SAF, CCRKBA want Bloomberg admin. records on MAIG dealings

By Dave Workman

Senior Editor

Following a week of embarrassing revelations about anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s apparent use of city property and personnel to support his Mayors Against Illegal Guns group, two of the nation’s leading gun rights organizations have filed a Freedom of Information Law request seeking for all records relating to the Bloomberg administration’s involvement with MAIG.

The Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms sent their request, prepared by SAF Special Projects Director Philip Watson, electronically and via overnight mail. They are joined in the information request by nationally-syndicated Gun Talk radio host Tom Gresham.

Gresham and the two gun rights organizations are asking for the following:

1. All electronic records related to Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the website MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org, including, but not limited to:
   1. All electronic files saved on city servers
   2. All Emails to or from users at the domain MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
   3. All current and former employees, officials, outside contractors, and volunteers with access to the website MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
   4. All current and former Email users and usernames that have had access to send or receive Email from @MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
2. Any and all records related to Mayors Against Illegal Guns electronic files, including, but not limited to:
   1. Emails
   2. Any written documents
   3. Any records describing processes for cooperation with this group
   4. Any records describing how received communications with this group are processed
   5. All employee pay or overtime related to cooperation or time spent with this group
   6. Official names, titles, and contact information of all employees, officials, outside contractors, and volunteers involved with domain hosting, creation, maintenance, and communication for MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
   7. All costs incurred by the City of New York for creation, maintenance, domain hosting, and communication for MayorsAgainstIllegalGuns.org
3. Any and all records of communication since January 1, 2002 between any city official, employee, or volunteer and any gun control advocacy organization, including, but not limited to:
   1. Mayors Against Illegal Guns
   2. Demand A Plan
   3. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
   4. Center for Gun Policy and Research
   5. Ceasefire
   6. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
   7. Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
   8. Joyce Foundation
   9. Violence Policy Center
   10. Legal Community Against Violence
   11. Million Mom March

SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb took the action after press revelations that the New York City server was being used to host the MAIG website, and that it is being administered by city employees. He also told TGM that reports about a special counsel in Bloomberg’s office having been sent to Nevada to lobby for a gun control law on behalf of the anti-gun MAIG group were “disturbing.”

“The public has a right to know what’s been going on between Bloomberg, the city and MAIG,” Gottlieb said. “Gun control is Bloomberg’s pet peeve, and he’s been pushing an anti-gun agenda since sending so-called private investigators on a sting operation to gun shops all over the country, which got him in trouble with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.”

Following that operation several years ago, the ATF advised Bloomberg’s office against doing anything like that again because it could jeopardize on-going legitimate criminal investigations, and the undercover officers involved. Where ATF was after crooks, Bloomberg appeared to be after headlines.

In the years since, Bloomberg has engaged in various gun control efforts, and about five years ago, with Mayor Tom Menino of Boston, he organized the MAIG group. Ironically, while claiming to be fighting crime, several MAIG members have been caught in legal entanglements, themselves. Various MAIG members have been charged with or convicted of crimes.

Now with the revelations about Bloomberg’s apparent use of city resources to help the anti-gun mayors group, questions have been raised about the propriety and legality of the Bloomberg-MAIG activities.

“There certainly appears to be a serious problem in Bloomberg’s administration,” Gresham said. “Evidently, the mayor and his staff have a gross misunderstanding of how the taxpayers’ money should be spent, and that should not include sending New York employees around the country to lobby for Bloomberg’s pet projects.”

Gottlieb, who has been one of Bloomberg’s most vocal critics on gun rights issues, was blunt.

“The man is obsessed,” Gottlieb contended, “and if he’s spent so much as a dime of public money on what amounts to a private crusade, Mayor Bloomberg needs to be held accountable for that.”

Gottlieb has called on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to launch a full-scale investigation into the mayor’s potential misuse of public resources for his own private war on gun owners.

“If Eric Schneiderman won’t investigate Bloomberg for possible misuse of public funds,” Gottlieb said, “we will. The mayor has been acting increasingly like a self-appointed monarch, but this still the United States, not Bloomberg’s personal fiefdom.”