2 Donors Plead Guilty, but the Mayor Is Not Charged. Why?

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A major donor to Mayor Bill de Blasio pleaded guilty to using campaign contributions as bribes to buy better treatment at City Hall — and yet the mayor, who took the money and aided the donor, was not charged with a crime.

Another donor pleaded guilty to honest services wire fraud that included making political contributions in exchange of official action — and again, no charges for the mayor.

The outcome has led some, including the WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer, to an obvious question.

“How can someone be guilty of giving you a bribe and you not be guilty of taking it?” Mr. Lehrer asked Mr. de Blasio on Friday.

It’s abundantly clear,” the mayor said. But it wasn’t.

“This man did a lot of bad things in a lot of places,” Mr. de Blasio said of Harendra Singh, a restaurateur who pleaded guilty to bribing the mayor. “I’m someone who never did, never would be involved in such an effort.”

But in fact, Mr. de Blasio sought a contribution from Mr. Singh for his 2013 campaign, and then took numerous steps to help him get a favorable resolution in a protracted legal dispute he had with the city. The dispute involved millions of dollars in back rent and other charges that Mr. Singh owed in relation to a restaurant that he operated on city property.

“It was thoroughly looked at, and there’s a reason there were no charges brought because there was nothing there,” Mr. de Blasio continued.

Charges were brought against Mr. Singh, who, in a federal courtroom in 2016, secretly pleaded guilty to conspiracy, bribery and honest services fraud in relation to tens of thousands of dollars in donations to the mayor’s campaign. The plea was sealed until this week when it was made public as part of an unrelated pending corruption case on Long Island.

The guilty plea was won by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District, which covers Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.

Mr. de Blasio’s ties to Mr. Singh and several other campaign donors for whom he did favors were investigated by federal prosecutors in the Southern District, which includes Manhattan. They decided not to bring charges against Mr. de Blasio or his aides — but in doing so, last year, they issued a cutting statement raising questions about the mayor’s ethics and making it clear he had done favors for donors.

A similar case arose with the other donor, Jona S. Rechnitz, who made campaign contributions and gave money to a nonprofit group the mayor created to support his City Hall agenda.

In return, Mr. Rechnitz got access to Mr. de Blasio, calling and emailing him. The result was personal attention when Mr. Rechnitz, a real estate investor, had problems with the city. A friend’s water bill overcharges got quickly resolved. Mr. Rechnitz got a meeting with the head of a city agency that had fined one of his properties for an illegal hotel.

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Mr. Rechnitz pleaded guilty in 2016 to honest services wire fraud. But although Mr. de Blasio solicited and received the donations and made it possible for Mr. Rechnitz to get special access, he was not charged.

Several factors were in play.

The United States Supreme Court set a much higher bar for public corruption cases with its 2016 ruling that reversed the bribery conviction of the former Virginia governor, Bob McDonnell. In the ruling, the court determined that making introductions or setting up meetings, even in exchange for gifts or financial benefits, did not constitute a crime.

As a consequence, several prominent corruption convictions were set aside, and prosecutors have become more cautious in taking on such cases.

Furthermore, bribery cases against elected officials based on campaign contributions are rare, the legal experts said. That is in part because the Supreme Court has drawn a clear distinction between a legal contribution to a political campaign and other kinds of payments like cash, gifts or other benefits that in effect go into the pocket of a public servant.

It may also have been that it was simply easier for prosecutors to bring charges against the person buying access, because the men admitted guilt, in the face of abundant evidence, as part of plea deals in which they agreed to cooperate with the government against other defendants. Mr. Singh is a witness in corruption trials on Long Island; Mr. Rechnitz testified against a labor official who was accused of steering millions of dollars of officers’ retirement funds into a hedge fund in exchange for promised kickbacks.

Nonetheless, the outcomes seem incongruous: Mr. Singh pleaded guilty to bribing the mayor, charges brought by the Eastern District prosecutors, while those in the Southern District examined the same conduct and chose not to charge the mayor. But current and former federal prosecutors and defense lawyers said there could be several explanations.

“When there’s an allegation that money has changed hands,” said Paul J. Fishman, who served as the United States attorney in New Jersey for more than seven years, “sometimes the issue is whether the transaction actually occurred. But often it’s not about that, and instead is about what the people were thinking at the time that they made that exchange.”

The mayor said at the time that Mr. Rechnitz’s account was untrue; the case, against the labor leader Norman Seabrook, ended in a mistrial, in part because Mr. Rechnitz seemed an unreliable witness.

But in Mr. Singh’s case, the charges to which he pleaded guilty, detailed in a court document, amounted to more than just his admissions that he had received benefits from Mr. de Blasio’s administration in return for his contributions; they were the conclusions not only of the prosecutors handling the matter, but also of their boss, Robert L. Capers, then the United States attorney for the Eastern District, who signed the document.

That included a July 2015 meeting in which Emma Wolfe, a top aide to Mr. de Blasio, met with Mr. Singh to negotiate a settlement, which contained more favorable terms than he had previously been offered.

“Nothing that he described as having happened, happened, period,” Mr. de Blasio said on WNYC. But the meeting did happen, and so did City Hall’s other efforts on behalf of Mr. Singh, which have emerged.

Anthony M. LaPinta, Mr. Singh’s lawyer, disputed the mayor’s assertion. “Mr. Singh pleaded guilty to his crimes because he is, in fact, guilty of those crimes,” Mr. LaPinta said in a emailed statement.