Fred LeBrun: Bharara Is Focused On Governor Cuomo's Office

Fred LeBrun in the Times-Union this morning:

A week ago Friday late in the day, Preet Bharara finally dropped the other shoe on Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

A flurry of subpoenas from federal prosecutor Bharara, the first served on the governor's office, left no doubt New York's chief executive and his extensive inner circle are now included in an ever broadening corruption inquiry involving the letting of state contracts and illegal conflicts of interest and lobbying.

...

We already know there's more than smoke here, in terms of improprieties by the governor's people, although the governor's office has been trying desperately to distance itself from both Howe and even Percoco.

There's been a blizzard of damage control to cover a flurry of subpoenas. A leak to a downstate tabloid to try to control the inevitable bad news from the onset broke the news.

A deliberate attempt to blur the focus of the inquiry from primarily the governor's office to include nine-month old inquiries into Buffalo contractors and the SUNY Polytechnic Institute followed.

That's all misdirection. Preet Bharara's focus is on the second floor of the Capitol.

When Cuomo has talked about the problem of corruption in the past, he always talks about it as if it has nothing to do with the executive branch and is only located in the legislature.

The news of the investigations into Cuomo's people - both current (Alain Kaloyeros at SUNY Poly) and former (Todd Howe and Joe Percoco) - exposes what jive that is.

As for the governor himself, well, there is certainly the appearance of corruption in his campaign fundraising, as Chris Bragg and Casey Seiler at the Times-Union reported this morning:

The federal subpoena received by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration in late April seeks information about any actions taken by certain Executive Chamber officials that might have benefited several major developers in New York, according to a person with knowledge of the subpoena.

The companies include Conifer Realty of Rochester, COR Development of the Syracuse area and Norstar Development, a company based in Ontario, Canada, that has significant operations in Buffalo. Several other companies were identified in the subpoena, which was issued by the office of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara.

...

While each of the companies is engaged in a wide range of projects with state and local governments, all three are involved in the development of affordable housing — an industry that has quietly proven to be among the governor's most generous supporters.

Read the piece and you see the pattern - Cuomo gets donations, donors get subsidies, tax benefits and/or contracts.

Steve McLaughlin pointed out this morning that this pattern with Cuomo is not new:

Cuomo's corrupt #Pay2Play tactics are not new. It's all he knows. Want a state contract, tax break or grant? Pay him https://t.co/Cl8ZoTY3Io

— Steve McLaughlin (@SteveMcNY) May 8, 2016

Some people think that Bharara will never get as far as Cuomo, that Cuomo is too smart to get caught in all of this, even as his minions like Kaloyeros, Percoco and Howe appear to be going down (and maybe Steven Pigeon in Buffalo too), but Fred LeBrun writes that is still to be determined:

After two terms of watching how this governor works, in the shadows, with as little accountability as he can get away with, it is small wonder the culture he's created hasn't caught up with him earlier.

And, it's hard to imagine a notorious micromanager like Andrew Cuomo being caught totally blind by the doings of his brother Joseph, and very old friend Todd. That just doesn't pass the sniff test. Again, to be determined though.

And just in case you aren't convinced that Preet Bharara has expanded his probes beyond the legislature, well, there was this warning from the U.S. attorney a few weeks back:

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara issued an executive warning Tuesday, making clear that his push to clean up corruption isn’t limited to the state Legislature.

“We will keep looking hard at corruption in our legislative branch, as we have been,” Bharara said during a keynote speech at Common Cause New York’s annual gala at the University Club in Midtown. “But not just there: in the executive branch, too, both in city and in state government.

“Executive offices in government are far from immune from the creeping show-me-the-money culture that has been pervading New York for some time now.”

Given how many stories there are of Cuomo donors getting contracts, grants, tax breaks, subsidies or even vetoes around the same time they're giving money to the governor, at the very least the appearance of a show-me-the-money culture pervades Cuomo's administration.

Whether Bharara can connect any of this to Cuomo, as LeBrun writes, that's to be determined.

But make no mistake - that's exactly what Bharara is trying to do.

He said as much back in April.

