Albany Remains A Cesspool Of Corruption - With Governor Cuomo At The Center Of The Rot

Sheriff Andy Cuomo convened "his" Moreland Commission on Public Corruption in order to clean up Albany - he told us so:



Cuomo of course shut "his" Moreland Commission in order to get a budget deal earlier this year, leaving much of the "clean-up" he had promised undone.

The NY Times reports this morning that Albany remains as dirty as ever - and the governor is up to his hairline in the dirt along with everybody else:

Now, eight months after its work was cut short, little in Albany has changed.

■ Powerful politicians — including the governor himself — continue to exploit a loophole in state law that allows corporations to funnel huge donations to them in smaller gifts that disguise the true sources of the money.

■ Lax personal financial disclosure laws, critics say, give corrupt legislators a way to mask political payoffs under the guise of part-time jobs. A 2011 reform presented as requiring disclosure of some clients was so narrowly drawn as to be meaningless, and another enacted this year allowed enough wiggle room that lawmakers could well continue to avoid scrutiny.

■ The line between political donations and outright bribery remains murky. Some politicians used their campaign treasuries as piggy banks for personal expenses, the commission’s investigators found, and bank records showed that lawmakers had failed to report some donations and expenditures altogether. A new, beefed-up Board of Elections enforcement unit has yet to show its strength.

Cuomo is essentially taking millions in legalized bribes by exploiting loopholes:

Mr. Cuomo easily won a second term in November. To pave the way for that victory, he raised about $47 million — much of it through the same kinds of enormous donations that the commission was building a case to outlaw.

For powerful politicians and the big businesses they court, getting around New York’s campaign donation limits is easy.

Emails that investigators unearthed between a fund-raiser for Mr. Cuomo and an executive at Glenwood Management, a developer of Manhattan rental apartments, show how it is done.

Corporations like Glenwood are permitted to make a total of no more than $5,000 a year in political donations. But New York’s “LLC loophole” treats limited-liability companies as people, not corporations, allowing them to donate up to $60,800 to a statewide candidate per election cycle. So when Mr. Cuomo’s campaign wanted to nail down what became a $1 million multiyear commitment — and suggested “breaking it down into biannual installments” — the company complied by dividing each payment into permissible amounts and contributing those through some of the many opaquely named limited-liability companies it controlled, like Tribeca North End LLC.

The Cuomo campaign reminded the firm later of 10 Glenwood-controlled LLCs that had already made donations.

A lawyer for Glenwood, Alan Levine, declined to comment. Ms. Lever, the governor’s spokeswoman, said his campaign “operates within the bounds of the current campaign-finance system.”

The torrent of money that flows into New York politics was a central concern for the Moreland Commission, and the LLC loophole was one of the most glaring weaknesses it saw in the campaign-finance system. Investigators subpoenaed several companies known to exploit it, including Glenwood and the Durst Organization, another real estate powerhouse.

Documents the investigators obtained provided unusual insight into what watchdog groups had long asserted: Corporations were strategically dividing up huge contributions to maximize their giving — and their influence. The use of limited-liability companies concealed the magnitude of their gifts from public view. 

...

Mr. Cuomo has collected more than $2 million in donations from limited-liability companies, according to campaign finance records. In all, the governor received more than $9 million from LLCs over his entire first term — roughly 20 percent of the $47 million he raised.

When Mr. Cuomo ran for governor in 2010, he characterized large LLC contributions as one of the campaign finance system’s “loopholes,” proposing that such donations be counted against the parent company’s $5,000 contribution limit, to make that limit “meaningful.” In June 2013, he proposed lowering that limit to $1,000 and applying it to limited-liability companies as well.

But Mr. Cuomo has also defended his continued exploitation of the LLC loophole — even if it meant contradicting himself. “Those aren’t loopholes,” he said in July 2013. “Those are the laws that are written.”

Just before his re-election this year, Mr. Cuomo renewed his call to shut off the spigot of LLC contributions, again using the word loophole. But he rejected any suggestion that he model good behavior by voluntarily declining contributions that exploited it.

