Thursday, July 24, 2014

NY Times exposes how ethically challenged Cuomo is

From the NY Times:

With Albany rocked by a seemingly endless barrage of scandals and arrests, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo set up a high-powered commission last summer to root out corruption in state politics. It was barely two months old when its investigators, hunting for violations of campaign-finance laws, issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm that had placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the New York State Democratic Party.

The investigators did not realize that the firm, Buying Time, also counted Mr. Cuomo among its clients, having bought the airtime for his campaign when he ran for governor in 2010.

Word that the subpoena had been served quickly reached Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aide, Lawrence S. Schwartz. He called one of the commission’s three co-chairs, William J. Fitzpatrick, the district attorney in Syracuse.

“This is wrong,” Mr. Schwartz said, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose account was corroborated by three other people told about the call at the time. He said the firm worked for the governor, and issued a simple directive:

“Pull it back.”

The subpoena was swiftly withdrawn. The panel’s chief investigator explained why in an email to the two other co-chairs later that afternoon.

“They apparently produced ads for the governor,” she wrote.

The pulled-back subpoena was the most flagrant example of how the commission, established with great ceremony by Mr. Cuomo in July 2013, was hobbled almost from the outset by demands from the governor’s office.

While the governor now maintains he had every right to monitor and direct the work of a commission he had created, many commissioners and investigators saw the demands as politically motivated interference that hamstrung an undertaking that the governor had publicly vowed would be independent.

The commission developed a list of promising targets, including a lawmaker suspected of using campaign funds to support a girlfriend in another state and pay tanning-salon bills. The panel also highlighted activities that it saw as politically odious but perfectly legal, like exploiting a loophole to bundle enormous campaign contributions.

But a three-month examination by The New York Times found that the governor’s office deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.

Ultimately, Mr. Cuomo abruptly disbanded the commission halfway through what he had indicated would be an 18-month life. And now, as the Democratic governor seeks a second term in November, federal prosecutors are investigating the roles of Mr. Cuomo and his aides in the panel’s shutdown and are pursuing its unfinished business.

Before its demise, Mr. Cuomo’s aides repeatedly pressured the commission, many of whose members and staff thought they had been given a once-in-a-career chance at cleaning up Albany. As a result, the panel’s brief existence — and the writing and editing of its sole creation, a report of its preliminary findings — was marred by infighting, arguments and accusations. Things got so bad that investigators believed a Cuomo appointee was monitoring their communications without their knowledge. Resignations further crippled the commission. In the end, the governor got the Legislature to agree to a package of ethics reforms far less ambitious than those the commission had recommended — a result Mr. Cuomo hailed as proof of the panel’s success.

While some reports of tension between the governor’s office and the commission surfaced in the news media at the time, the examination by The Times provides the first full accounting of how extensively the governor’s aides involved themselves in the commission’s work and the level of disruption that this caused.


Read the whole thing. You'll fall off your chair.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

What a tangled web we weave Mr Cuomo...

Anonymous said...

I'll bet that the Times will indorse him for re-election anyway, come November.

Anonymous said...

"I'll bet that the Times will indorse him for re-election anyway, come November."

We know The Times won't endorse Astorino and they despise Cuomo so much that an endorsement of him will just prove that they are a liberal rag.

I can actually see them printing an editorial endorsing no one claiming that we need a cleansing of the political arena in Albany.

Then they will endorse every democrat and liberal running for state senate and assembly.

Anonymous said...

Remember the disaster Cuomo created while he was in charge of HUD??? Our country is still trying to dig out of it.
Millions of lives destroyed all because of Cuomo and company! New York must dump this evil man!

Anonymous said...

Cuomo is nothing but an air headed thug & drama queen.

Anonymous said...

Cuomo was scum when he headed HUD. A made man in the Dem Mafia. The Slimes finally figured this out?

"Go get your shoe shine box, Punchy"

Anonymous said...

Cuomo is nothing but an air headed thug & drama queen.
+
That is a good way to describe someone from western Queens on city council.

georgetheatheist said...

"Remember the disaster Cuomo created while he was in charge of HUD??? Our country is still trying to dig out of it."
_________________________________
Yup, sure do. After you devour reading that Times article you can read here the Village Voice article of 2008 by Wayne Barrett how Cuomo caused the banking crisis of 2008 as HUD Secretary.

Anonymous said...

So Cuomo clearly appears to have major ethical issues, and Astorino is a douchebag. What's the choice?