Mayor Accused of Trying to Intimidate Investigations Commissioner

Mayor Bill de Blasio and his senior staff repeatedly tried to pressure the commissioner of New York City’s top watchdog agency into not releasing critical reports about his administration, the commissioner said Monday.

Days after being fired from his job as the head of the Department of Investigation, Mark Peters said in a letter to the City Council that the mayor and at least two deputy mayors upbraided him on several occasions during his time in the post, accusing him of disloyalty and questioning whether he was “still a friend” to Mr. de Blasio.

Each rebuke, Mr. Peters said, came right before his agency released reports critical of the administration, including a November 2017 report on the city failing to conduct proper lead inspections at its public-housing developments and an April 2017 report about the misuse of city-owned cars by top brass at the Department of Correction.

“On several occasions the mayor and his most senior staff have expressed visible anger at me over certain DOI investigations,” Mr. Peters said in the letter. “They have requested that I not issue certain reports, and when I declined to do so they took actions to demonstrate their anger in ways that were clearly designed to be intimidating.”

Mr. Peters said the intimidation turned to punishment on Friday, when Mr. de Blasio fired him as commissioner and replaced him with Margaret Garnett, New York’s executive deputy attorney general for criminal justice and a former federal prosecutor. His dismissal from the position he had held since 2014 was a way to silence him and thwart coming investigations that pertain to the mayor and his senior staff, according to the letter.

.. Under city rules, he was allowed to provide a public response to his firing.

.. In firing Mr. Peters, the mayor cited an independent probe’s determination that Mr. Peters abused his power earlier this year when he tried to absorb an investigative agency for the city’s Education Department into the DOI. Two people whom Mr. Peters fired during that reconfiguration filed whistleblower claims.

Following the release of the independent probe’s findings last month, Mr. Peters issued a public apology and admitted his actions were wrong.