Albany - as dirty as ever, with Sheriff Andy Cuomo up to his hairline in the corruption and rot.

How Crooked Are Andrew Cuomo And Sandra Lee?

From Fred Dicker at the NY Post:

State Republicans want to know if Gov. Cuomo’s live-in girlfriend, “Semi-Homemade’’ celebrity chef Sandra Lee, is subsidizing his living expenses with income from companies doing business with the state, a possible “gifts law’’ violation, The Post has learned.

Republicans — who recently accused Lee, owner of the $1.2 million, six-bedroom, Westchester home where the First Couple lives, and Cuomo of failing to pay their fair share of property taxes — are combing public records for the names of Lee’s clients to see if they’re doing business with the state or trying to influence state policy, sources said.

“License! Global,’’ a trade publication, reported in 2012, for instance, that Lee, a Food Network star, author of numerous cookbooks and a magazine publisher, had “teamed up” with TV Guide magazine for a new magazine with “high-profile corporate sponsors’’ such as Verizon and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s Web site shows that the companies together have hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with New York.

“Companies that hire Lee surely know she’s the governor’s girlfriend and that could be a factor in their decision to pay her,’’ said a GOP operative involved in the research.

Lee is also frequently paid to speak before food and other industry groups, although the names of the companies are generally not publicly disclosed.

Celebrity Talent, a booking agency, says online that Lee charges a minimum in the range of $25,000 to $50,000 for speeches.

She gets from $50,000 to $99,999 for speaking overseas, the agency says.

If Lee and Cuomo were married, Lee would be required to disclose details of her income to the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE), which would then check for possible conflicts of interest.

But JCOPE, in an April 2013 decision, held that Lee, despite her relationship with Cuomo, doesn’t have to make any disclosures.

“The governor should be disclosing how much if anything he is contributing to the household costs,’’ said Jessica Proud, a spokeswoman for GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino.

“If his household is benefitting from businesses that have business before the state, that should be disclosed by the governor, who said he was going to have the most transparent administration in history,’’ Proud continued.

Cuomo’s office repeatedly refused to provide any information on what, if any, cost-sharing arrangements the governor has with Lee.

Cuomo’s aides have said in the past that the governor kicks in for household costs including property taxes. But the governor’s publicly disclosed income-tax returns don’t show him making property-tax payments that could be tax-deductible.

Cuomo is paid $179,000 a year as governor and, according to a financial disclosure filed last month, will be paid $700,000 to $900,000 by HarperCollins for a forthcoming memoir.

If they dig, they will find something.

Will Political Fortune Turn On Cuomo?

Michael Fiorillo on Sheriff Andy Cuomo's shutdown of Moreland and the subsequent furor that shutdown has caused, with US Attorney for the Southern District Preet Bharara picking up the Moreland investigations and refusing to rule out an investigation of Cuomo himself:

The abrupt shutdown of the Commission was surprising, immediately suggesting that it was not the the PR and negotiating weapon that our Reptilian Governor intended it to be.

It's hard to imagine that there aren't players in both parties who would like to see the man go down. In the past, he was always his own worst enemy, and he has been skilled/fortunate in controlling his political narrative in recent years.

That good political fortune is going to run its course, as it has for Christie, and maybe everyone will see what a nasty piece of work Cuomo is, and he too will have a swift fall.

It is said that Cuomo has no friends, only associates who go along with what he wants and enemies he turns into roadkill.

You can bet that lots of those who have ended up as roadkill on the other end of Sheriff Andy's motorcycle are going to look to stick him with a shiv.

The shivs are out for Christie, with a US attorney, a district attorney in New York and a legislative panel in New Jersey investigating him over a whole host of potential criminal or unethical activities.

All of these investigations stemmed from one "stupid move" by Christie's people, closing three access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in retaliation for something that pissed Christie off about Fort Lee (what that is has never been quite settled upon, though it's thought to be against the Fort Lee mayor for not endorsing Christie's re-election bid.)

