We just learned Mamdani’s own lawyer officially banned Signal and WhatsApp for city work on January 15, and the mayor’s communications shop used Signal anyway. Mamdani’s staff ignored a written order from the chief counsel and ran a nearly 200-person influencer army off an app the city said not to touch. Makes me wonder what other rules they’re breaking. Chief Counsel Ramzi Kassem put it in the memo: no Signal, no WhatsApp, keep the records. Emilia Rowland, director of New Media and Cultural Communications, kept feeding talking points through the banned channel. Some of those creators have been paid by city agencies. Rowland is on a city salary. The public pays for the work. The public doesn’t get the messages. That’s outrageous. Transparency is the floor for anything government does with taxpayer dollars. Today is the City Council hearing on this. Rowland was invited. She didn’t show. She acts like she’s above accountability. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. If tax dollars pay Mamdani’s communications staff and their proxies, every message is a public record. Encrypted chats exist to hide those messages. Records law exists so you can see them. This is a blatant violation of public trust. Shut the Signal chat down. Publish what they still have. Fire the people who treated a written order like a suggestion. A mayor who lectures Washington about transparency doesn’t get a secret pipeline on New York’s dime.