Judge Orders City Officials to Give Sworn Testimony about Missing September 11 Documents
The ongoing lawsuit by advocates for the community of people whose health has been affected by toxins released during the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 took a significant step forward on May 11, when New York State Supreme Court Justice James G. Clynes ruled that the plaintiffs may question New York City officials under oath.
The immediate issue relates to why officials denied since 2023 that City agencies possessed any records related to the possible health impacts of debris exposure, but then admitted last September that they had 68 boxes of such documents, containing approximately 340,000 pages. These included a 2002 directive from the City’s Law Department to its Department of Environmental Protection to preserve all World Trade Center-related materials after scanning them into a database. This order indicates that multiple set of documents (both paper copies and electronic versions) should exist.
The plaintiff demanding these records, the nonprofit 911 Health Watch, argued to Justice Clynes that DEP officials should be required to give sworn testimony about why they denied such documents existed. During the May 11 court session, the City’s Law Department claimed that DEP staffers discovered the 68 boxes last fall when new carpets were installed. The City’s attorneys also proposed working with 911 Health Watch on a voluntary basis, if the organization would agree to drop its lawsuit. Lawyers for 911 Health Watch refused and asked Justice Clynes to take the unusual step of ordering DEP officials to make themselves available for testimony. The judge agreed to this request.
Ben Chevat, executive director of 911 Health Watch said, “we recognize that the judge’s decision is an extraordinary remedy, but we feel it is clear from the record, and from what the City said in court, that discovery is needed.”
A lawyer for 911 Health Watch, Matthew McCauley, said, “by ordering the City to produce high ranking officials to answer questions under oath about their conduct concerning the handling and production of September 11 documents, the Court is sending a message to this administration that it will be held accountable for the sins of prior administrations.”
This was a reference to the aggressive push by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to persuade Lower Manhattan residents to return to the community days after the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, and refusals by every subsequent Mayor to release internal City documents related to this decision.
An intriguing of hint at what these records could contain came in July 2022, when then-Mayor Eric Adams took a tentative step that had been blocked by his three predecessors (Mayors de Blasio, Bloomberg, and Giuliani), by announcing that he was willing to consider releasing the documents. But two months later, Mr. Adams reversed this stance, and refused to make public the materials sought by 911 Health Watch unless City government was first granted immunity against any lawsuits that might arise from them. In 2023, when members of New York’s congressional delegation demanded these records, Mayor Adams wrote to the federal legislators, acknowledging that such previously unreleased documents existed, but refusing to hand them over, citing ‘litigation risks.’ He added that increased federal funding and new legislation creating legal protections for the City might cause him to reconsider.