has chosen to serve powerful executives like Mayor Giuliani and Governor Christie, helping them settle personal vendettas, conceal abuses, and escape accountability.
In the role of Corporation Counsel, New Yorkers need a smart, experienced attorney. But we also need a truly independent advocate who will chase the truth and follow the law. Not a political bulldog who will find loopholes, refuse to share information, and hide abuse. Transparency and accountability to the people of New York City is paramount. Not loyalty to the Mayor.
And Mastro is loyal to a fault. To this day, he has not seen it fit to say a single public word against Rudy Giuliani. Mastro has called Giuliani a “role model and inspiration” and was happy to endorse his presidential bid in 2007. But he stayed publicly silent when his former boss led Trump’s campaign to overturn the November 2020 election, when his former boss told the mob to engage in “trial by combat” on January 6, 2021, or when his former boss was disbarred in disgrace earlier this year.
Randy Mastro is smart and experienced, but he is all too eager to serve the powerful, not the public. That’s why he cannot be our City’s chief lawyer.
