Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo notches big win with bombshell ruling that deems NY ethics panel probing his $5M COVID book deal ‘unconstitutional’

Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo scored a big win Monday when the state ethics panel attempting to claw back $5 million in profits from his controversial COVID book deal was deemed unconstitutional by a New York judge.

The newly formed state Commission on Ethics and Lobbying In Government — which has been probing the questionable circumstances behind Cuomo’s 2020 memoir “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic” — is an illegal group made up of unelected “urban academics,” Albany Supreme Court Justice Thomas Marcelle wrote in the bombshell ruling.

The scathing, 25-page decision — which calls the ethics watchdog an “unsanctioned fourth branch of government” — marks a major victory for Cuomo, who filed suit in Albany state court in April aiming to disband the independent panel.

Cuomo had claimed that the commission is not authorized to seize his literary cash — or exist at all — because it operates without sufficient government oversight or control.

Marcelle agreed with Cuomo — who resigned in disgrace in 2021 after being accused of sexual misconduct by a dozen women — in Monday’s ruling.

“If the people should choose to be governed by those who are not politically accountable to them or their Governor, who swear no oath of allegiance to them, and who come as a class composed of urban academics and who are not reflective of the cross-section of the people whom they govern, the people
may do so,” Marcelle wrote.

“But it is for the people to decide and only the people,” the judge added.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul, who created the panel to replace another watchdog group called the Joint Commission on Public Ethics — which was criticized for being beholden to Cuomo, her predecessor — vowed to appeal the court’s decision.

Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi, meanwhile, took a victory lap.

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“As we’ve said all along, this was nothing more than an attack by those who abused their government positions unethically and — as the judge ruled today — unconstitutionally for political purposes,” Azzopardi said.

“Truth and reason won, mob rule lost today,” Azzopardi added.

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The question of whether the state’s creation of the new ethics commission is constitutional, however, is far from settled.

In February, another state judge, Justice Joseph Lamendola, found that the state constitution does in fact allow for the creation of the new panel, court records show.

Lamendola issued his ruling in the case of Gary Levine, a Republican appointee on the prior version of the commission who had challenged a review panel’s decision not to allow him to serve on the new board.

The new commission’s current 11 members include chair Frederick Davie, a top administrator at Morningside Heights’ Union Theological Seminary, and other veteran attorneys, judges and law school professors.

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In a joint statement, Davie and the commission’s executive director, Sanford Berland, said they are reviewing “all options” to respond to Monday’s ruling.

The panel’s strategy could include pushing Albany lawmakers to adopt “interim legislation” that would replace the law Hochul used to create the panel and which Cuomo has challenged, Davie and Berland said.

“New Yorkers have the right to an ethics commission that is truly independent and fully empowered to administer and enforce the state’s ethics and lobbying laws objectively, even-handedly, and without regard to the rank, position, or political affiliation of those we regulate and without interference from any branch of government,” Davie and Berland wrote.

Marcelle, in Monday’s ruling, found that the new panel takes away power from the governor’s office because the top state executive has no power to appoint members.

Instead, a group of 15 New York law school deans, known as the Independent Review Committee, has the power to appoint panel members.

Cuomo has denied any wrongdoing related to his lucrative $5.1 million deal with Penguin Books to produce the 309-page tribute to his own pandemic response.

The former governor has insisted that staffers volunteered on his book on their own time, and therefore did not violate any ethics rules. Cuomo has also denied the accusations of sexual misconduct.

Yet the former ethics panel — known as JCOPE but derisively called “JJOKE” by critics — rescinded its approval of the deal after claiming Cuomo and his lawyers misled it about the use of top executive staff and other government workers to prepare the book.