Cuomo The Campaign Finance Crook

WNYC's Andrea Bernstein has done a masterful job of putting together the ways Andrew Cuomo has skirted campaign finance law - all while claiming to uphold campaign finance law and "clean up Albany."

Here's a taste:

In May 2013, the housekeeping committee wrote a $900,000 check to Buying Time. A day later, an ad began appearing, featuring Cuomo looking straight into the camera. “I am proposing a clean-up Albany plan to fight corruption," he said. "It empowers our district attorneys, it increases criminal penalties. It decreases the influence of money in politics.”

Yes, that’s right. To pay for an ad about decreasing the influence of money and politics, Cuomo used an account with no contribution limits whatsoever. One of the main goals of ethics reformers has been to curtail housekeeping contributions.

Just a couple of months after that not-a-campaign ad ran, Cuomo’s own campaign committee paid Buying Time another $430,000 to run a virtually identical ad, with the same bright piano music underneath – even using the same font in the “paid for by” message.

“I am appointing a new independent commission led by top law enforcement officials to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing," Cuomo said in the ad. "The politicians in Albany won’t like it, but I work for the people.”

But then things started to go off-track for the governor. Because the “new independent commission,” known in Albany shorthand as the “Moreland Commission,” smelled something fishy when it noticed that the housekeeping account was buying ads. So it issued a subpoena for information on – yes –Buying Time.

One of the governor’s closest aides, Larry Schwartz, immediately had it quashed, according to three knowledgeable sources. The circumstances are now under investigation by federal prosecutors. Neither Schwartz nor Buying Time would comment for this story.

Bernstein recounts Cuomo's shenanigans with the Committee To Save New York, a shadowy PAC that surfaced to promote his agenda, spending millions on pro-Cuomo ads without ever revealing who the donors were (though news accounts later found gambling interests gave a couple of million in return for expanded legalized gambling in the state.)

She also notes how Cuomo's using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for pro-Cuomo ads as part of an ad blitz paid for by the Economic Development Corporation.

The ads are ostensibly about how New York is "open for business," but of course the message is, "Cuomo is great!"

Bernstein concludes that all of Cuomo's campaign finance shenanigans, while certainly hypocritical and ethically challenged, may not be illegal:

Last spring, after the Moreland Commission was shut down, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, seized its papers and vowed to continue its investigations. But speaking in Manhattan last week, he was rueful. “The scandal is not necessarily what’s illegal but what is legal." he told an audience. "And we have limited powers and we can only go after things that are illegal.”

So far, there’s no evidence Cuomo has done anything illegal. But the evidence does show that he stretched New York’s campaign finance limits so far they’ve become meaningless. And he did it to tell people he is cleaning up Albany.

Bharara has been very quiet about Cuomo since the summer.

That doesn't mean he's not working on something spectacular to be revealed after the election.

Alas, the statements Bharara made last week concern me that he's warning us that Cuomo the Campaign Finance Crook will get away with his criminality.

Cuomo Pressures Unions To Support His Gambling Initiative

From Fred Dicker at the Post:

Cuomo and other supporters of Proposition 1 on Tuesday’s ballot fear that Bill de Blasio’s expected landslide in the mayoral race will hold down city turnout, costing the controversial plan to legalize casino gambling potentially crucial votes.

Many of the city’s biggest unions, under pressure from Cuomo and other gambling supporters, mounted a major effort in recent days to persuade their members to support Prop 1.

But “since everyone expects de Blasio to win easily, the fear is that a lot of voters won’t even bother going to the polls,’’ said a source working to help get the controversial measure approved.

Two questions here:

After all the union bashing Cuomo has done these first three years, why would the unions care what Cuomo wanted?

Second, what exactly do the unions, or more specifically, the leadership of the various unions, get out of supporting the gambling initiatives?

We know the unions, including the UFT, have supported the gambling initiative with campaign donations.

Has any money or other largesse rolled into the pockets of the leadership from the gambling consortia as payback for supporting the gambling initiative?

Crooks At Reuters Run Con Game

From Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone:

Hilarious corruption story hit the news wires this week. It's actually a two-part joke.

Part one is that Thomson Reuters got slapped in the face by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for its absurd practice of selling early access to the results of the consumer confidence survey it conducts each month in conjunction with the University of Michigan.

It turns out that in recent times, if you paid them an extra subscription fee of a few thousand dollars a month, Thomson Reuters would allow you access to the Consumer Confidence data a full two seconds earlier than the rest of its subscribers – at 9:54:58 a.m., as opposed to 9:55:00 exactly.

Thomson Reuters suspended the activity at the request of Schneiderman, who released a statement about this humorously brazen effort at the systematic sale of inside information. From the L.A. Times:

The consumer confidence data can move financial markets, and Scheiderman's office said "that two-second advantage is more than enough time for these traders to take unfair advantage of their early access to this information as they execute enormous volumes of trades in the blink of an eye."
“The securities markets should be a level playing field for all investors and the early release of market-moving survey data undermines fair play in the markets,” Schneiderman said Monday.

The two-second head start allows high-speed traders to plunge into the markets en masse and retreat all the way back again before most of the world sees this market-altering economic data. From a CNN report a few weeks ago:

In the milliseconds before the survey is released to other paying clients at 9:55 a.m. ET, trading volumes can soar up to 20 times their normal levels. By 9:54:59 a.m. ET, long after computers have acted on the number, volumes have already returned to normal.

As my friend Eric Salzman joked, the two-second head start is a scheme taken straight out of The Sting, where the "hook" was early access to the results of an out-of-state horse race. All that's missing is Robert Shaw placing his bet: "Five hundred thousand dollars to win. Lucky Dan!"

I say this all the time, but it bears repeating:

It's all rigged.

Everything - rigged.