Monday, October 25, 2021

25 October 2021: Opinion - Due Process Is Different When Cuomo Does It

Seiler: All the due process Cuomo could have stomached

Albany Times-Union editor Casey Seiler runs through a number of examples of hypocrisy on the part of Andrew M. Cuomo's claim the state attorney general's investigation of his alleged misconduct in office was biased. He recaps a number of events already covered somewhere in the timeline, before describing one that has not. Here's that excerpt, which picks up from the recent JCOPE vote fiasco:

In most democratic bodies, a measure that receives a 7-2 vote would be approved. But because JCOPE was designed to be ineffective, the matter required eight aye votes, and several commissioners neglected to show up — while others, incredibly, showed up but kited out early. While it's unclear how the five missing members might have voted, it's sort of what they're on JCOPE to do.

One of those who couldn't make it all the way through was Colleen DiPirro, a Cuomo appointee whose aversion — at least in public — to voting in any way that might displease the former governor is at least as powerful as her affection for scrolling through her cellphone in remote meetings. After Tuesday's vote, one commissioner plaintively asked how DiPirro had voted, only to be informed she had taken a powder.

DiPirro, it's worth remembering, had dinner with then-Inspector General Letizia Tagliafierro the night before the notorious January 2019 JCOPE meeting that included a vote on whether or not the panel should investigate whether former Cuomo aide Joe Percoco was running the governor's 2014 re-election campaign out of Cuomo’s taxpayer-funded Manhattan office. DiPirro and Tagliafierro, you see, are old friends. And according to them, when old friends get together the night before a vote that could prove problematic for their mutual patron, they definitely don't discuss it.

When information about the closed-door proceeding was somehow leaked the very next day to Cuomo, who harangued Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie about the way his appointees had voted, it ended up being investigated — in secret — by Tagliafierro's office. Though the former Cuomo aide recused herself, her investigators failed to talk to Cuomo or Heastie.

Tagliafierro resigned last month as this newspaper was preparing an investigative piece that detailed how the inspector general's office had withered during Cuomo's administration. On Thursday, Gov. Kathy Hochul took the refreshing step of appointing an inspector general who doesn't come from the ranks of the Executive Chamber: former Manhattan prosecutor Lucy Lang.

It's rather amazing how incestous New York's state government became during Andrew M. Cuomo's tenure as governor.

Here is previous coverage of related events on the timeline:

Seiler's op-ed was published on 23 October 2021.

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