Cuomo’s epilogue

We are all for Andrew Cuomo disgorging the $5.2 million advance from his cursed COVID memoir. The book was a terrible idea for him to write while he was governor, still battling the virus (and not much of a read, either). Like his previous try at becoming an author, it bombed, with sales so weak that the publisher took a deep bath.

The book was also written under an ethics permission that the watchdog now says was both improperly obtained and not honored. It’s bad all around and it shows that when the publisher called Cuomo in the first weeks of COVID, he should have said that he was busy and didn’t have time.

We don’t know how permission was obtained from the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE), but if the terms of the arrangement weren’t followed — most importantly, that no government employee on the clock could participate in the book’s production — Cuomo, as the responsible party, should be at fault. As to any sanction for such a breach, it depends on what the law and rules allow for a person no longer in state employ. Ethically speaking, repaying the treasury for labor pilfered, plus a penalty, would be in order.

But JCOPE ordering a relinquishment (to the state attorney general) of the full $5.2 million advance that the publisher stupidly pledged to the governor is quite a stretch. JCOPE, flaccid by design — Cuomo’s design — is using as its justification that its permission was retroactively revoked last month and that Cuomo never reapplied. Therefore, goes their cockamamie logic, it’s like he never had the OK in the first place. Cuomo’s lawyer’s laughing retort seems about right here.

JCOPE was created to be a weak ethics cop over the executive and Legislature. There is no way it would have ever gone after a governor still in power. That it only finds its teeth after Cuomo has resigned in disgrace is perfectly fitting, and final proof it too should be put out of its misery.