Guess Comptroller John Liu is serious about a mayoral run. He’s kicked to the curb a longtime aide too toxic even for famously liberal New York.
John Choe, the apologist for communist North Korea, quietly quit his $105,000-a-year job as Liu’s policy director last month — shortly after The Post reported his equally under-the-radar hiring.
The claim by Liu’s office that The Post story had little to do with Choe’s departure is farfetched, considering how his employment was kept under wraps in the first place.
Choe was previously the comptroller’s chief of staff during Liu’s years on the City Council. After a failed bid to win his own council seat, he worked on Liu’s comptroller campaign until news broke that he’d told a 2006 conference on the “Global Struggle for Socialism” that North Korea was “at the front line of the liberation struggles against imperialism.”
He has since run Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, a propaganda outfit that sends people on trips to the North — and which South Korea believes is controlled by Pyongyang.
Choe’s allegiance to the North led him to spend his honeymoon there — a country that’s allowed millions to starve even as it lavished critical resources on a nuclear-weapons program.
Councilman Vincent Ignizio (R-SI), who criticized Choe’s hiring, hailed his exit: “Clearly, he didn’t support the United States and its policies. If he’s so anti-American, I’m not sure he has a place working in government.” Exactly so.
Of course, that just invites speculation as to who else might be snuck onto the public payroll in a — heaven help us — Liu mayoral administration.