Mayor Bloomberg offered a seal of approval yesterday to the City Council’s use of public funds to hire lawyers to represent it during a federal investigation into its finances.

“It is the city’s policy that we provide legal representation for employees of the city and that would include elected officials, either by giving them service through the corporation counsel’s office or by hiring outside counsel up until there is some evidence that they have done something illegal,” Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday.

“If they’ve done something wrong then our sympathies for them, I think, should be an awful lot less, probably non-existent, and they should pay for their own defense,” he said. Until that point, the city will pay for representation, Mr. Bloomberg added.

The council has been negotiating with a law firm to represent council employees who have been called before the U.S. attorney or Department of Investigation, and has spent at least $94,633 in public funds on the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, which was hired in October to represent the council as a whole. A criminal defense lawyer, Lee Richards III, also has been hired with public funds to represent the speaker of the council, Christine Quinn, at a cost of $600 per hour.