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Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s team is firing back at Mayor Zohran Mamdani after Mamdani accused past city officials of misleading New Yorkers about toxic air following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman accused Mamdani of seeking to “score cheap partisan political points” by directing blame toward local officials who rushed to the scene of the attacks while overlooking the radical Islamic terrorists responsible for killing nearly 3,000 people.
“Now would be a good time to remind Mayor Mamdani that cowardly terrorists acting in the name of Islam are 100 percent responsible for all of the death and destruction on September 11, 2001, and for all of the suffering and illness that have continued since that day,” Goodman said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
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Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani attends the annual 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City in Sept. 2024. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The records released by Mamdani’s administration include more than 170,000 pages documenting the city’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath. The initial release includes 68 boxes of records from the Department of Environmental Protection that were not located until 2025, and records related to 7 World Trade Center.
The records include documents from Giuliani’s administration, including a memo sent to Deputy Mayor Robert Harding that warned the city faced potentially multimillion-dollar lawsuits from New Yorkers who claimed health advisories failed to protect them from toxic exposure and that the sites were inadequately cleaned up.
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At a news conference announcing the release, Mamdani said the documents showed that officials across multiple administrations had information about hazardous conditions but failed to adequately inform the public.
“I wish there was a limited number of people who misled the public that I could describe them in just a few names,” Mamdani said during a Tuesday news conference. “But the truth is that, as we have heard, this goes across a multitude of those that New Yorkers have trusted, and we are here to release these documents today because, for a long time, New Yorkers have known the truth, and yet they have been unable to see the truth in any document that’s been presented to them.”
Mamdani said the release was intended to give New Yorkers access to records that had been difficult to obtain for years. His administration said the city had settled two lawsuits brought by 9/11 Health Watch as part of the release and created a public portal containing the documents.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani provided an update hours after the explosion in Staten Island, New York, on Friday afternoon. (WNYW)
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air. And then, when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way was nowhere to be found,” Mamdani said.
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Thousands of first responders, residents, workers and others exposed to the World Trade Center site have since developed illnesses recognized by the World Trade Center Health Program as related to 9/11 exposure. The program continues to provide treatment and monitoring for people suffering from certified 9/11-related conditions.
Former Republican New York Gov. George Pataki, who was governor at the time of the attacks, said in an interview with the New York Post this week that he had been diagnosed with restrictive airway disease, which he attributed to his exposure to toxins at Ground Zero.
The newly released records provide additional detail about environmental hazards found in the years after the attacks, including asbestos detected at 15 John Street in Lower Manhattan. The records document asbestos findings at multiple locations and provide additional detail about the city’s environmental response.
The records show that asbestos was detected at some locations at levels below applicable cleanup or exposure benchmarks and at others at levels that appeared to exceed them. Health authorities have said there is no known safe level of asbestos exposure.
Then-EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman said in a Sept. 18, 2001, press release that air monitoring results indicated the air near the World Trade Center was safe to breathe, days after the EPA first issued assurances about environmental hazards on Sept. 13.
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Goodman pointed to the federal government’s role in communicating about air quality after the attacks, noting that the EPA issued public assurances about conditions near Ground Zero. An EPA Inspector General review later concluded that the data available at the time did not fully support the agency’s broad assurances about air safety.
“The EPA, a federal agency, issued press releases and public statements declaring that air samples showed the air quality near Ground Zero was safe,” Goodman said, referring to Giuliani’s response. “The agency later apologized for those statements, saying it did the best it could with the knowledge available at the time.”
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Firefighters gather near ground zero after the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (Corbis via Getty Images)
Whitman later apologized for the assurances in a 2016 interview, saying she was sorry for people who became sick or died and that she and the EPA had done the best they could with the information available at the time.
The release of the documents follows a petition with more than 100,000 signatures from 9/11 victims’ family members requesting that Mamdani not attend the memorial ceremony at Ground Zero Friday.
“This mayor is not serving us,” Charles Wolf, who lost his wife on 9/11, said at a noon news conference. “He’s serving himself. We are asking respectfully that he not show up.”
“Even though there is going to be other politicians there, these are the politicians that helped us push beneficial laws through and literally held our hand during that time,” Wolf continued. “Mayor Mamdani has not shown any of that, none of it. He just wants to be there because he wants to be there.”
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The mayor’s office said the initial release represents only the beginning of the city’s effort to make its 9/11 records publicly accessible, with additional documents expected to be added to the portal.
Eric Mack contributed to this report.
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