Excerpt:
New York City Republican mayoral hopeful Joe Lhota defended the NYPD's broad surveillance of Muslims and attacked the Associated Press' Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting during a wide-ranging interview with BuzzFeed Tuesday.
Lhota dismissed the AP's reporting as based on "supposition" and "missing a big point." Lhota also denied, despite reports based on documents and sources, that the NYPD had ever spied on a Muslim establishment without following a target.
"When you look at the facts they don't willy-nilly go there because of the people there," Lhota said. "I have yet to see any place where they have gone where there was not at least one, if not two people that they were focused on that brought them to that mosque. The mosque didn't come first."