NYC broke record-keeping rules with Mamdani’s secret influencer Signal chat, mayor’s top attorney seemingly admits

Zo’s flacks got their Signals crossed.

City Hall officials broke state record-keeping rules with a secret Signal chat filled with pro-Zohran Mamdani influencers, the mayor’s top attorney seemingly admitted Friday.

Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem revealed that officials took “corrective actions” — but only after learning from a reporter that the message thread was set to auto-delete until last week.

“Once we learned about this particular instance from reporting, the corrective actions that we took included reminding staff to disable disappearing messages,” Kassem said during a security briefing for the weekend’s upcoming J’Ouvert and West Indian American Day festivities.

The New York Times reported the influencer chats ran by Mamdani’s “new media” whiz Emilia Rowland, who draws a $175,000-a-year salary, were set to erase messages after she sent them.

Watchdogs and critics argued the self-destructing messages not only clearly violated state law requiring public officials to maintain records, but also dovetailed with concerns that Mamdani’s administration was underhandedly trying to sway public opinion.

City Councilman Phil Wong is pushing a bill to provide guardrails for how New York City government taps influencers after it was revealed Mamdani’s staff maintained the secret chat feeding online personalities administration talking points.

“Council members are racing to introduce legislation because this is one of the biggest scandals we’ve seen out of City Hall, and the administration calling it a ‘faux scandal’ after they royally screwed up only makes it worse,” he told The Post on Friday.

“Blatantly using taxpayer dollars and government resources for a propaganda machine is a huge red flag, and the Council needs to come down hard on it because New York City has a mayor, not a king.”

Mamdani isn’t the first New York pol to potentially run afoul of record-keeping and transparency laws.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio had to cough up emails with his closest private advisers in 2017 after a lawsuit from The Post and NY1.

And former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a shared nemesis of both Mamdani and de Blasio’s, and his staff drew fire for using BlackBerry smartphones to avoid digital paper trails.

Criminal attorney Cory H. Morris, who handles lawsuits over public records violations, said the use of Signal — an encrypted messaging app that prominently features disappearing messages — implies Mamdani’s staff is sharing communications they don’t want the public to see.

“It’s not innocuous,” Morris told The Post.

“They are trying to evade the records law by using something that destroys the records, or for that matter, that doesn’t keep a record.” 

Watchdogs at good government group Reinvent Albany had mixed view of Mamdani’s influencer list. They said using influencers, whether paid or not, can be an effective way to market programs and policies to New Yorkers — although they argued the collaboration should be voluntarily disclosed.

But city officials shouldn’t use instant messaging apps such as Signal to communicate with the public, precisely because of transparency concerns, the watchdogs said.

John Kaehny, the group’s executive director, said he was inclined to believe City Hall officials are more inexperienced than sinister.

“I tend at this point not to see anything nefarious at all with the Mamdani City Hall, but it is, at best, a lack of professionalism and lack of basic standards and training, and it’s very sloppy,” he said.

“If they continue and they persist with using Signal and other instant messaging stuff, then it’ll be about more than that it will be about trying to keep things secret,” Kaehny added.

“It’s not going to be an excuse that ‘we’re new’ for very much longer.”

— Additional reporting by Vaughn Golden and Kyle Schnitzer