Where Gov. Cuomo went wrong — and where many associated with his disbanded ethics commission went wrong — was in mixing law enforcement with hardball Albany gamesmanship.
By stirring the two, Cuomo transformed a drive to force reform on the Legislature into a shambles that prompted an investigation by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
Amazingly, it’s the governor’s office — not the Legislature — that has been forced to hire a criminal defense lawyer.
Cuomo rode his high horse into the gully.
Running for election four years ago, he said corruption and a loose ethical culture had fed the capital’s long-time dysfunction. He promised a clean-up, but the Legislature refused more than token moves on conflicts of interest and financial disclosure.
With prosecutors arresting a stream of lawmakers, Cuomo reissued a campaign vow: If the Legislature failed to enact reform laws, he would empanel a so-called Moreland Act commission to expose wrongdoing by its members.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Republican chief Dean Skelos shrugged off the muscle-flexing. Finally, as urged here in a editorial headlined, “The gov who cried wolf,” Cuomo empaneled a commission.
To answer the unsettled question of whether the panel had the authority to probe the Legislature, Cuomo enlisted Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to deputize commission members, vesting them with the AG’s criminal law-enforcement powers.
At that moment, the nature of the beast changed — and his plan to use the commission to bludgeon the Legislature into reform became dangerous.
His eventual decision to trade passage of get-tough laws for shutting down the commission took on overtones of obstructing justice because the commission was stocked with designated cops.
Heightening the impression, panel cochairman William Fitzpatrick, an upstate Republican DA, talked openly about “following the money” and referring criminal cases to prosecutors.
Still more, after declaring that the commission would have total independence to probe Albany, Cuomo pushed the commission around behind the scenes.
One example: When the Daily News revealed that the Legislature had granted tax breaks to the city’s most expensive condo project, this page concluded:
“This giveaway to One57 has all the makings of a perfect case for Cuomo’s Moreland Act commission: large campaign contributions changing hands, lawmakers operating behind closed doors, special interests gaining undeserved benefits and taxpayers getting the shaft.”
A later editorial carried the headline, “Follow Cuomo’s money, too,” after Albany Bureau Chief Ken Lovett disclosed that the developer had given $300,000 to the governor’s campaign over the past two years, including $100,000 shortly before Cuomo signed the tax breaks into law.
Along the way, the governor’s office pressured the commission into dropping plans to subpoena the Real Estate Board of New York in favor of simply requesting information from the group.
Numerous instances of similar interference add to the brief that Cuomo meddled with a commission that had become more than an arm of the governor the moment he granted it the attorney general’s authority. The distinction appears to have escaped Cuomo.
Similarly, he failed to recognize that even the standard public relations maneuver of soliciting supportive statements from commission members could be construed as witness tampering during the course of a federal investigation. Bharara made that crystal clear in a letter to the commission’s remaining staff.
Now, newly aware that anything he says can and will be used against him, Cuomo has said he will have no further comment. That’s how serious the matter is.