Bharara Targeting Campaign Fundraising - Especially Cuomo's

Jimmy Vielkind at Politico NY:

ALBANY — As his office investigates one of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's key programs, Preet Bharara is making war on campaign fund-raising as we know it.

The U.S. attorney for the Southern District issued a flurry of subpoenas earlier this summer, seeking information about how construction contracts were awarded on several big state projects in Buffalo, according to people familiar with the investigation and other published reports.

The New York Times reported Sunday that investigators subpoenaed Empire State Development, SUNY Polytechnic Institute and their subsidiaries. It's impossible to know exactly what Bharara is looking for — the prosecutor and his aides refuse to talk about their ongoing work — but his efforts are ensnaring campaign donors whose apparent sin is giving to politicians as they benefitted from state business.

“Their goal is to use the people that are paying to testify against the politicians. They're not after the company that is paying for the service,” said James Cohen, a longtime defense attorney and professor at Fordham Law School. “It's precisely what Bharara said he was going to do: he thinks that Albany and its various tentacles — which go both ways — are really dirty, and have been dirty for a real long time. New York has not shown any ability, in his mind, to attempt to clean it up.”

If Bharara is after the politicians on the other end of the donations and not the donors themselves, then we have a pretty good idea which politician he's targeting here - these are all Cuomo's donors he's looking into:

One of the recently subpoenaed firms is LPCiminelli, sources said, a stalwart contractor in Buffalo that is building a solar panel factory for SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Company president Louis Ciminelli and other entities he controls have given Cuomo $90,800 since 2011, making him one of the governor's 100 largest donors. The solar contract was originally written so only Ciminelli met the criteria; the request for proposals was subsequently amended, but Ciminelli still won.

The correlation between the donations and the award quickly aroused the interest of journalists; Ciminelli and SUNY Poly insist the contract awards were on the merits. Daniel Oliverio, who is representing Ciminelli, declined to confirm or deny the subpoena but said “unequivocally” that the firm and its owners were not the targets of any investigation.

...

There's Ciminelli in Buffalo. In Albany, Joe Nicolla and Columbia Development gave Cuomo thousands as it won contracts to build new buildings for SUNY Poly and a convention center down the block from the Capitol. Other companies in the Capital Region held a fund-raiser for Cuomo before they won money in an economic development contest. Cuomo raked in $250,000 from developers in Kiryas Joel after he vetoed a bill that would have restricted the Hasidic enclave's growth.

 As for what Bharara may be looking to pin on Cuomo:

Paul DerOhannesian, a defense lawyer based in Albany, said the focus of honest services fraud is on the fraudulent and deceptive conduct of the public official who abuses a position of trust, and the government is not required to link any particular payment to a specific act on the part of the public official. The quid pro quo element is therefore satisfied if the public official understood that as a result of the payment, he of she was expected to exercise particular kinds of influence on behalf of the person directing the payments as opportunities arose, or when called upon to do so.

“It's murky,” he said.

Polls show that New York voters agree with Bharara, and even if it can't be declared strictly illegal, business as usual in Albany needs to change. If the attorney general has his way, that's going to apply to the entire elected class that thrives on and perpetuates the current system, from Cuomo on down.

I'm sure there's something Bharara knows that we don't know about all of this that has spurred his interest (as well as the subpoenas to Cuomo's donors as well as Empire State Development Corporation and Suny Polytechnic) and the rapid fire leaks are indication that what he knows is bad for somebody.

Bharara's leaks are strategic, often setting up the frame that somebody's got some legal trouble (e.g., Silver, Skelos.)

I would think the same thing is being done here and since the donors in question are all Cuomo's and the recipients of the subpoenas on the state end are allies of Cuomo (like Alain Kaloyeros at Suny) or entities essentially controlled by Cuomo (Empire State Development), the target of Bharara's investigation is pretty clear.

Cuomo Having Some Fundraising Trouble?

State of Politics:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s re-election campaign on Friday sent out another appeal to donors for buying tickets to a fundraiser that will include a viewing of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.”

The Cuomo campaign has been selling tickets to the Oct. 14 event since August, with donations ranging from $125 to $25,000.

But in a sign the campaign has struggled to sell tickets to the event — which will include the governor in attendance — those who have never donated to Cuomo have received letters urging them to buy tickets.

