Bloomberg Forgot All about Making that $1.2M Political Donation

You know how sometimes you see a weird $25 charge on your credit card bill and you kind of freak out for a minute and think your credit card was stolen? And then you realize that, yes, you did buy season 4 of “The Muppet Show” off of Amazon and no, your computer was not hacked?

Well, that’s kind of what happened to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Except replace that $25 with $1.2 million and season 4 of “The Muppet Show” with a major political contribution.

As you may already know, former Bloomberg campaign aid John Haggerty is on trial in a $1.1 million theft case involving an Independence Party contribution. Since this, naturally, involved the mayor, Bloomberg took the stand this week and it’s been, well, a bit odd. As the Associated Press pointed out, his money (and, perhaps, his lack of accountability over it) is a critical issue:

On the stand, Bloomberg told defense lawyers that $1.2 million in contributions to the state Independence Party in 2008 had slipped his mind. He misremembered by $200,000 how much he paid to his most senior deputy mayor when she took a leave of absence to campaign for him a year later.

Now, this is perhaps somewhat understandable… right? Bloomberg is worth $19.5 billion, according to the most recent Forbes estimate, so the $1.2 million would be pocket change as far as he’s concerned.

Still, one has to hope that he didn’t actually use the phrase “slipped [my] mind” while referring to the $1.2 million on the stand. The force generated by the collective eye-roll in the courtroom would be enough to reverse the earth’s rotation.

TAGS: bloomberg haggerty | bloomberg haggerty trial | bloomberg testifies haggerty case | michael bloomberg john haggerty

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