9 May 2022: Ethics Commission Hits Back at Cuomo

Ethics commission hits back at Cuomo, seeking $5M book repayment

This report indicates New York's Joint Commission on Public Ethics is putting the lawyers it hired on 27 April 2022 to work. In addition to defending the commission from the resigned-in-disgrace Andrew M. Cuomo's 1 April 2022 lawsuit, JCOPE's legal team will be taking on the task of compelling Cuomo to give up the $5.2 million he will personally pocket from the publisher of his pandemic "leadership" book because of his use of state government resources to produce it. According to the following excerpt, JCOPE's legal team went on the offense in filing a countersuit against Cuomo on Friday, 6 May 2022:

New York’s ethics oversight commission countersued ex-Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo late Friday, filing a court action seeking to force the repayment of $5.1 million in book proceeds paid to the former governor.

In March, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics had passed a resolution ordering Cuomo to repay the millions from writing “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” But Cuomo has taken no steps to comply with the JCOPE order to repay the funds to the book's publisher, Penguin Random House.

In the counterclaims on Friday, attorneys representing the commission asked that Cuomo be forced to repay the funds, and for an injunction barring Cuomo from disbursing the millions in the meantime.

JCOPE's aggressive response has also included notifying Cuomo's attorneys of a plan to depose Cuomo on June 22.

The counterclaims come in response to a lawsuit Cuomo filed in early April. In state Supreme Court, his attorneys had argued that JCOPE had violated his constitutional due process rights. They sought to block JCOPE from going forward with an ongoing ethics investigation into whether Cuomo misused government resources to produce the 2020 book.

Since JCOPE will be replaced by a new ethics commission in July, we anticipate Cuomo's personal legal team will attempt to stall any effort to depose the otherwise unemployed Andrew M. Cuomo before that occurs.