The Adams administration still wants to move forward with nominating attorney Randy Mastro as the city’s next top lawyer, a leading City Hall official said Tuesday — but the controversial nomination has yet to be made official.
During the mayor’s July 2 weekly press briefing, Mayor Eric Adams’ Chief Adviser Ingrid Lewis Martin did not directly answer if and when City Hall plans to officially float Mastro’s name for the job, which opened on May 31 when the city’s last corporation counsel Sylvia Hinds-Radix resigned.
The administration has roughly a month left to nominate a new corporation counsel — the official who leads the city’s Law Department, which then must be approved in a vote by the City Council. Still, Lewis-Martin insists all systems are a go for the Mastro nomination.
“We’re moving forward with Randy, we’re working in partnership with the council to see how things can manifest, it hasn’t changed,” Lewis-Martin said. “We needed to get past the budget cycle, so we’ll just move forward and see how things progress with Randy.”
Lewis-Martin had previously said that discussions with the council over Mastro’s nomination were on pause “out of respect” for the City Council amid negotiations over the city budget, which the council adopted in a vote on Sunday.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ office said they have not yet received Mastro’s nomination from the administration.
Lewis-Martin also insisted on Tuesday that discussions surrounding Mastro have been “in a good place” with the council, despite widespread public opposition from council members.
Several individual city lawmakers, as well as caucuses that represent a couple of dozen council members altogether, quickly came out against Mastro when news that Adams was looking to replace Hinds-Radix with the seasoned litigator first surfaced in April. Those who voiced opposition to the nomination include members like Tiffany Cabán (D-Queens) and Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn) — two of the council’s most progressive lawmakers — and caucuses like the council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus (BLAC) and LGBTQAI+ Caucus.
The members cited concerns over Mastro’s history of representing conservative clients, such as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie during the Bridgegate scandal, and his time working in former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration as chief of staff and a deputy mayor. They said Mastro’s record as a litigator is at odds with the largely progressive council’s “values and principles.”
But the mayor’s team has countered by pointing to Mastro’s work with good government groups like Citizens Union, which Mastro chairs, and defending clients like the Black Lives Matter protesters who were swept out of a Washington, DC square by law enforcement at the behest of then-President Donald Trump in 2020.
The mayor has also reportedly been organizing private meetings with Mastro and several council members to try and win them over if his name comes up for a vote. One lawmaker, Bronx Council Member Rafael Salamanca Jr. (D), told Politico in May that the meeting changed his mind about Mastro’s potential nomination.
However, after a bruising budget cycle where council members had to battle with the administration to restore a slew of Mayor Adams’ budget cuts, it is unclear how successful City Hall will be in changing more lawmakers’ minds.
