10 July 2021: Is JCOPE "a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy"?

State ethics hearing Monday

In the first Star Wars movie, also known as "Episode IV", the character Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" than the Mos Eisley Spaceport they are about to visit.

We integrated part of that quote into the headline for this timeline entry because a lot of people in New York, including the New York Bar Association and a number of elected officials, are concluding the Joint Committee on Public Ethics (JCOPE) is perhaps a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than the fictional Mos Eisley Spaceport.

Good government advocacy groups such as Reinvent Albany and the New York Public Interest Research Group have been highly critical of JCOPE, accusing the agency of being a toothless watchdog reluctant to delve into allegations that would embarrass the governor.

In a February report, the New York City Bar Association, in an evaluation of JCOPE, noted it has evolved over the past decade from seeing JCOPE as structurally flawed to concluding it "should be abolished and replaced with a new entity."

John Kaehny, director of Reinvent Albany, said a prime example of how ineffective JCOPE has become came when the agency's staff gave Cuomo permission to line up a profit-making book contract about his role in leading the state through the pandemic without having the JCOPE commissioners review the proposed arrangement before it was finalized with the book publisher.

"One hundred percent of the corruption enforcement in New York has been by federal prosecutors, with zero from JCOPE," Kaehny said. "JCOPE has aggravated things by giving free passes to the governor for a multi-million-dollar book deal with a company whose parent company gets state subsidies in the form of film and television production tax credits."

If JCOPE were to be scrapped without any immediate replacement, Kaehny said, state officials would lose the "facade" of having an ethics watchdog in place, and might then do a better job of maintaining ethical standards.

Before we continue, note that these comments don't even mention any of events of the past week, which demonstrated again how impotent JCOPE is. Here's the timeline's coverage of that story:

• 2 July 2021: JCOPE Vote Abstainers Block New Criminal Probe of Governor Cuomo
• 9 July 2021: JCOPE Ethics Leak Probe Won't Be Reopened

Getting back now to the criticisms of JCOPE and a new criticism of the chairman the commission's insiders recently hired, Sanford Berland, who is alleged to have already engaged in unlawful conduct as part of his hiring:

David Grandeau, an Albany lawyer who specializes in lobbying compliance matters and who was once chief of the now-defunct Lobbying Commission, said he believes the JCOPE structure could be spared but argued all of the current staff and commissioners should be terminated.

"This is an agency that is broken and corrupt, and it's corrupt from the top down," Grandeau said.

Grandeau charged that Berland, whose appointment as the new JCOPE director was announced April 28, filed a required financial disclosure report after it was due, and the agency then back-dated it.

McClure insisted the document was "submitted when it was supposed to be submitted." He declined to provide the date JCOPE received the document from the commission's new chief.

In this excerpt, McClure refers to JCOPE spokesman Walt McClure, who appears to be following Governor Cuomo's chief PR flack Rich Azzopardi's tone-deaf playbook.

The New York Senate Ethics and Internal Governance Committee will hold a hearing on Monday, 12 July 2021 on potential reforms of JCOPE.