Cuomo’s not so pro bono
On Monday, the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics shocked the world and actually did something. Unfortunately, the thing it did was to undo something its staff had done more than a year ago, and that the commissioners had failed to undo several times previously despite mounting evidence that it had either been played for a bunch of suckers or allowed to let a powerful man get away with significant wrongdoing — which, if you’re JCOPE, could in either case be viewed as a classic example of something being a feature and not a bug.
JCOPE’s action, of course, was its decision Tuesday to rescind its staff ’s 2020 approval of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s $5.1 million book deal with Crown Publishing for “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID -19 Pandemic,” the ex-governor’s second-in-a-row failed memoir. The ethics commission ultimately did not take kindly to learning that, contrary to the assurances of Cuomo’s counsel that no state resources or personnel would be used in the production of the memoir, Executive Chamber employees served as a sort of literary support staff for the contracted author.
The response from Team Cuomo was, of course, to denounce JCOPE as hopelessly corrupt — which, truth be told, is an argument that has been made in this space many times back when the former governor’s loyalists dominated the commission. “These JCOPE members are acting outside the scope of their authority and are carrying the water of the politicians who appointed them,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said in a statement that seems to have been plagiarized from one of my past columns.
I observed on Twitter that this was akin to Dr. Frankenstein releasing a statement denouncing his reanimated creature. Azzopardi called to note that it was more like Igor issuing such a statement. This is a fair point.
The ex-governor’s argument is that any staffer who worked on the book did so on a wholly volunteer basis, and plus — in a classic rubber/glue argument — lots of legislators have their staffers do volunteer campaign work. (Governors, too.) Now, using staff to volunteer on a political campaign is morally suspect but also regular practice. Using staff to shovel $5.1 million into your personal bank account is something else entirely.
There is, of course, the lingering question of just how “voluntary” this work was. I have in recent months tried to imagine how a powerful elected official (or PEO) might recruit a staffer for such work — less pro bono than pro Cuomo. I think it might go a little something like this: