Following Mastro disaster, new corp counsel pick cruises through City Council

Muriel Goode-Trufant, who was recently nominated for corporation counsel by the mayor, appeared before the City Council for a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024. Photo by Gerardo Romo / NYC Council Media Unit

By Jacob Kaye

The City Council on Wednesday had few objections to the mayor’s pick for the city’s top attorney, a sharp contrast from their feelings toward his last pick, Randy Mastro, who withdrew his nomination after an all-day grilling from lawmakers over the summer.

Mayor Eric Adams’ latest nominee, Muriel Goode-Trufant, appeared before the Council on Wednesday for a hearing on her nomination to serve as the city’s next corporation counsel. The hearing was far less tense and only a fraction of the length of the hearing for Mastro’s nomination, which was held in August and all but ensured the need for a new nominee.

Goode-Trufant, who currently serves as the city’s acting corporation counsel, was nominated for the prestigious legal position by Adams in October after Mastro, whose nomination was likely to be rejected by the Council, withdrew his name from consideration.

Much like the nominees themselves, the two hearings could not have been less alike.

Goode-Trufant has spent over three decades working in the Law Department, the agency she would lead as corporation counsel, representing the city’s legislative branch, its executive branch and all city agencies and employees. While Mastro spent a number of years serving in city government, working as a deputy mayor and chief of staff to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the longtime attorney spent a bulk of his career working as a private lawyer.

Goode-Trufant noted the differences between the nominees on Wednesday.

“There are some who choose money and there are some who choose fulfillment," she said. “I have been quite fulfilled at the Law Department.”

Goode-Trufant first began with the office in 1991 in the general litigation division, where she worked her way up to assistant chief. She became the department’s managing attorney in 2015 and, in 2023, was promoted to serve as first assistant corporation counsel.

She took over as acting corporation counsel in June after the former office holder, Syliva Hinds-Radix, reportedly resigned amid disagreements with the mayor over how to handle several of the investigations that had ensnared the administration in scandal.

Hinds-Radix was largely expected to leave the position for the better part of this year. In the spring, reports first began to circulate that Adams was pushing for Mastro’s appointment to the role.

However, those rumors were met with immediate pushback from a majority of the Council, who said in an open letter that they would vote against approving the attorney should he be nominated. Nonetheless, Adams went through with the nomination and with it, launched a public relations effort, employing prominent New Yorkers from the city’s legal, business and governmental worlds to sway members of the Council to vote “yes” on Mastro.

The effort failed, as even some of the mayor’s allies in the legislature appeared poised to vote “no” on the nominee had he come up for a vote.

Goode-Trufant’s nomination didn’t require the same public push.

Having worked with Council leadership in recent years, she didn’t need much of an introduction to the lawmakers now charged with deciding her fate.

“I am familiar with the pressing legal matters and challenges facing this city, which makes me uniquely qualified to seamlessly assume this role should I be confirmed,” the attorney said at the start of the hearing.

The Law Department currently employs around 760 attorneys – a 20 percent reduction compared to the years before the pandemic – and has around 70,000 active legal cases it is working on.

It represents the city in all of its civil matters, from negligence cases brought by people injured on city property, to proactive lawsuits, like the city’s recent efforts to stop tobacco companies from selling flavored vapes in the five boroughs. But while the department often represents the city as a whole, it also represents individuals or individual offices within city government, including both the mayor and the Council.

Like they asked Mastro in August, councilmembers on Wednesday probed Goode-Trufant about how she would handle a legal dispute between the Council and the mayor, a common occurrence over the past three years.

On several occasions, the Adams administration has chosen not to enact laws passed by Speaker Adrienne Adams’ Council, a practice that has led to lawsuits in some cases.

Goode-Trufant was asked by lawmakers on Wednesday about her view on the mayor’s refusal to enact a Council law banning the use of solitary confinement in the city’s jails. Just before the law’s implementation, the mayor issued a state of emergency and an executive order suspending the law. Both the state of emergency and executive order remain in effect and the mayor, who vetoed the legislation before the Council voted to overturn his rejection of the bill, has given little indication that he’ll lift either order in the near future.

Goode-Trufant said she believed the use of an emergency order to skirt around implementing the law was appropriate given the “extraordinarily difficult situation” on Rikers Island. The Law Department veteran said that she believed the law would have interfered with an ongoing court order surrounding the city’s management of the jails on Rikers Island stemming from the case known as Nunez v. the City of New York.

“The challenge in that particular circumstance is that everything that is included there is also the subject of longstanding litigation, and there are difficulties that the city faces in that litigation,” Goode-Trufant said. “Separately there are instances where our supervision by the court would have been impacted by the full-throttled enactment of that particular local law, so we had very immediate challenges that we had to face. It was an extraordinarily difficult situation, which persists.”

The federal monitor in the case, Steve J. Martin, is expected to issue his recommendation on the implementation of the ban on solitary confinement on Friday.