U.S. Attorney Warns Cuomo on Moreland Commission Case

[WestVirginiaRebel]

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.

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King Andrew gets cut down to size...

 

 

 

[Draggingtree]

STEVEN MALANGA

 

A Tale of Two Scandals

 

Andrew Cuomo’s Moreland Commission episode may prove worse than Chris Christie’s Bridgegate—but you wouldn’t know it from the news coverage.

 

5 August 2014

The Bridgegate affair in New Jersey was a seedy political scandal, in which some staffers and allies of Gov. Chris Christie used their influence with a bi-state agency to tie up traffic around the George Washington Bridge to punish a political opponent. The emerging Moreland Commission outrage in New York State, as set out in a recent New York Times storyabout the efforts of Cuomo administration members to hobble an investigation into political corruption, is potentially far worse. At best, it represents a cynical effort by Cuomo, who ran for election four years ago promising to clean up Albany, to protect friends and campaign donors when investigators began asking them uncomfortable questions. At worst, as U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara suggested last week, it might involve criminal tampering with an investigation probing links between campaign contributions and political favors, like tax credits http://city-journal.com/2014/eon0805sm.html