Mr. Cuomo’s ethical abuses

Gov. Andrew Cuomo surely knows better than to use public employees for his private gain. That’s not mindreading. That’s right from an agreement he made with Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

Now, though, Mr. Cuomo wants to split hairs. The employees were on their own time. His use of them was incidental. The rules don’t mean what they explicitly say.

When public officials start parsing ethics rules, it’s a pretty safe bet that a whole lot of rule-breaking is going on. And so it seems to be in the governor’s case.

Surely Mr. Cuomo knows the sordid and not-too-distant history of such ethical abuses in the upper echelons of state government.

There was Alan Hevesi, a state comptroller, who had an employee drive his wife around and serve as a personal aide — and didn’t reimburse the state for those services, in violation of an agreement Mr. Hevesi had made with the state’s ethics watchdog. That, and a graft operation involving the state pension fund, led to Mr. Hevesi’s very public downfall in 2006.

There was also Antonia Novello, a state health commissioner (and former U.S. surgeon general), who also ended an admirable public career in disgrace in 2006 after she was found to have had state employees tending her house plants and doing other personal chores.

And now we have Mr. Cuomo, apparently using state employees for abuses of the public trust both petty and substantially more serious. All, it seems, in service of a book deal whose value he has yet to reveal, but which is said to have been in the millions of dollars.

Last year, Mr. Cuomo sought to cash in on the accolades he was getting for his handling of coronavirus by writing a book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID -19 Pandemic.” His special counsel, Judith Mogul, told JCOPE that the governor would abide by nine long-standing rules for officials in such undertakings, including a provision that no “state property, personnel or other resources may be utilized.”

Yet there are now reports from various newspapers, including the Times Union and The New York Times, that the governor and high-level people in his administration jumped those guardrails, as Ms. Mogul called them, on numerous occasions.

Junior aides are said to have helped with tasks like photocopying and delivering material to or from the Executive Mansion. More senior aides are said to have assisted as well, including Secretary to the Governor Melissa Derosa, who helped pitch and edit the book.

A spokesman for the governor, Rich Azzopardi, insists there was nothing amiss here, since any work the staffers did to help the governor with his book was voluntary. If that exception doesn’t appear in any of the ethical conditions the governor was supposed to be adhering to, well, that’s because it’s so obvious it doesn’t need to be on paper, Mr. Azzopardi suggests. It’s just like staffers who work for a politician helping with that person’s campaign, he offers.

Perhaps so — though there seems to be a vast difference between volunteer political work and having your boss ask you to do unpaid work to help him earn millions of dollars on the side of his public job. Just how voluntary can that be, really?

And no one seems to be arguing that anyone was off the state clock when

Mr. Cuomo had public employees scrambling to block information that might have harmed the governor’s image — and his big book deal. That information concerned the thousands more deaths of nursing home residents from COVID -19 than the administration had reported. The months-long cover-up of those numbers included top aides rewriting an official report, and multiple state public information officers making false statements about the data and its unavailability.

That’s been a disturbing pattern in itself — taxpayer-funded information officials blocking or delaying the release of public information that might not be in Mr. Cuomo’s political or private financial interest, only to suddenly produce it when they can no longer keep it hidden.

We saw it with the Health Department’s release in January of nursing home death data just as Attorney General Letitia James was issuing a report that included numbers contrary to what the administration had been claiming. We saw it again this past week when, just as a New York Times story about the governor’s use of staff on his book was about to go online, the administration finally released Ms. Mogul’s letter to JCOPE and the ethics panel’s response after delaying a Freedom of Information request by the Times Union for five months.

Whether it’s having state employees serving as the governor’s personal editors, pitchmen or gofers, or engaging them in a cover-up to tamp down public information that might and tank an apparently multi-million-dollar book deal, this is exactly what’s not supposed to go on when there’s a rule against using “state property, personnel or other resources.”

Or, more precisely, abusing them — and with them, the public trust.

Add all this to the growing list of scandals for the Assembly Judiciary Committee to investigate as it weighs whether there are grounds to impeach Mr. Cuomo.

Or, more precisely, just how many grounds there are. As it did with Alan Hevesi and as it did with Antonia Novella, it just keeps getting worse the more New Yorkers learn about your behavior, Mr. Cuomo.

Resign.