Once the scrutiny started on Christie, it hasn't stopped - today the Newark Star-Ledger has yet another brewing Christie scandal over his sticking a bunch of Christie shills with conflicts of interest onto the state conflict of interest board/ethics agency.

Hard-bitten politicians like Christie and Cuomo can seem invulnerable for a long, long time, so long as the FEAR they engender keeps people in check.

But once that veneer of invulnerability is pierced and blood hits the water, the sharks circle.

They're encircling Christie right now, with all these criminal and ethics investigations being conducted on him and his administration.

The shutting down of Moreland and the furor it has caused, with US Attorney Preet Bhrarara wondering aloud in the media just what caused Cuomo to close the commission down so suddenly and just how far the Cuomo administration's interference into the commission's work went may turn out to be the first pricking of Cuomo's veneer of invulnerability.

If so and Cuomo's reputation bleeds a bit into the water, you can bet the sharks will circle him the way their circling Chris Christie right now.

We may yet see the turning of Sheriff Andy's political fortune.

Governor Cuomo Pals Up With Banker/Criminal John Mack For Wall Street Outreach

Jimmy Vielkind at Capital NY:

ALBANY—Governor Andrew Cuomo is utilizing John Mack, a senior adviser to Morgan Stanley who the governor recently brought on to be an adviser on global trade, to help him navigate the titans of Wall Street, according to schedule documents released by Cuomo's office.

Cuomo began regular meetings with Mack, a former C.E.O. of the investment bank, in the fall of last year.

The schedules show Mack accompanied Cuomo to a meeting with current Morgan Stanley C.E.O. James Gorman on December 12, and to a meeting with Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein on the following day.

Mack also attended an afternoon meeting on Veteran's Day that included senior officials from Empire State Development as well as Leslie Whatley, the director of the governor's new program to create tax-free zones rooted at public university systems. She was formerly the global head of corporate real estate at both Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan

Cuomo administration spokespeople did not immediately say what the governor discussed with Gorman and Blankfein.

Matt Taibbi on John Mack:

John Mack, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley and one of the more irritatingly unrepentant dickheads of the crisis era, gave an incredible interview to Bloomberg TV. In a discussion about executive pay, Mack said we're all being too rough on his fellow too-big-to-fail bank CEOs.

He would love, he said, "to see people stop beating up on Lloyd and Jamie," endearingly referring to Goldman chief Lloyd Blankfein and Chase chief Jamie Dimon by their first names (Mack must be in a bowling league with both men). He added: "I think that would make a lot of sense, and I'm in favor of that."

Mack went on to say that the debate over compensation was healthy, just not always warranted. "As long as shareholders reward performance," he said, "we can argue." But, he added, "The last time I checked, this business is still a business that pays people extremely well."

It's already funny that of all the injustices in the world, this was the one Mack decided to worry about on TV: the criticism of poor Jamie Dimon's 74 percent raise. But more to the point: If we really did live in a world where shareholders rewarded performance, would a CEO who just oversaw a record $20 billion in regulatory penalties even have a job, much less be getting a raise?

Mack had stones enough to be whining about people "beating up" on Jamie Dimon, given the year Chase just had. But to do so and simultaneously scold us that high compensation on Wall Street is just "shareholders rewarding performance," that's either Nobel-caliber chutzpah or laboratory-pure stupidity.

John Mack of all people should be quiet when it comes to the issue of public outrage over bank corruption. How about this, John: All of us malcontents will promise to stop beating up on your fellow CEOs, if you share with us the entire contents of your conversation with Pequot hedge fund honcho Art Samberg on June 29th, 2001?

Mack, readers may recall, was at the center of the controversy involving SEC whistleblower Gary Aguirre. Aguirre is a lawyer and investigator who began working for the SEC in September 2004. One of his first assignments was to look into a case involving a hedge fund called Pequot Capital Management, which had made a highly auspicious series of trades just ahead of, and after, a merger involving GE and a company called Heller Financial in the summer of 2001. The man making the deal was legendary Pequot trader Art Samberg.

