Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune:
It
appears to those on the governor’s side of the argument that he has the
right to cut the funding of agencies run by people who will not quit on
his demand.
It appears to those on the
prosecutor’s side that his funding veto and the threat that preceded it
were an attempt to intimidate and coerce the office that has the job of
policing corruption and ethics cases in state government.
The
threat is the thing. Had the governor simply cut the funding without
saying anything — especially in public, but even in private — this would
just be a strange veto. That is not unprecedented.
But
Perry did speak out. He decided that Lehmberg’s serving time for a
drunk driving arrest, or running a gauntlet of public opprobrium that
includes an eternal presence of arrest night video on the Internet, was
not enough.
...
Perry pressed ahead,
knowing he was on a political stage as well as an official one. He
demanded Lehmberg’s resignation and conditioned continued funding of her
office on that demand.
She said it was
improper and rebuffed him. He did what he promised and vetoed the state
funding intended to support investigations of ethics and corruption and
tax and other state cases.
Texans for
Public Justice — that’s the liberal-leaning group that started this
—complained to prosecutors, officially posing the question about whether
a crime had been committed.
A special
prosecutor was appointed, keeping Lehmberg out of the official
proceeding, to take the case to a grand jury, a panel given the job of
deciding whether the charges were plain political bunk or worth
presenting to a criminal jury or judge. And that panel decided it ought
to go forward.
Let's contrast that Perry story with some of Cuomo's Moreland stories.
First, this one from the NY Times:
With Albany rocked by a seemingly endless barrage of scandals and arrests, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo set up
a high-powered commission
last summer to root out corruption in state politics. It was barely two
months old when its investigators, hunting for violations of
campaign-finance laws, issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm that had
placed millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements for the New York
State Democratic Party.
The
investigators did not realize that the firm, Buying Time, also counted
Mr. Cuomo among its clients, having bought the airtime for his campaign
when he ran for governor in 2010.
Word that the subpoena had been served quickly reached Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aide,
Lawrence S. Schwartz. He called one of the commission’s three co-chairs, William J. Fitzpatrick, the district attorney in Syracuse.
“This
is wrong,” Mr. Schwartz said, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose
account was corroborated by three other people told about the call at
the time. He said the firm worked for the governor, and issued a simple
directive:
“Pull it back.”
The
subpoena was swiftly withdrawn. The panel’s chief investigator
explained why in an email to the two other co-chairs later that
afternoon.
“They apparently produced ads for the governor,” she wrote.
The
pulled-back subpoena was the most flagrant example of how the
commission, established with great ceremony by Mr. Cuomo in July 2013,
was hobbled almost from the outset by demands from the governor’s
office.
While
the governor now maintains he had every right to monitor and direct the
work of a commission he had created, many commissioners and
investigators saw the demands as politically motivated interference that
hamstrung an undertaking that the governor had publicly vowed would be
independent.
The
commission developed a list of promising targets, including a lawmaker
suspected of using campaign funds to support a girlfriend in another
state and pay tanning-salon bills. The panel also highlighted activities
that it saw as politically odious but perfectly legal, like exploiting a
loophole to bundle enormous campaign contributions.
But
a three-month examination by The New York Times found that the
governor’s office deeply compromised the panel’s work, objecting
whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on
issues that might reflect poorly on him.
Ultimately, Mr. Cuomo abruptly
disbanded the commission
halfway through what he had indicated would be an 18-month life. And
now, as the Democratic governor seeks a second term in November, federal
prosecutors are investigating the roles of Mr. Cuomo and his aides in
the panel’s shutdown and are pursuing its unfinished business.
Before
its demise, Mr. Cuomo’s aides repeatedly pressured the commission, many
of whose members and staff thought they had been given a
once-in-a-career chance at cleaning up Albany. As a result, the panel’s
brief existence — and the writing and editing of its sole creation, a
report of its preliminary findings — was marred by infighting, arguments
and accusations. Things got so bad that investigators believed a Cuomo
appointee was monitoring their communications without their knowledge.
