8 July 2022: JCOPE to Release Final Report on Cuomo as Ethics Commission Disbands

Ethics panel releases internal Cuomo report in final act

Over much of its history, New York's Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) served to extinguish ethics charges filed against Andrew M. Cuomo and his cronies. So much so that the only place more safe for these political actors from facing consequences for their ethical transgressions was the Albany County District Attorney's office. The ethics "watchdog" created by Cuomo was compromised and ineffective by design.

That state of affairs lasted until August 2021, when Cuomo resigned in disgrace as New York's governor. After that, Cuomo's political appointees who served his interests on the commission were soon shuffled off and their non-beholden-to Cuomo replacements finally began seriously probing Cuomo's more ethically challenged actions from his decade in power.

But because JCOPE had been so severely compromised by Cuomo during its existence, New York legislators acted to replace the toothless watchdog with a new ethics oversight commission for public officials, which takes over that responsibility from JCOPE beginning from 8 July 2022.

As that happens, JCOPE will issue a final report. The excerpt below describes JCOPE's penultimate action from 7 July 2022:

In its final act after 11 bumpy years, New York’s ethics commission voted Thursday to release an internal report that examined its staff’s approval of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s lucrative book deal in 2020.

The 10-to-1 vote by members of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which is being disbanded, is expected to provide insight on the details of a former deputy counsel's decision to authorize the former governor to profit from a book he wrote detailing his handling of the pandemic. The lone dissenting vote was made by William Fisher, one of two Cuomo appointees left on a panel once dominated by loyalists to the ex-governor.

Officials with the ethics commission said they would move quickly to post the report on their website.

JCOPE's commissioners left a lot of open threads related to their long-delayed probes of Andrew M. Cuomo's alleged ethical misconduct. We'll find out soon how many they've addressed in their final report.