City builds 200-strong influencer army, dodges disclosure questions, then aims it at CEOs over taxes

…(cont) Folder two, September 8th — six days later — a reporter puts a plain question to Governor Hochul at a podium: does anyone on this list have to say, publicly, that City Hall pays them? The governor's answer is that she isn't aware of any law requiring it. All together now — that's the whole exchange, clause by clause: question, non-answer, no law cited, move to the next topic.

Folder three, September 28th — twenty days after that podium, not six — the plan's purpose turns up in print: the same network, discussed internally for use against the city's chief executives, framed as support-building for the administration's tax package.

So the arc, filed end to end: build the army, decline to answer whether it has to register as what it is, then turn it on the people being asked to pay more. Each folder on its own is a local-politics item. Stacked, they're a sequence — payroll, no disclosure, deployment — and the order is the whole story. I didn't write the order. The dates did.

What the plan is reported to produce is not in dispute in these pages: a public campaign aimed at CEOs, timed to a tax fight. What's missing from the folder is anything saying the influencers' arrangement was ever disclosed to the people reading their posts, or that anyone asked them to. The governor was asked. She said she didn't know of a rule. That's the file.