Mr. Cuomo’s new void
It speaks volumes about New York’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics that it can’t get to the bottom of an ethical breach in its own ranks.
What a commentary on its investigative capability. Its independence. Its integrity. What a commentary, too, on the state of ethics in New York government. And among prosecutors in Albany and Manhattan who are looking the other way.
Who’s left to look into this mess? One name comes to mind: Attorney General Letitia James.
The allegations go back to 2019, when JCOPE’S board voted on whether to investigate the circumstances surrounding Joseph Percoco, a former top aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was convicted of corruption charges connected to the Buffalo Billion economic development effort. Republicans wanted JCOPE to look into whether Mr. Percoco misused state resources in continuing to work in the governor’s office on nongovernmental business while he was on leave and working for the governor’s 2014 reelection campaign, and whether Mr. Cuomo knew about it.
JCOPE, which has drawn much criticism for the degree to which Mr. Cuomo controls it, was forced by a court to vote on the complaint. Normally, how individual commissioners vote is secret. But former JCOPE commissioner Julie Garcia, an appointee of Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, says Mr. Heastie’s top counsel, Howard Vargas, told her after the meeting that Mr. Cuomo had complained about how the speaker’s appointees had voted.
Ms. Garcia reported the matter. An investigation by the inspector general — which conspicuously did not include interviews with Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Heastie — failed, not surprisingly, to substantiate the leak.
Several Republican JCOPE commissioners have been pressing for an investigation of the leak and the inspector general’s handling of it. But getting an investigation to happen is no easy thing — and it doesn’t seem to help that all the relevant players are members of the same party, in this case, Democrats. Although the governor has an office in New York City, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. says the matter isn’t in his jurisdiction. Albany County District Attorney David Soares says he’s focused on gun violence.
If they won’t investigate, there is still a credible possibility — the state’s attorney general. Though also a Democrat, Ms. James showed commendable independence in last month’s release of a report that concluded the Cuomo administration greatly underestimated the number of nursing home residents who had died of COVID -19, information the governor’s office had kept secret for months. Ms. James is now overseeing an investigation into sexual harassment allegations against the governor.
The hitch here is that Ms. James would need authorization from the governor to conduct a criminal probe in which he himself would be, at the very least, a person of interest.
And yet, as Mr. Cuomo acknowledged in the backlash over the nursing home data, creating a “void” only invites others to fill it with speculation. That’s not hard to do here: For all appearances, Mr. Cuomo has an unethical, possibly illegal, pipeline into a board whose operations are supposed to be largely secret.
Mr. Cuomo, then, has a choice: Let an independent investigation get to the truth, or let New Yorkers fill the void with the most likely conclusion his reluctance leaves.