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.
In the video, the tenants raised concerns about conditions in the housing authority’s buildings, attacking Mr. de Blasio’s housing record. Ms. Perez, one of the tenants, said in an interview on Friday afternoon that she stood by her criticism of the authority but was furious about being tricked into appearing in the video.
Ms. Perez said she had been called last week by another tenant leader, Carmen Quiñones, who said Ms. Patton was with her at the Frederick Douglass Houses in Manhattan and wanted to talk to residents about the housing authority’s performance.
Only after the questioning ended were the four tenants told that the interview was for the Republican Party, Ms. Perez said. But she said she was never told that it was for the convention.
Ms. Perez said she demanded to see the edited version of the clip, but no one ever showed it to her. She added that Ms. Quiñones called her minutes before the clip aired on Thursday night to say that it was about to be shown.
During the pandemic, Ms. Perez and Ms. Quiñones have helped to provide hundreds of thousands of meals to residents who would not have had food otherwise. One of the vendors who provided the food, a farming company owned by Muslims, called an associate of Ms. Perez on Friday and asked why she appeared in a video supporting Mr. Trump, Ms. Perez said.
Ms. Patton declined to be interviewed, saying that she was traveling. But she issued a statement denying that she misled the four tenants, saying that they knew that their interviews would be shown at the convention “to increase awareness of the inhumane conditions that Mayor de Blasio has allowed for far too long.”
“Each participated regardless of political party because they recognized the importance of having a voice on the national stage and the undeniable improvements that have transpired under this administration,” Ms. Patton said.
She said she supports the Democratic Party except for one person, Mr. de Blasio, whom she blamed for what she said were worsening conditions at the Douglass Houses in Manhattan and across the housing authority, which has 400,000 tenants.
The third tenant, Mr. Martinez, said he was asked to take part in the meeting with Ms. Patton with little notice, but took up the opportunity to air his concerns about public housing. “This was not an endorsement of Trump,” he said.
Mr. de Blasio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
But on Thursday night, his press secretary, Bill Neidhardt, called the video a “cynical attempt to pit Black Americans against immigrants,” a reference to an assertion in the video that undocumented immigrants had been allowed to cut in line to get housing before American citizens.
“It’s wrong,” Mr. Neidhardt
