10 July 2021: Editorial - "JCOPE Has Got To Go"

New York state editorial roundup: Cuomo's posturing, fix the roads, JCOPE charade

The Albany Times-Union's editors call for New York's official public "watchdog", the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) to be terminated, calling it a "sham". They also rip JCOPE Commissioner Colleen DiPirro, who might be a "Imposter Syndrome" case study if she really believes her expressed reasoning:

Members of the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics must know that a crime may have been committed right under their noses, possibly by someone close to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Possibly by one of them. Yet the commission won’t ask the state attorney general to investigate.

At issue is the apparent leak of a confidential JCOPE vote in 2019 on what’s believed to be the question of whether to open an investigation into whether a former top Cuomo aide, Joseph Percoco, used state resources in the governor’s office while he was on leave to work on Mr. Cuomo’s reelection campaign. Shortly after that vote, which resulted in no investigation, Mr. Cuomo is said to have contacted Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie to express displeasure with how Mr. Heastie’s appointees on the commission voted. Divulging such a vote would be a misdemeanor crime.

An investigation by the state inspector general’s office was inconclusive; little wonder, since neither the governor nor the Assembly speaker was interviewed. So JCOPE last week considered referring the matter to Attorney General Letitia James.

That went nowhere. Four of Mr. Cuomo’s appointees voted against the referral without explanation; another, Colleen DiPirro, abstained, saying that although she has been on JCOPE for two and a half years, she didn’t feel “qualified” or “educated” enough to cast a vote. To put this tortured logic another way, she didn’t have enough information to decide whether more information is needed.

Mr. Heastie’s appointees abstained as well, including one of the targets of the governor’s ire, James Yates, who said he couldn’t cast a vote even to refer the corruption he witnessed for an outside investigation because it would be a conflict of interest. What, one has to wonder, could he possibly be accused of having to gain by a pursuit of the truth?

“Sham” is too mild a word for this corrupted ethics commission. JCOPE has got to go.

That's much rougher than we've been in our analysis, particularly with respect to Yates' abstained vote. We may need to reconsider our initial view.