Hey, it ‘taint’ me!
Gov: I'm clean, even if corrupt cronies aren't
It’s not me, just everyone around me.
Gov. Cuomo tried again Thursday to distance himself from the corruption scandal that has consumed his flagship upstate economic development project, arguing that the spate of guilty verdicts won’t hurt his re-election chances.
“I think there has never been a suggestion that I did anything wrong,” Cuomo said during a stop in Brooklyn.
“There have been people in the administration — we just had a SUNY professor who was found guilty, and can we do more checks and balances? Yeah, we always can, but you will always have some level of people who think they’re smarter and get greedy and get stupid and get venal.
“In those situations, what you’ll have to do is say, I’m going to enforce the law 100 percent.”
Cuomo said his track record shows him to be tough on crooked pols. As the state attorney general a decade ago, Cuomo convicted state Comptroller Alan Hevesi and Bronx state Sen. Pedro Espada, then the state Senate majority leader.
A federal jury in Manhattan last week convicted Alain Kaloyeros — Cuomo’s hand-picked head of the $1.5 billion Buffalo Billion project to help revitalize Northern and Western New York — on all counts stemming from a bid-rigging indictment.
Federal prosecutors alleged that Kaloyeros, who headed the arm of the State University of New York that ran the program, funneled contracts to two developers that were major Cuomo donors. Three executives from those two firms were convicted, as well.
Cuomo announced this week that he would be donating the $534,000 in campaign contributions he received from the two developers, LPC-iminelli and COR Development.
Joseph Percoco, once Cuomo’s closest aide, will be sentenced next month following his conviction in March for accepting more than $321,000 in bribes from companies with business before the state.
Meanwhile, Cuomo continues to maintain a huge lead over Democratic rival Cynthia Nixon — 59 to 28 percent — in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. Nixon dismissed the results. “I don’t know where they found these people,” she said.
“Sixty-five percent of millennials polled didn’t seem to have heard of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as someone who is a national figure, who all New Yorkers can talk about. Polls are reliably wrong.”
Speaking at the 74th Street/ Roosevelt Avenue subway station in Jackson Heights, Queens, Nixon hammered away at a favorite theme that Cuomo has imperiled subway riders by underfunding the MTA.
“Not only are there serious safety concerns, but the dysfunction is also devastating to New Yorkers and to our financial well-being,” she said.