“I am not a Trump supporter,” one of the tenants said, adding that she was furious that her interview with a government official was used for the convention.
It started with an unexpected call last week from Lynne Patton, a longtime Trump associate who oversees federal housing programs in New York. Ms. Patton told a leader of a tenants’ group at the New York City Housing Authority, the nation’s largest, that she was interested in speaking with residents about conditions in the authority’s buildings, which have long been in poor repair. Four tenants soon assembled in front of a video camera and were interviewed for more than four hours by Ms. Patton herself. They were never told that their interviews would be edited into a two-minute video clip that would air on Thursday night at the Republican National Convention and be used to bash Mayor Bill de Blasio, three of the tenants said in interviews on Friday. “I am not a Trump supporter,” said one of the tenants, Claudia Perez. “I am not a supporter of his racist policies on immigration. I am a first-generation Honduran. It was my people he was sending back.” The episode represents another stark example of how President Trump has deployed government resources to further his political ambitions. Ms. Patton is head of the New York office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and under the Hatch Act is barred from using her government position to engage in political activities. Throughout the convention, Mr. Trump has shattered the traditional boundaries between government and politics, and the video was aired on a night when the campaign took over the South Lawn of the White House, the first time that a major political convention has occurred there. The public housing clip was the second instance of the Trump campaign’s misleading participants in an event involving the federal government that was filmed for the Republican National Convention. On Tuesday, the convention showed a video of five new American citizens being sworn in at a naturalization ceremony by Mr. Trump. Some of the five said they did not know that they were being filmed for a political event. Three of the four tenants in the public housing video were interviewed on Friday by The New York Times. All three said they opposed President Trump and were misled about the purpose of the video.
