JCOPE’s last laugh

An outside report on the ethics panel’s servile approval process for ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s book deal reminds us of why were glad it’s defunct.

Just before the figurative switching off of lights and clearing out of desks, the state’s now-defunct Joint Commission on Public Ethics voted Thursday to release a report investigating the process that led to the panel’s July 2020 approval of the $5.1 million book deal that produced then Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s COVID -19 memoir, “American Crisis.”

The report by the firm Hogan Lovells, released a few hours after the vote, offers a crystalline reminder of why the watchdog entity was maligned throughout its 11-year tenure: JCOPE was dysfunctional and wholly in the thrall of the Executive Chamber.

In the case of the book deal, the panel’s staff can take a tiny wedge of cover from the fact that Mr. Cuomo’s team — including taxpayer-funded loyalists who should have been devoting themselves to managing the pandemic — used obfuscation, deceit and pressure tactics to get their way. Two examples: In framing its formal request, the Executive Chamber misrepresented the focus of the book and neglected to mention that 70,000 words of what was planned as an 80,000-word book had already been assembled.

But to say the staff, especially JCOPE Deputy General Counsel Martin Levine, was too credulous in this matter strains the definition of the word to its breaking point. The report notes the many red flags that JCOPE ignored, including the noxious ethical swamp of a top state official personally profiting from his account of a health crisis he was still in the middle of managing. When a JCOPE commissioner asked Mr. Levine for a copy of the publishing contract and other information, Mr. Levine allowed himself to be talked out of it by Mr. Cuomo’s special counsel Judith Mogul and Linda Lacewell, who at the time was ostensibly serving not as the governor’s book agent but as superintendent of the state Division of Financial Services.

When more commissioners pressed for details, the panel’s staff and JCOPE Chairman Michael Rozen — a Cuomo appointee, of course — treated them like nosy children. The staff ’s informal approval of the book project was zapped to the Executive Chamber at 5:51 p.m. on July 16. The manuscript was sent to the publisher less than 10 minutes later. Except for Mr. Rozen, the ethics panel’s commissioners appeared to be completely out of the loop.

Compounding the panel’s slapdash work was the fact that it never asked Mr. Cuomo to submit an Outside Activity Approval Form that would have detailed, for example, the number of hours in each day the governor planned to work on the book — which could have been tricky, since the governor and his assistants had almost finished the manuscript even before receiving approval.

The commissioners and staff of the newborn Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government need to read the full report, and ask themselves one key question: Is it any wonder the Cuomo administration eventually sank under the weight of scandal, considering that the people who were supposed to police its ethical performance were so utterly compromised and servile?

The only good thing to say about this affair is that it will likely be the last time New Yorkers are embarrassed by JCOPE.