13 January 2022: Cuomo to Fight JCOPE Clawback of Pandemic "Leadership" Book Profits

Cuomo won’t give up $5M book payday without a fight, says lawyer

This report follows up the legal chest thumping by one of Andrew M. Cuomo's lawyers featured in this timeline entry. The following excerpt provides more context for the developing legal situation:

Andrew Cuomo is ready to fight the very ethics panel he created to try and keep his $5.1 million pandemic-windfall book deal.

A lawyer for the forced-to-resign ex-governor threatened Wednesday to sue the state’s ethics board for trying to claw back the payday Cuomo received for his written-on-the-job memoir about the COVID-19 scourge — and accused officials of acting “for improper political reasons.”

In a letter to the chairman of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, Cuomo lawyer James McGuire formally put the agency’s commissioners and staffers “on notice that they must preserve all records” related to their consideration of the controversial book deal.

McGuire said JCOPE had violated Cuomo’s “rights to the protections of due process under the United States and New York Constitutions, and expose JCOPE and its commissioners to liability under [federal civil rights law].”

The flip side of Cuomo filing suit against JCOPE to try to keep the proceeds from his pandemic "leadership" book that was produced by state government employees is that it would also expose Cuomo to legal discovery by JCOPE's attorneys, which could form the basis of additional actions against Cuomo.

If that happens, well, it's time to pop some popcorn....