9 December 2021: How Can JCOPE Claw Back Cuomo's Pandemic "Leadership" Book Deal Millions?

Here's how JCOPE could force Cuomo to pay back millions

When New York's Joint Committee on Public Ethics (JCOPE) voted to rescind their staff's approval of Andrew M. Cuomo's pandemic "leadership" book deal, the question was raised how they might succeed in forcing Cuomo to give up what Staten Island-based columnist Tom Wrobleski called his "COVID blood money book".

This report describes how they are likely to proceed:

The commissioners are still in discussions on how exactly to proceed. But sources say that it’s increasingly likely that at JCOPE's monthly meeting next Tuesday, Commissioner David McNamara will introduce a motion that would order Cuomo to disgorge the millions in proceeds.

While JCOPE would issue the order if the motion passes, its language would likely leave enforcement of the order to the state attorney general’s office, which would also likely be the entity to determine whether any money recovered would go to the state treasury — and thus back to taxpayers — or be repaid to the book’s publisher, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House.

The commissioners’ strategy is to force Cuomo to disgorge the funds under provisions in the state Executive Law that created JCOPE. A section of that law allows the commission to issue written advisory opinions to state employees seeking to earn outside income, and says those opinions are binding “unless material facts were omitted or misstated by the person in the request for an opinion.”

Given the nature of how the book deal was approved and how Cuomo conducted himself in office in covering up the full extent of COVID nursing home deaths during the period his administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect, which made his "leadership" appear more successful than it was, helping him secure the $5.2 million book deal, we think a very reasonable argument can be made for Cuomo to be forced to give the money to New York taxpayers.