The governor of New York, expressing victimization from his latest visit from the feds.
Albany, N.Y.
Looks like Mario’s son Andy Cuomo is having another ethics debacle and again abusing his position giving to him by the voters who entrusted him with it.
The Times Union: FBI probing Cuomo office’s hiring practices
The FBI is investigating the Cuomo administration’s practice of hiring employees to work in the governor’s office while actually paying them through various state agencies and public authorities, the Times Union has learned.
Hiring pricey political appointees to work for the Executive Chamber — but paying them through other entities — has allowed Cuomo and prior governors to increase the size of their staffs while escaping criticism for inflating the Executive Chamber budget.
One type of evidence being explored by the FBI, sources said, are the written notifications that are sent by agencies or authorities to the governor’s office informing them of a new hire.
An analysis by the Times Union a year ago found that more than 40 percent of the Executive Chamber staff was actually on the payroll of public authorities or agencies. At the time, 89 of 209 Executive Chamber employees were on agency or authority budget lines.
That trend accelerated when Cuomo announced 27 new hires or promotions last March. All but a handful went to Executive Chamber jobs, but the Executive Chamber was actually paying just five of those people.
Many of the well-paid new political appointees announced in March were veterans of the Obama administration or Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign that needed new employment. The moves also sparked further speculation about Cuomo gearing up for a 2020 presidential run.
Under Cuomo, in some instances the positions held by Executive Chamber officials have had a correlation with the entity paying them. In other instances there seems have been little link between the work being done and an employee’s source of income.
Take well-paid Cuomo speechwriters, Tom Topousis and Jamie Malanowski. Although paid to pen speeches for the governor, Topousis was hired in 2015 at a $125,000 salary as a “special assistant” at the Office of Children and Family Services, a child protective services agency.
Malanowski’s $120,000 salary, meanwhile, has been paid by the Affordable Housing Corp., a quasi-governmental agency that helps subsidize affordable housing projects.
One of the March hires announced by Cuomo was Joel Wertheimer, who in his prior job in the Obama White House was coordinating and reviewing briefing materials sent to the president.
In his new post as staff secretary for Cuomo, Wertheimer was hired at a $120,000 salary on the budget of the Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services, an agency which helps people recover from addiction. He left the Cuomo administration in September, seven months after being hired, payroll records show.
In March, Cuomo also announced the hiring of Robert Gibbon, a former state Republican Senate staffer and an attorney. He was retained as assistant counsel to the governor for transportation at a salary of $105,000.
Yet Gibbon was hired for a budget slot on the payroll of the Justice Center, an agency meant to investigate allegations of abuse and neglect at homes for the disabled. After the Times Union inquired about Gibbon’s status, a Cuomo spokesman said he would be moved to the payroll of the quasi-governmental Thruway Authority.
These hires from the wracked DNC forms quite the cabal. Mario’s son again proves adept at spreading tax dollars like it’s coming out of his ass like diarrhea on patronage hires. How these generously well overpaid officials qualified for these positions absolutely don’t matter to a man with such lofty goals beyond his horrendous two terms as governor.
Nothing strange or unusual considering where these dubiously talented folk came from considering how much campaign money was accrued and spent by the partisan political organization. In fact lots of it by Figurehead Obama in his 2012 campaign virtually bankrupted it with the over-staffing of all this primo talent and candidate Manifest Hillary 2016 campaign ethically bankrupted it according to Donna Brazille and Wikileaks.
It’s an absolute certainty that the positions and the policies they are tasked with as not resulted in any proactive or positive gains or progress at all when it comes to services the constituency relies on. Like transit, transportation and housing. Even a basic thing to keep governing functioning honestly and efficiently like ethics. For these appointees seem more distracted with primping the Prince Andy for the high office than with the conditions of the roads, the subways, schools, elderly care and stemming the crises of cost of living and rental affordability, child abuse, homelessness and heroin and fentanyl addiction. The only thing these hacks specialize in is boosting their clients hollow profiles and watered-downed disingenuous promises and policies. No need to wonder why these problems still exist and persist.
As for ethics, these career politicos said fuck all to that certainly when they started their careers in government service. For it’s has always been about survival of the fittest, and have found a nice safe place from the man who betrayed his promise to stifle in house corruption and abolished the Moreland Commission when it was found to be in his palatial office.
All this falls in direct line with his atypical lousy judgement when it’s comes his choices of funding programs and of course the people he’s willing to associate with, like his honorary brother Joe Percoco, just recently busted taking bribes from a developer and hooking up his son with a plum job:
The Cuomo hiring practice is also a sidebar to the January corruption trial of former top Cuomo aide Joe Percoco and three others.
The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office alleges Percoco accepted bribes from Syracuse developer Steven F. Aiello, a co-defendant in the upcoming trial. One government favor done in exchange for bribes, according to prosecutors, was Percoco facilitating a $5,000 raise for Aiello’s son in a new job in Cuomo’s office in 2015.
The son, Steven L. Aiello, was actually paid his $62,000 salary through the Division of Military and Naval Affairs, which manages New York’s military forces, records show. He has since left the administration.
Clear to see a pattern there. But with Mario’s son’s unquenchable appetite for more loftier heights and stupidly distracted with it that he let his shithead friend engage in nepotism hiring, he recklessly went into overkill with his executive office hires, leading to this FBI investigation.
And Andy is clearly feeling the heat up his ass as he’s in snowflake victimization mode.
Team Cuomo called the Times Union’s report “absurd” and said the practice has been going on for decades.
“The agencies are all part of the same executive branch, and this administration follows the exact same lawful hiring process we inherited from previous administrations stretching back decades. If there are questions about it, call George Pataki,” said Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi.
“In this environment, anyone can ask about anything, but the fact is the longstanding practice of detailing staff from agencies to work in the Executive Chamber dates back over 50 years to at least the Rockefeller administration and extends to the White House and the federal Department of Justice,” he said.
Or we can ask Governor Andy’s dad.
“Given that the Federal Department of Justice and the White House have a long history of utilizing this practice, perhaps the FBI can investigate them when this is charade is over.”
The paper reported that some employees do have some connection to the agencies or authorities they are paid by while in others they do not.
“Have you been in Albany?” Cuomo sternly asked the reporter who asked the question. “Have you covered government? Do people who have political experience get hired by government or is it a new fact for you?”
“You have it going on in journalism,” Cuomo said. “What are you going to do different?”
Nothing like good old deflection and projecting. And the classic childish antidote of “they did so we can do it too”. With a sprinkle of the pervasive fascist trend of bashing and intimidating journalists.
The pressing thing about this for Andy is that he is the only one left from all those previous corruption cases in the last few years serving the state. Which makes him the only target or in his mind an easy scapegoat. The timing is pretty shitty considering his comfy seat in Albany is up for grabs this year, but it serves him right for having such shitty judgement in the first place.
Although it’s wishful thinking, an indictment against Andy would be sweet but it’s a long shot considering the precedence of a century of entrenched unethical political wheeling and dealing in New York. It is nice and karmic that he is feeling the same frustration and aggravation that his policy decisions have levied on his constituents, especially in the 5 boroughs, who continued to be subjected to it day after day, year after year.
Here’s hoping charges materialize, that way a new precedence can begin to get money and marketing out of politics and government. But mostly drop the bomb on this jerk’s deluded higher office ambitions.
If not, at least the nation can be secure in the knowledge that Mario’s son appointed a bunch of political mercenaries that couldn’t get their megalomaniac candidate Manifest Hillary to beat a boastful ignoramus manchild like our current President Figurehead Trump.
Go ahead and try. I triple dog dare you.
Impunity City 