Mayor Bill de Blasio took the advice of an adviser to “pick a fight” with Rudy Giuliani after the former mayor blamed de Blasio for the city’s homeless crisis in a scathing New York Post op-ed, a new batch of City Hall emails revealed Thursday.
Patrick Gaspard, a longtime mayoral pal and the ambassador to South Africa at the time, wrote de Blasio and top mayoral aide Emma Wolfe on Sept. 6, 2015, asking how they planned to “respond to Rudy?”
“I think this presents a real opportunity,” Gaspard suggested. “This is the guy we want to pick a fight with.”
After de Blasio responded, “What do you advise PG? How would you do it?,” Wolfe jumped in. She wrote “one cud tee off tmrw at parade, leads coverage coming into week,” referring to West Indian-American Day festivities.
The mayor then asked “what kind of teeing off will work?” and asked his aides to propose a “counter-RG message” so it could “seep in” before the parade.
Gaspard weighed in later again, saying: “This one is too easy. This creep is lecturing on a policy that failed under him and worse yet he’s making a morality play.”
He added in another email, “He ought to be ridiculed. I would laugh him off before addressing the substance in a more somber tone.”
De Blasio ultimately used the parade to portray Giuliani to the media as “delusional” for blaming the spiraling homeless crisis on Hizzoner’s “so-called ‘progressive’ view” of dealing with vagrants living on the streets.
Days later on 9/11 of that year, Giuliani criticized de Blasio again for misrepresenting the city’s homeless crisis in a morning interview on Fox 5.
Hours later, Hizzoner couldn’t hold back his anger. He was caught in a revealing photo giving Giuliani a piercing stare while both attended the solemn 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero.
The emails were the latest batch of communications between the mayor and his outside advisers, so-called “agents of the city,” that City Hall released in response to a lawsuit filed by The Post and NY1.
More than a year-and-a-half earlier, emails show de Blasio was looking to thank Giuliani for defending him in a newspaper story.
Soon after taking office in 2014, De Blasio reached out to cops about the arrest of a Brooklyn bishop who was a key political supporter. Giuliani told a reporter he might have done the same and to give de Blasio a break since he was new on the job.
“I didn’t think I was likely to write this sentence, but Lindsay: pls sched a call with Rudy Giuliani tmrw so I can thank him,” de Blasio wrote in a Feb. 12, 2014 message to an aide.
Shortly senior aide Emma Wolfe apparently killed the call. “… strikes me as prolonging a story if Rudy decides to tell the world about the call he got thanking him for this. Maybe too paranoid.”
A review of de Blasio’s schedule shows no record of a call to Giulani in 2014.