As an aide for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Rachel Noerdlinger, who used to run media relations for Al Sharpton's National Action Network as its vice president, worked to cover up Sharpton's lies due to concerns about making him look bad.
Noerdlinger was chief of staff for de Blasio's wife before she was pushed to resign from the $170,000 position after months of controversies including her boyfriend being a convicted cop-killer and her own calls for violent retaliation against police arose.
New emails released by the Mayor's office last week reveal Noerdlinger was still working on her old boss' behalf even when she was on the city payroll. In addition to passing along the mayor's official talking points to Sharpton, she also gave her old boss cover when he told a lie that the mayor's office easily could have exposed.
The New York Post reports:
To keep the peace after the tiff, Rachel Noerdlinger—then a City Hall aide who previously had worked for Sharpton — protected her ex-boss after he appeared to make a false claim to the media, according to correspondence obtained by The Post.
Sharpton told The New York Times a week after the explosive July 31 event that he didn’t know he’d be sharing the dais with Bratton at the police/community relations powwow until the last minute.
But Noerdlinger wrote a note to City Hall press staff that she had e-mails from Sharpton prior to the event showing "Bratton clearly on [the] program" — but that she didn’t want to expose him.
"I’m still not wanting to share any email with [Sharpton] to media because it will set us backwards with him, when the mayor and he seemed to have a reset moment last night," Noerdlinger wrote in an Aug. 7 e-mail discussing how to respond to the Times’ inquiry.
When the Post asked the mayor's office about the rift between de Blasio and Sharpton, Noerdlinger urged members of the press office in an email to push back against the story.
"Given this enlightened moment we are at, it would be very good to push back," she wrote, according to the report.
The Post's editorial board describes Noerdlinger as Sharpton's "taxpayer-funded mole at City Hall."