Mayor Bloomberg was trying to rewrite history on the witness stand.
First, when he was asked yesterday about his successful effort to overturn the term-limits law, the mayor objected to the wording.
“Not overturning,” he insisted, claiming he had simply asked that the City Council change the law so incumbents could serve an extra four years.
Somehow, Bloomberg forgot about the council members pressured by his aides to vote the right way and the paid stooges dispatched to pack the contentious City Hall hearing on the issue.
Then, when a question was raised in open court about former Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, Bloomberg held firm to the press- release version of events that his top aide left to pursue opportunities in infrastructure finance.
Of course, Goldsmith would still be here if not for his arrest in a domestic dispute after his wife called 911 from their Washington, DC, home.
But Bloomberg was at his most forgetful when it came to his dealings with the shady state Independence Party, which received $1.35 million from the mayor in 2008 and another $1.1 million in 2009 for a ballot-security operation.
Remarkably, the mayor had no recollection of the 2008 donations, made in four separate wire transfers of $150,000 to $500,000 between May and October.
“I think we should be supporting the parties other than the major parties,” was Bloomberg’s explanation of his outsized largesse.
Let’s be clear:
The Democratic and Republican parties might get support for purely philosophical reasons, but no one writes a check to the state Independence Party except to get something in return.
And although he insisted the $1.1 million political operative John Haggerty allegedly absconded with was for ballot security for all Independence candidates, the mayor couldn’t name a single other IP candidate who might have benefited.
For all their pretrial hints of sensational revelations, everything produced by the Haggerty team was pulled from the public record.