JCOPE ‘aided Andy’ on book deal

The now-disbanded Joint Commission on Public Ethics acted as disgraced exGov. Andrew Cuomo’s patsies by approving his controversial $5 million pandemic book deal without even a basic review of its terms, a blistering investigative report found.

Instead, JCOPE officials allowed Cuomo and his team to dictate the terms of what information they would disclose and when about the book contract when they sought approval from the ethics agency.

“One of the clear takeaways from our analysis of JCOPE’s approval of the July 10 [2020 book] request is that the Executive Chamber overpowered JCOPE and JCOPE failed to assert itself as a watchdog agency against the governor,” the findings of the law firm Hogan Lovells found. “Rather than JCOPE telling the Executive Chamber what information it needed to provide in order to obtain approval, the Executive Chamber told JCOPE what information the governor would provide, which was not much.”

‘Coerced’

The belated report, ordered recently by JCOPE’s commissioners, said, “The Executive Chamber also successfully coerced JCOPE into expediting the approval and rushing through the process with very minimal due diligence.”

The report recommended the new Commission on Ethics in Lobbying and Government put in place a more rigorous review process to make it “more difficult for statewide elected officials to quickly push ethically questionable or problematic requests through the approval process.”

The new ethics agency should also create a list of information that must be provided in connection with all outside activity requests. JCOPE never collected such information from Cuomo for his book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.”