19 October 2021: JCOPE Fails to Claw Back Cuomo Book Deal Millions Despite Majority Supporting Action

JCOPE fails to revoke Cuomo book approval

If you've ever thought JCOPE has become a clown show*, you'll find evidence to support your assessment in the following excerpt from this report:

A strong majority of New York ethics commissioners present for a vote on Tuesday favored revoking approval of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's lucrative book deal. Yet the motion still went down by one vote because so many other commissioners had departed the meeting by the time the vote occurred late Tuesday afternoon.

By a margin of seven votes in favor and two against, commissioners overseeing the Joint Commission on Public Ethics failed to pass the motion undoing its own staff’s approval for Cuomo to write last year's book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic." Eight votes in favor were needed to pass the motion. And by the time took place — five hours after the meeting had kicked off — five of 14 JCOPE commissioners were not present. The commission had held an unusually long, closed-door executive session, where the motion and other matters were discussed, before taking the vote in public.

The two votes against the motion were from William Fisher — who was appointed to the commission by Cuomo — and Jose Nieves, the panel's new chairman, who was recently appointed by Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Commissioner Gary Lavine agreed to have a vote on the motion after the executive session concluded. It's one of several times this year a matter has been pushed into executive session, and then failed to receive eight votes due to early departures.

The five commissioners not present at the end of Tuesday's meeting were Colleen DiPirro, an appointee of Cuomo; James McCarthy, the Assembly Republican appointee; David McNamara, a Senate Republican appointee; Juanita Bing Newton, the Senate Democratic appointee; and Terryl Brown, who was just appointed to JCOPE on Monday by Hochul.

* "Clown show" may be too mild a description to describe New York's Joint Commission on Public Ethics.