Randy Mastro, a former first deputy New York City mayor in the administration of Eric Adams, and veteran investigative journalist Richard Behar are suing Mayor Zohran Mamdani for what they say is his administration’s failure to turn over records related to his rollback on his first day on the job of several of his predecessor’s executive orders on Jew-hatred and Israel.
The lawsuit, which Richard Behar filed in New York State Supreme Court, alleges that Mamdani’s office is guilty of a “pattern of obstruction” in its response to multiple Freedom of Information Law requests that Behar has submitted since Mamdani took office on Jan 1.
Mastro is serving as counsel to Behar. FOIL is New York’s version of the Freedom of Information Act.
“It was done on the first day of the Mamdani administration, so there couldn’t have been that many documents relating to that decision,” Mastro, who served as deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, told JNS. “Yet he has gotten stonewalled.”
Behar “was not given any date for production, and then he was told they won’t produce responsive documents, if at all, until November,” Mastro said.
Under New York law, members of the public, including journalists, have the right to request records relating to government decisions, and agencies are required to respond—or provide reason for denial—in a timely manner.
The mayor’s delay in responding to the requests was “arbitrary, capricious and irrational in multiple egregious respects,” Behar alleges.
“The city’s prolonged delays, without any substantive justification, demonstrate a pattern of obstruction that is inconsistent with the purposes and mandates of FOIL,” the petition states.
Behar’s two requests, which he filed on Jan. 13 and May 8, sought records related to Mamdani’s decision to rescind several of his predecessor’s executive orders, including those adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred and barring city agencies from boycotting Israel.
Behar, a former Forbes, Time and Fortune staff member and, since 2012, contributing editor of investigations at Forbes, told JNS that he is seeking records explaining the rationale behind Mamdani’s actions, including inter-office communications, research, studies and public-impact analyses.
He also requested records containing terms including “antisemitism,” “IHRA,” “Jews,” “Jewish,” “Israel,” “boycott” and “BDS,” he said.
“Investigative reporters aren’t a nuisance to blow off. We’re the reason those in power can’t rule from the shadows,” he told JNS. “When doors close, or records get slow-walked, that’s not bureaucracy. It’s a decision to keep the public in the dark.”
“Fortunately, I have one of the best and toughest attorneys in the country to knock that door open,” he said.
Mastro said that his firm agreed to represent Behar on a pro bono basis after the mayor’s office informed him that it would not respond to the first request until late August and to the second until Nov. 9, 2026.
“That’s not a timely response,” Mastro told JNS. “That’s just an obstruction and hoping the moment will pass.”
“The whole point of news gathering and news reporting is to keep the public informed,” he said. “When journalists make these requests, they’re really made on behalf of the public, not to bury the issue and respond 11 months later.”
Behar also sought records related to the sudden removal of webpages promoting New York City’s business relationships with Israel, Israeli companies and entrepreneurs, as well as records about efforts to terminate the relationship between Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, per the petition.
Mastro told JNS that Behar was trying to understand how that decision was made and who authorized it.
The mayor’s office initially claimed it had “nothing to do” with the removal of webpages promoting New York City’s business ties to Israel. But six months into the administration, the city still has not appointed a new president of the Economic Development Corporation, according to Mastro.
“What low-level staffer at the Economic Development Corporation decided to wipe its website clean of references to Israel and Israeli companies?” he told JNS. “It seems inconceivable that some low-level staffer at EDC would have done that.”
When Behar requested documents showing communications between City Hall and the corporation, he was “stonewalled again,” Mastro told JNS.
“That’s just not how the law is supposed to work,” he said, “That’s not how government should operate.”
Mastro told JNS that Gerald Lebovits, a State Supreme Court justice in Manhattan who was assigned to the case on June 10, granted an expedition request, which he said could yield a decision by early July.
A ruling in Behar’s favor would compel the administration to produce the requested records, he said.
Mastro’s involvement in the case is personal, he told JNS.
As deputy mayor under Adams, he was involved in creating many of the executive orders that Mamdani rescinded, including the order directing city agencies not to boycott Israel and the adoption of the IHRA working definition.
He has also been an outspoken critic of Mamdani and resigned in December with a five-page letter to Adams, which included the statement, “I will never work for a Socialist.”
“While I told the press months ago that ‘I will never work for a Socialist,’ the mayor-elect’s transition team needlessly included me (and you) last week on a list of 179 City Hall staffers it intends to replace on Jan. 1, 2026,” Mastro wrote in the letter.
“No need to have done so,” he wrote. “We will be leaving city government together.”
Mastro was also heavily involved in creating the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, he said. It was initially unclear whether Mamdani would keep the office, and he later appointed a head of the office that left many Jews in the city concerned.
“One of the most important issues our city faces, and one that goes to our very core as a city of inclusion, is addressing the raging antisemitism occurring in New York City today,” Mastro told JNS.
“We have more hate crimes committed against Jews in New York City than against all other groups combined,” he said.
Mastro never imagined that he would live in a city where Jew-hatred “is only getting worse.”
He doesn’t have a guess about what the records will show but wants to find out.
“The first act of a new mayor was the abolition of a series of executive orders designed to address antisemitism,” he told JNS. “I’d like to know how that happened and why that happened.”
“That’s why a journalist like Richard Behar wants to know how that happened and why that happened and report on it,” he added.
