09/10/2026
🚨New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed 9/11 air quality records on Tuesday, revealing that city officials knew the air around Ground Zero was dangerous while publicly telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe. The documents sat undiscovered in 68 boxes in a city office until last year, after years of the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch suing for their release.
Among the records is the “Harding Memo,” sent in October 2001 to Robert Harding, Rudy Giuliani’s deputy mayor. It laid out the potential for tens of thousands of lawsuits over 9/11 air exposure and outlined legislative strategies to limit the city’s legal liability, rather than warn the public.
The documents show the pattern didn’t end with Giuliani’s term. A memo from early in the Bloomberg administration, five months after the attacks, acknowledged the city was “leaving itself open to a barrage of lawsuits” and suggested officials “discontinue telling people to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags.”
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said at the announcement, flanked by 9/11 families and Jon Stewart. “There was poison in the air, and on the ground, and in the window sills, and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes, and it stayed there for months.”
The numbers make the deception impossible to spin. Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11 itself. More than 9,000 have died since from 9/11-related cancers and illnesses tied to that toxic exposure, roughly three times the death toll of the attacks themselves.
It took a Muslim, progressive mayor to finally give first responders and survivors the transparency Giuliani’s administration buried, and the city continued burying through establishment Republican and Democrat administrations, for a generation.
The same Republican leaders who spent months insinuating Mamdani was somehow sympathetic to the 9/11 hijackers because of his faith, including Giuliani himself, now find their old administration’s cover-up exposed by the man they tried to demonize as a closet “jihadi.”