A watchdog group representing 9/11 first responders and survivors applauded New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday as his administration released a trove of long-buried files that shed new light on how New Yorkers were misled about air quality and health risks in the wake of the terrorist attack. “I want to thank Mayor Mamdani for…
Page H2From§Eachthe matinee edition — 8 September 2026
THE DOCUMENTS
Mamdani exposes 25 years of 9/11 air-quality lies, gets a petition asking him to skip the memorial
As it ran on the front
I called around to ask what exactly took twenty-five years, and nobody I reached had lied to me, which after this week I recognize as its own kind of achievement.
On Tuesday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's administration switched on a public portal holding roughly 170,000 pages of records about air quality after September 11, per ABC News. The Washington Examiner reports Mamdani said the files prove officials lied to residents about how bad the exposure was. The New York Post, which appears to have read further into the drawer than the rest of us, describes one item inside it: an October 2001 memo the paper says shows officials already knew about "potential Ground Zero risks" — the Post's phrase for the memo's contents, not a line printed from the document itself, because no outlet quotes it directly. That is the whole story. Not a scandal invented for an anniversary — a scandal that was filed correctly, twenty-five years ago, and then just filed.…
…(cont) All together now — the sequence is the point, so take it in order. First the city knows something. Then the city keeps the something in an office instead of a bulletin. Then a mayor opens the office and hands the something to the public, and per Common Dreams, the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch — which has spent years asking what the city knew and when — says thank you. The portal answers, at last, in bulk.
Here is the part the wire desk didn't have to invent. On Aug. 29, retired Port Authority officers asked Mamdani and the governor to stay away from Friday's ceremony, citing his rhetoric, according to the New York Post. On Sept. 8 — the same day the documents went live — a 101,000-signature petition arrived at City Hall asking him to skip it too, per Fox News. A Washington Examiner column on his handing out a ceremonial pen ran that same day. None of it is about the memo. All of it landed the week the memo did.
I am not the investigator here. The mayor's office did the investigating; I am reading the coverage of the reading. What the record now shows, without dispute, is this: the city had the pages the entire time. It handed them over on a Tuesday. And the paperwork that followed within a week was not a correction, not a bill, not a reckoning — it was a petition, and it was not addressed to the memo. It was addressed to the man who found it.
“They sat on the memo for twenty-five years, admitted it Tuesday, and by the following Monday the loudest document in the city wasn't the one about the toxic cloud — it was the one with a hundred and one thousand signatures asking the guy who released it to stay home. That's the whole con: they don't have to defend the lie once somebody else agrees to argue about the messenger instead. Your neighbor's cough is real and free; the outrage about who found the file is manufactured and, near as I can tell, also free.”
“Nobody here is disputing the documents, and it's honestly a little insulting to suggest we are — the issue was never the memo, it's optics, it's tone, it's respect for the day. You don't hand a ceremonial pen to a lawyer with that kind of client list on a 9/11 remembrance order and act stunned when a hundred thousand people don't want you standing at the flowers. Did I say "flowers"? It's a memorial service, and nobody's questioning his right to grieve, they're just — respectfully — asking him to grieve somewhere else.”
The receipts
First responders who rushed to the World Trade Center on and immediately after the 9/11 attacks were likely exposed to dangerous toxins, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani heralded the release of thousands of files related to 9/11 on Tuesday, claiming they prove officials lied to residents about the extent of the terrorist attack’s impact on air quality. As part of a $34 million effort, the city launched a new public portal featuring over 170,000 documents related to […]
Nearly 170,000 pages of records -- including a bombshell October 2001 memo showing city officials knew about potential Ground Zero risks -- are now publicly available.
A 101,000-signature petition delivered to City Hall demands Mayor Zohran Mamdani skip the 25th anniversary 9/11 memorial service on Friday.
Washington Examiner economics columnist Tiana Lowe Doescher criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for handing a symbolic 9/11 pen to a lawyer who once represented al Qaeda. Mamdani signed executive orders on Friday, designating Sept. 11 as a citywide day of remembrance.
· Retired Port Authority cops tell Mamdani, Hochul to stay home from NYC 9/11 ceremony: ‘Would cause profound pain’ from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
· Mamdani posts emotional message mourning accused knife-wielding killer —and is slammed by victim’s family from the morgue, 27 Aug 2026
· 9/11 families plan to ignore ‘spiteful’ Mamdani if he shows up at 25th memorial ceremony from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
· Mamdani gives influencers special access as Signal use raises records-law questions from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.