In the email sent Friday afternoon the Cuomo campaign gives three reasons for attending:

“If your inbox is anything like mine, you’re getting flooded with crazy End Of Quarter emails. So I figured I’d give you something easy.
Here’s the story:
1. Hamilton is an absolutely incredible show.
2. Tickets are hard to find (the show is basically sold out through 2016).
3. We would love you to come see the show with us on October 14th.
That’s really about it. You get to come see the show, and support Governor Cuomo at the same time.”

Cuomo has indicated he will run for a third term in 2018.

With the US attorney rooting around in the Buffalo Billion project, probing Cuomo donors who received contracts worth hundreds of millions from the state, Cuomo can't exactly do the old "Quid Pro Cuomo" right now and have some donors pay him back for favors by sending in eight checks from four LLC's linked to the same guy.

No, he's got to rely on the more standard form of fund-raising and if the repeated emails about the Hamilton show are an indication, looks like he may be having trouble reeling fish in.

John Flanagan Admits State Intervention In School Districts Doesn't Go So Well

State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan over the East Ramapo monitor:

As the state Education Department moves to oversee the East Ramapo school district, Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan on Tuesday urged caution in taking away local control of the district.

“When we move in any way shape or form to usurp local control, we have to be extraordinarily judicious,” Flanagan said. “I’m not suggesting for a moment there aren’t extraordinarily acute issues on that district, because there are.”

He added: “It’s important to recognize that in the state of New York where we’ve directly intervened in school districts, our track record isn’t very good.”

That's an interesting admission since the state is set to take over 144 schools in the next year or two if they don't "improve."

Flanagan's sending a message to Dennis Walcott and his East Ramapo monitoring team to not upset the Hasidic men who sit on the school board for the school district that serves a largely black and Latino population of students.

And I get the politics of that - the Hasidic community knows how to use political donations to make sure that politicians take care of them.

Witness the Kiryas Joel/Cuomo relationship.

Nonetheless, Fanagan has unwittingly also admitted that state ought to be careful in how it administers the school receivership program pushed by the governor and approved by the state Senate and Assembly in the last budget.

There it is, in plain language from John Flanagan, former head of the education committee in the state Senate, current state Senate Majority Leader (at least until he's indicted like the last five):

“It’s important to recognize that in the state of New York where we’ve directly intervened in school districts, our track record isn’t very good.”

Cuomo Staff Tries To Keep Reporter From Covering Hochul Meeting With Kiryas Joel Leaders

Here's some news from the most open and transparent New York State government in history:

KERHONKSON - Satmar leaders heaped praise upon the lieutenant governor and governor Tuesday during visits by Lt. Governor Kathy Hochul to Orthodox Jewish girls’ camps in Sullivan and Ulster counties.

During visits to Camp Bais Rochel in South Fallsburg and Camp Rav Tov in Kerhonkson, Hochul watched camper performances, listened to speeches given by current and former campers, and met with Kiryas Joel Mayor Abraham Wieder and other Satmar community leaders.

Hochul and her entourage were an hour late arriving to Camp Rav Tov. In the meantime, camp staff welcomed press presence and sought to show off their campers’ model behavior. Hochul’s Chief of Staff Jeffrey Pearlman and David Lobl, Special Assistant for Jewish Affairs to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, tried unsuccessfully to have a reporter leave the grounds of Camp Rav Tov until after Hochul visited with campers. Lobl called the campers’ presentation before Hochul, which included chants, songs and thankful speeches about Hochul’s and Cuomo’s support of the Jewish community, “off the record.”

Photos shared on Twitter by the Village of Kiryas Joel’s Twitter account showed the village’s mayor meeting with Hochul and her staff at one of the camps.

Why would Cuomo's staff want to keep the press away from the Hochul meeting with Kiryas Joel leaders?

Well, there is this:

Hochul's visit to the Satmar camps came less than a month after Cuomo vetoed two bills that Kiryas Joel leaders lobbied fiercely against as a threat to the community's expansion plans. Within days of those July 8 vetoes, a Kiryas Joel man who controls Satmar land holdings in Monroe and Woodbury - including some of the vacant tracts contained in a pending 507-acre annexation petition - deposited $250,000 in the governor's campaign account through five limited liability corporations, records show.

