JCOPE strikes back at Cuomo
Panel countersues to force ex-governor to return book proceeds
New York’s ethics oversight commission countersued exgov. Andrew M. Cuomo late Friday, filing a court action seeking to force the repayment of $5.1 million in book proceeds paid to the former governor.
In March, the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics had passed a resolution ordering Cuomo to repay the millions he collected for “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” But he has taken no steps to comply with the JCOPE order to repay the book’s publisher, Penguin Random House.
In the counterclaim, attorneys representing the commission asked that Cuomo be forced to repay the funds, and sought an injunction barring Cuomo from disbursing the millions in the meantime.
JCOPE’S response also included notifying Cuomo’s attorneys of its intention to depose him on June 22.
The counterclaims come in response to a lawsuit Cuomo filed in early April in state Supreme Court. In that action, his attorneys had argued that JCOPE had violated his constitutional due-process rights. They sought to block JCOPE from going forward with an ongoing ethics investigation into whether Cuomo misused government resources to produce the 2020 book.
Cuomo’s attorneys argued
that JCOPE had “prejudged” the former governor in the investigation into whether he violated the Public Officers Law, noting that the board’s commissioners have passed several resolutions seeking to force Cuomo to repay proceeds earned from the book, even as the ethics inquiry has been ongoing. These were “flagrant violations of the due process rights,” the former governor’s attorneys asserted.
JCOPE commissioners say their efforts to force Cuomo to repay the $5.1 million were made using a separate portion of state law than the one dictating ethics inquiries.
Cuomo does not dispute using state workers to help produce “American Crisis,” but argues that the work was legal because the employees were “volunteering.” (That has been disputed by some of the staffers who took part.)
JCOPE commissioners argue that regardless of the outcome of the ethics investigation, Cuomo flatly misled the panel’s deputy counsel in 2020 when when he sought initial approval for the book project. At that time, his government lawyer had explicitly told JCOPE staffer Martin Levine that government personnel would not be used to write “America Crisis,” and Levine approved the project based on that assurance.
On Friday, attorneys representing the commission also sought a dismissal of Cuomo’s civil rights lawsuit filed in April, arguing it was “absurd and misplaced” and “a naked attempt by a former governor to use a federal civil rights statute to stop the hearing in state administrative proceeding concerning the potential violation of ethics laws by a thenpublic servant.”
Attorneys at the law firm Hogan Lovells, which is representing JCOPE, said Cuomo’s suit “should be dismissed with prejudice.”
They argued that the former governor had not exhausted administrative remedies before filing the lawsuit; that he was barred by a statute of limitations issue; and that the state Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction over the type of lawsuit that Cuomo had filed.
The firm is representing JCOPE because Attorney General Letitia James’ office declined to represent the commission.
In December, James’ office told JCOPE that a full ethics investigation into Cuomo was needed before the commission could force repayment of the $5.1 million. But commissioners disagree with James’ legal interpretation and have launched their own effort to force Cuomo to repay the funds.
JCOPE’S legal action comes even as it’s set to be replaced by a new state ethics oversight panel in July, created in this year’s state budget.
“In these filings, JJOKE itself acknowledges it will be out of business within weeks, meaning there’s no way it can hold the required hearings before then and yet it continues to double down on their biased abuses of power that even the attorney general’s office said were unconstitutional,” Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi said on Monday. “These filings represent the sad death rattles of a dying, incompetent and increasingly irrelevant bureaucratic beast that is wasting taxpayer money in a feeble attempt to settle political scores.”
It’s possible, however, that the new ethics commission would continue to pursue a Cuomo repayment, as well as the ethics investigation.
JCOPE was created by Cuomo and the Legislature a decade ago; until his downfall last year, the panel was subject to near-constant criticism that its operations were unduly influenced by the Executive Chamber.