Resignations further crippled the commission. In the end, the governor
got the Legislature to agree to a package of ethics reforms far less
ambitious than those the commission had recommended — a result Mr. Cuomo
hailed as proof of the panel’s success.
And then this one, again from the NY Times:
In an escalation of the confrontation between the United States attorney in Manhattan,
Preet Bharara, and Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo
over the governor’s cancellation of his own anticorruption commission,
Mr. Bharara has threatened to investigate the Cuomo administration for
possible obstruction of justice or witness tampering.
The
warning, in a sharply worded letter from Mr. Bharara’s office, came
after several members of the panel issued public statements defending
the governor’s handling of the panel, known as the Moreland Commission,
which Mr. Cuomo created last year with promises of cleaning up
corruption in state politics but shut down abruptly in March.
Mr.
Bharara’s office has been investigating the shutdown of the commission,
and pursuing its unfinished corruption cases, since April.
In the letter, sent late Wednesday afternoon to a lawyer for the panel,
prosecutors alluded to a number of statements made by its members on
Monday, which generally defended Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the commission.
The statements were released on the same day Mr. Cuomo first publicly
responded to a report in The New York Times that described how he and
his aides had compromised the commission’s work.
At
least some of those statements were prompted by calls from the governor
or his emissaries, according to people with direct knowledge of the
situation who were unwilling to be named for fear of reprisal.
One
commissioner who received a call from an intermediary on behalf of the
governor’s office said he found the call upsetting and declined to make a
statement.
The
letter from prosecutors, which was read to The New York Times, says,
“We have reason to believe a number of commissioners recently have been
contacted about the commission’s work, and some commissioners have been
asked to issue public statements characterizing events and facts
regarding the commission’s operation.”
“To
the extent anyone attempts to influence or tamper with a witness’s
recollection of events relevant to our investigation, including the
recollection of a commissioner or one of the commission’s employees, we
request that you advise our office immediately, as we must consider
whether such actions constitute obstruction of justice or tampering with
witnesses that violate federal law.”
Reached late Wednesday night, a spokesman for the governor did not
immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter from Mr.
Bharara’s office. A lawyer for the commission declined to comment on the
letter.
The Times reported last week that
Mr. Cuomo’s office had deeply compromised the panel’s work,
objecting when it focused on groups with political ties to Mr. Cuomo, a
Democrat who is seeking re-election, or on issues that might reflect
poorly on him.
The Times’s article prompted condemnations from government watchdog
groups and newspaper editorial boards. Mr. Cuomo, facing perhaps the
harshest scrutiny of his three and a half years as governor, remained
out of public view for five days as criticism mounted.
If Perry was indicted for what he did, how can Cuomo NOT be indicted for what he did?
Quashing subpoenas to his own donors so that the Moreland Commissioners couldn't investigate them, trading away criminal investigations conducted by the Moreland Commission in return for an on-time 2014 budget, tampering with potential grand jury witnesses, having his henchman write up statements of support from the Moreland Commissioners (statements which he then pointed to in his own public statement of defense against the meddling and tampering charges made by the NY Times) - don't these add up to a much bigger case than what the special prosecutor has against Rick Perry?
And that's just the stuff we know about - it's probable that US Attorney
Preet Bharara, the prosecutor looking into the Moreland mess has more
on Cuomo than we know about.
Steve McLaughlin summed it up nicely on Twitter:
Seems to me, if Perry has been indicted for the Lehmberg case, Andrew Cuomo should be indicted for Moreland.
Whether that happens or not is a different story - Texas is Texas and New York is New York, a special prosecutor looking into a case is one thing, a US attorney looking into a case is another thing.
But I bet Andrew Cuomo's dinner didn't sit so well with him last night after he saw what happened to Perry.
