Unredacted internal emails obtained after a three-year legal battle may reshape ongoing lawsuits over New York City’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates, according to attorneys who spoke on “Good Morning, CHD” this week.
The records, obtained through New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL), show top city officials and government lawyers working together behind the scenes to push back on religious exemption requests, privately dismissing workers’ beliefs while building arguments to help arbitrators deny them.
Attorney Jimmy Wagner, who led the records fight, said the documents expose a “smoking gun.”
In the lawsuits over the documents, the unredacted versions were visible to everyone in the courtroom except the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Wagner said. City lawyers knew exactly what the emails contained while making arguments that directly contradicted them.
“They’re literally arguing out of both sides of their mouth,” Wagner said.
The government attorneys claimed they were acting with integrity and protecting religious rights. Yet “in the same breath, they have this … smoking gun piece of evidence that shows the city from the beginning … believed that anyone making a religious accommodation request, especially as it was associated to abortion, it was BS. That’s their language — ‘BS,’ in capital letters,” he said.
Hellbound and Down 