So sue me!
Aide’s clients not my problem: gov
WHAT’S ONE more legal problem?
A defiant Mayor de Blasio, who is at the center of several overlapping investigations, said he doesn’t care that a state ethics agency is taking his now-defunct political nonprofit to court for not cooperating in its probe.
“They want to go to court, they can go to court,” de Blasio told reporters Tuesday.
“We think it is quite clear that they are beyond their purview.”
He spoke one day after sources said the Joint Commission on Public Ethics filed a motion in court in Albany to try to force the nonprofit to cooperate with its probe.
JCOPE had been seeking subpoenas from the nonprofit, the Campaign for One New York, regarding its fund-raising and lobbying efforts.
The nonprofit’s lawyer Laurence Laufer on Friday said it wouldn’t comply because the request was a “blatantly political exercise by an agency whose very independence is deeply in question.”
Laufer has suggested that Gov. Cuomo — who does not get along with the mayor — is behind the probe, but has stopped short of naming him. Cuomo has denied any involvement.
De Blasio and Laufer have also insinuated that Cuomo might be behind the leak of an embarrassing memo in which a state Board of Elections official with ties to the governor urges the Manhattan district attorney to investigate Hizzoner’s fundraising for 2014 state Senate races.
But sources said that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara had begun looking into that fund-raising well before the Board of Elections referred the case to DA’s Cy Vance Jr.’s office. Vance’s office then teamed up with the feds to conduct a joint investigation, the sources said.
That development — the latest in the connected probes into the mayor’s fund-raising — was first reported Tuesday by DNAInfo.com.
Although de Blasio has tried to claim the probes are mostly political, he demurred Tuesday when asked directly if Cuomo was pushing the JCOPE investigation.
“Look at the cast of characters (at JCOPE), who hired them, and what they have come out of,” he said.
Former JCOPE Executive Director Letizia Tagliafierro now works for Cuomo, and its current head, Seth Agata, also worked for the governor at one point.
Its spokesman said the probe was launched on behalf of goodgovernment groups last year, and was not political.
It is not the only body investigating de Blasio’s fund-raising. He is at the center of several law enforcement investigations, including inquiries into the Campaign for One New York, which operated outside the campaign finance system.
No one has been charged with wrongdoing, but because of its structure, the nonprofit was allowed to accept larger donations than allowed under the city’s strict campaign finance laws. De Blasio has said he’s done nothing wrong. ALBANY – Gov. Cuomo said Tuesday it wasn’t his job to ask now former top aide Joseph Percoco who his private consulting clients were – even when he returned to the administration after running the governor’s 2014 reelection campaign. Days after the probe became public, Cuomo last week said that Percoco, after leaving the state payroll to run his the reelection campaign, told him that he might hire outside clients, but never said who they were or even if he did. Asked by reporters Tuesday if he regretted not asking Percoco for specifics, Cuomo said he does not. He insisted that neither he nor the state lobbying commission had reason to delve into Percoco’s decision to represent clients with ties to the state while he was off the state payroll running Cuomo’s campaign. “There are rules, people know the rules, they’re very clear, they’re very precise and people should follow the rules,” Cuomo said, before adding that “the onus is on you to follow them, not for you to be questioned and then follow them.”