Perhaps Cuomo's special assistant for Jewish affairs and Hocul's chief of staff were afraid she wouldn't be able to have an open and frank discussion about how much more Cuomo needs to have donated into his campaign if the Kiryas Joel community wants more payback from him?

Cuomo's New York State Of Crime

A commenter on the Bill Mahoney Capital NY piece about Cuomo taking $250K from the guy in charge of land development in the Village of Kiryas Joel in return for vetoing a bill that passed the New York Legislature with wide bipartisan support in both the Assembly and the Senate that would have given Orange County some say in the annexation of some land next to Kiryas Joel:

Apologies to Billy Joel but;

"I'm in a New York State of Crime..."

As I posted last night, Cuomo's campaign got the $250K in eight checks from four different LLC's all linked to the same guy who's in charge of land development in Kiryas Joel and owns quite a bit of the land Kiryas Joel wants to annex into the village.

The checks came a few days after Cuomo vetoed legislation that would have allowed the county to review the controversial land annexation plans Kiryas Joel has for hundreds of acres adjacent to the village.

 

Here's how the Times-Record covered the story before it was revealed Cuomo's campaign was paid $250K from the land development guy in Kiryas Joel:

 

Cuomo, lobbied fiercely by both supporters and opponents of Kiryas Joel's potential expansion, waited until around 10:30 p.m. Wednesday - less than two hours before his deadline - to announce his veto. He said in his message that the measure would violate the state constitution by giving counties "control over local annexation petitions that would not impact a county's boundaries," an argument Kiryas Joel's attorneys also had made.

 

Skoufis, D-Woodbury, called Cuomo's reasoning "flat-out wrong" on Thursday, pointing out that the clause in the constitution about annexations specifically says that "the consent of the governing board of a county shall be required only where a boundary of the county is affected." He noted that his bill didn't involve the county's governing board - the Legislature - and didn't require consent, since county planners would only have made recommendations.

“Sadly, Governor Cuomo's veto message appears to be nothing more than fabricated reasoning to reach a predetermined outcome," he said in a statement. "It is extremely disappointing that the governor chose to ignore the voices of thousands of residents from every municipality in Orange County.”

"Fabricated reasoning to reach a predetermined outcome" - that's a statement that applies to much of Andrew Cuomo's record as governor of New York.

 

Here's how Kiryas Joel officials reacted to news of the veto:

 

Kiryas Joel officials applauded Cuomo on Thursday, contending the bills were intended to prevent Kiryas Joel's expansion and would have hindered other annexation efforts in New York.

“We appreciate that Governor Cuomo was able to see through the angry rhetoric being advanced by Assemblyman Skoufis and looked at these bills for what they really were, a thinly veiled attempt to stop the natural growth of the peaceful, family-oriented community of Kiryas Joel,” said Ari Felberman, the village's government relations coordinator.

That's right, Governor Cuomo was able to see through the angry rhetoric being advanced by Assemblyman Skoufis and understand that if he did the right thing and veto these bills, he would, you know, have God's light shine on him - as well as some cash.

Here's how Assemblyman Skoufis responded to news of the veto:

 

Skoufis lamented that Cuomo "decided to play politics with the Hudson Valley" by blocking the bills.

"This bipartisan legislation would have provided significantly increased scrutiny of the current Kiryas Joel-initiated bids as well as all future controversial annexation proposals throughout the state," he said.

Yes, but vetoing the bills would have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to Governor Cuomo as well as potential future votes from the citizens of Kiryas Joel (some of whom apparently vote early and often, sometimes in both Orange County and Brooklyn.)

Andrew Cuomo is definitely in a New York State of Crime these days, what with the hedge fundie donations and fundraisers in return for the pro-charter and pro-education reform agenda, the Glenwood and REBNY cash in return for the pro-real estate industry agenda, the Hollywood donations in return for the movie and TV tax credit program and now the Kiryas Joel donations in return for the veto that will help them expand and make money on the deal (since the guy who donated to Cuomo owns a lot of the land in question.