ALBANY, N.Y. — As its final action before being disbanded, New York’s much-maligned ethics panel voted Friday to release an outside report detailing its approval of a $5.1 million book deal for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
In a 10-1 vote, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics moved to make public a report written by the law firm Hogan Lovells that found Cuomo “is at fault for misleading JCOPE” and the commission “should have recognized the potential ethical issues arising” from the deal.
According to the report, Cuomo’s office “exerted pressure on JCOPE to expedite the approval of the request” of the book, titled “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which was published by Penguin Random House in 2020 at the height of the crisis.
“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,” the report reads.
The report reaffirms that Cuomo staffers were enlisted to help write and promote the book and also shows how JCOPE dropped the ball and should have raised more questions about the then-governor writing a memoir mid-pandemic.
“Notwithstanding the Governor’s tactics, once JCOPE staff became aware that the Governor sought to write and commercialize a book about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic while leading the State’s response to the pandemic, they should have recognized that the request raised significant potential ethical issues,” the report states.
Cuomo’s spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, denounced the report and accused the disbanded organization of chicanery. “There is some poetry to the fact that this feeble stunt — authored by the very law firm that is representing JJOKE in our lawsuit — is the last act from this incompetent biased, score settling dinosaur of a bureaucracy.”
The new look at the ethical issues surrounding the tome also reveals that much of the COVID-19-focused text was already written before Cuomo sought approval from JCOPE and that his office initially “mischaracterized the Book as a continuation of the Governor’s prior memoir.” The report notes that JCOPE staffers were aware at the time that the book would “at least in part focus” on the pandemic.
The decision to release the report was made during an emergency JCOPE meeting held less than 12 hours before the panel is slated to be replaced by a yet-to-be-formed ethics entity created as part of the state budget process earlier this year.
Ahead of the vote, commissioner Marvin Jacob voiced frustration with the convoluted process to approve the publishing of the report and the commission itself, long criticized for lack of transparency and being a toothless entity.
“How is this being heard out there, all of this legal mumbo jumbo, privilege and this and that, amendments and amendments to amendments, technical, technical talk,” he said. “We’re talking about a report, whether it goes out into the public with redactions, without redactions, and we can’t even get underway.
“Can we just try to be as transparent as possible, as straightforward as possible in what we say in our very last meeting,” he added, noting the flak that has hounded the board during its rocky 11-year tenure.
The commission then entered executive session to discuss the release of the report in private.
Cuomo’s seven-figure publishing deal was approved by a JCOPE staffer and not the full ethics panel, which was made up of appointees named by the governor and legislative leaders.
JCOPE commissioners voted late last year to rescind the approval and ordered the ex-governor to turn over his profits following reports that staffers assisted in writing and promoting the book.
That prompted Cuomo, who resigned last August following multiple accusations of sexual harassment, to file a lawsuit in April arguing that JCOPE had violated his constitutional due process rights.
The commission in turn, represented by Hogan Lovells, counter-sued in an attempt to force Cuomo to repay the funds.
The disgraced Democrat has admitted that Executive Chamber staffers helped with the book, but he argues that any work was purely “voluntary” and not done on state time.
Late last year, Attorney General Letitia James’ office told JCOPE that the panel needed to conduct a full ethics investigation into the matter before Cuomo could be forced to pay back the $5.1 million.
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