New York’s ethical farce

The Joint Commission on Public Ethics sure seems to be going out of its way to not investigate whether Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s former campaign manager violated the rules, if not the law, by using public resources to conduct political business.

For the second time now, JCOPE has contrived an excuse for ignoring complaints that Joe Percoco, a longtime aide to the governor, was doing campaign work out of the governor’s office even after he had left state government to work on Mr. Cuomo’s 2014 campaign. JCOPE is so determined to avoid looking into this that it’s wasting taxpayer money in court to defend its lack of action — a misuse of public resources in a class all its own.

There is no argument that the complaints JCOPE is ignoring are political hay. They were filed months ago by Marcus Molinaro, Mr. Cuomo’s Republican challenger, and Ed Cox, the Republican state chairman.

But their partisan motives don’t make the allegations any less serious — or the facts on which they are based any less true.

It’s a matter of public record that over eight months in 2014, while he was off the state payroll and managing the governor’s re-election campaign, Mr. Percoco used his old desk at the governor’s Manhattan office. Aides to the governor testified to this in Mr. Percoco’s trial on bribery charges for which he was convicted and now awaits sentencing. Phone records show dozens of calls from that desk’s phone to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign headquarters, fundraisers, consultants and lawyer. The desk was just steps away from the governor’s.

Mr. Cuomo has said he knew nothing about all that. Mr. Molinaro and Mr. Cox want JCOPE to do a full investigation, and say they’ve been waiting months for a legally required answer to their complaints.

JCOPE insists it doesn’t have to respond to the complaints, or do anything about them, since they’re secondhand, based on press reports. It also argues that it needs to notify a complainant only if a case has been closed, and only if its board voted to open an investigation at all. Clearly, it has not — the governor’s office says it hasn’t been notified of an investigation, as the law would require.

Putting this legal parsing aside, the fact remains that political business was being conducted in the governor’s office, right under the governor’s nose. If that’s doesn’t raise ethical red flags, what does?

If JCOPE were a genuine ethics watchdog, it wouldn’t even need a complaint to start looking into this. But the commission — a 14-member body on which the governor appoints a bloc of six seats — has hired outside counsel, at public expense, to fight Mr. Molinaro and Mr. Cox in court rather than investigate misuse of public resources in the Executive Chamber.

To tally up the apparent offenses here: Dereliction of duty. Failure to comply with the law. Spending taxpayer funds for political purposes.

If only New York had a real ethics watchdog to investigate the commission posing as one.