Waiting For The Skelos Indictment - And What Might Come After

Chris Smith in New York Magazine:

The chatter about Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Albany's plague of corruption investigations went on all day, everywhere. In the state capitol's corridors, in the restaurants where the pols and the lobbyists eat lunch.

I hear Dean might be indicted Thursday.

Is this one of Dean's last days as Senate majority leader?

Who's next?

... 

"We've seen a lot of strange things in Albany," a veteran government operative says. "But we've never seen the indictment of two leaders of the legislature."

It hasn't happened. And maybe it never will. But the talk of the town has already moved on:

Will Bharara go for a trifecta?

A Skelos indictment is an almost near certainty - there's no way Bharara's office leaked the story of the Skelos scandal, complete with tales of subpoenas to Skelos' fellow Long Island Republican Senators and the empaneled grand jury looking into the State Senate Majority Leader, to the NY Times without an indictment coming down.

What comes after that will be most interesting.

Tom Libous, Skelos' deputy, is currently under indictment for lying to the FBI and has said he is dying from cancer.

Who takes over afterward, what exactly gets done in the waning days of the legislative session and what future leaks come from US Attorney Preet Bharara's office will be most interesting.

I know many readers on the blog are skeptical that Bharara is going to go for the trifecta and take down Cuomo too.

It seems almost unfathomable that the feds would take out all three men in the room in the New York government.

And yet, there is just enough smoke around Cuomo, his donors, the "pulled back" subpoenas, the Moreland Commission tampering and the like that, well, you never know...