As evidence in a Senate investigation into Aguirre's firing later revealed, Samberg made a huge investment in Heller on July 2nd, 2001, apparently without having done any research into Heller before that time. He had, however, talked the previous business day (Friday, June 29th) to John Mack, who had recently left a job running Morgan Stanley and had just returned from Switzerland, where he'd interviewed for a job with Credit Suisse. Both Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse had worked on the merger for Heller financial. and, the Senate explained, "possessed material, non-public information about the deal."

Right after Mack talked to Samberg and Samberg invested in Heller, Pequot cut Mack in on a lucrative deal involving a Lucent spinoff that ended up more than tripling Mack's $5 million investment. When Aguirre asked permission to interview Mack about all of this, he was denied such permission by his superiors at the SEC. When he pressed, they fired him (Aguirre later won a wrongful termination settlement with the SEC in the amount of $755,000).

Ultimately, the government did not interview Mack about the Pequot deal until August 1st, 2006, exactly five days after the five-year statute of limitations on the incident had expired. In that testimony, Mack denied having foreknowledge of the Heller deal, and claimed that Samberg had wanted him to invest in the Lucent spinoff, not the other way around – despite the fact that the SEC had emails from Samberg saying Mack had nagged Samberg to let him into the lucrative deal, "busting his chops" to get in.

The government never really pursued the matter further and Mack's role in what the Senate called a "highly suspicious" trade was never fully investigated. He ultimately returned to Morgan Stanley to serve as the bank's CEO from 2005 to 2009.

All of which means exactly nothing today, over a decade after the original incidents. By now it's just one of a pile of stories about cases that never got made against Wall Street executives for questionable behaviors in the pre-crisis years.

Still, it seems to me that after having been saved by the gods from the jaws of death in the Heller episode, Mack should probably henceforth stay on the sidelines in any debate about financial corruption. That he doesn't should tell us a lot. I'm not sure these guys can even spell "shame," much less exercise any.

So Sheriff Andy Cuomo brings on Wall Street criminal John Mack to work the room when Cuomo goes to chat with other Wall Street criminals like Lloyd Blankfein and James Gorman.

What a cozy group of criminals Sheriff Andy is palling around with.

No wonder he had such a piss-poor record bringing indictments against Wall Street criminals when he was attorney general of New York State.

He's pals with them.

Clinton To Administer Oath Of Office To De Blasio

The only oath Bill Clinton should be taking is raising his right hand in court and promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

Former President Clinton will administer the oath of office for the mayor-elect at his Jan. 1 inauguration ceremony at City Hall, the transition team announced Saturday.

And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — who hired de Blasio as her campaign manager during her 2000 Senate campaign — will attend with her husband.

"Chirlane and I couldn't be more excited to have President Clinton and Secretary Clinton stand with us,” de Blasio said in a statement, which highlighted that he had worked for President Clinton as a regional director at HUD.

...

De Blasio will recite his official oath at midnight on Dec. 31. The de Blasio campaign would not say where the official swearing in would take place or who would administer that oath.

...

De Blasio's hour-long inauguration ceremony will take place at noon on Jan. 1, on the steps of City Hall.

 A commenter writes:

Recommended reading: No one left to lie to by Christopher Hitchens. Excellent study of the redoubtable Clinton, who, apart from needlessly sanctioning the capital punishment of the mentally retarded Ricky Rector, also bombed countries to deflect from his libidinous shenanigans. Clinton was an awful President, who is pimping his equally unethical, selfish wife for President. Don't buy it. As a Dem, no way I vote for Hillary. No way.

Politicians on average are selfish, self-centered narcissists who should be trusted slightly less than car salesmen.

Bill Clinton is more selfish, more self-centered, more narcissistic and less trustworthy than even the average politician.

Not surprised de Blasio, who made his bones in the Clinton administration, is having BC do the oath of office honors.

But frankly, it's just one more reason why I suggest a close eye should be kept on Mayor de Blasio.