‘Not my choice’
Laura Nahmias
ALBANY—U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is getting a trove of "unseemliness" in the truckload of documents he retrieved from Governor Andrew Cuomo's shuttered ethics commission, according to the commission's former co-chairman.
“We are not wasting the U.S. attorney’s time,” Onondaga County district attorney William Fitzpatrick told Capital on Thursday afternoon.
Fitzpatrick, the Republican who co-chaired the governor's Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, said it would be "not ethical" to suggest the commission's work product will definitely lead to criminal charges against any lawmakers. But, he said, there was "a lot of unseemliness."
In a fairly unmistakable rebuke to the governor, Bharara dispatched a truck this week to collect the findings of the commission, which operated for just nine months before Cuomo agreed to dissolve the panel as part of a state budget agreement that included some new ethics provisions. The U.S. attorney suggested that the commission's mandate had been bargained away prematurely as part of a larger agreement by state leaders.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/04/8543580/not-my-choice