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Cuomo says his name was 'never mentioned.' it was. 136 times

ALBANY, N.Y. — Shortly after last week’s conviction of Joseph Percoco, once one of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s closest friends and aides, on charges of soliciting and accepting more than $300,000 in bribes...

That is incorrect. Cuomo was mentioned: 136 times, to be precise.

A search of the trial transcripts shows that the governor’s full name — Andrew Cuomo — was spoken repeatedly during testimony, questioning, openings and cross-examination, including 29 times on a single day in February. His family name, including a smattering of mentions of his father, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, appear almost 500 times. And mentions of the governor — his office, his staff, his campaign, his reputation — was even more common, topping 1,500 occasions.

In his first public remarks after the verdict, Cuomo responded Wednesday to a question about how it affects his political fortunes, which may include presidential ambitions, by saying reporters who covered the trial could attest that “the governor’s involvement was never mentioned, his name was never mentioned.”

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On Sunday, the governor’s office reiterated that Cuomo had meant that his name was not mentioned in reference to any wrongdoing. And, to be sure, Cuomo was never accused of any criminal act.

Still, the efforts to distance himself from the Percoco verdict are understandable, considering the often unflattering portrait of his administration’s inner workings — including written disparagement of staff, angry outbursts by Cuomo, and Mafia-like codes and sophomoric nicknames — revealed during the trial.

But as Cuomo returns to Albany this week for budget negotiations, he will nonetheless face lingering questions about his former aide as well as the omnipresent issue of ethics in the state Capitol. That scrutiny will only intensify as two former top legislative leaders, Sheldon N. Silver and Dean G. Skelos, are retried in the coming months on corruption charges, and another former state official and friend of the governor’s, Alain E. Kaloyeros, is tried in June in a different bribery scheme.

Like myriad corruption cases before it, the Percoco verdict has led to calls for reforms from government watchdogs. Shortly after Tuesday’s verdict, nine such groups called for a state constitutional amendment to create an independent ethics enforcement agency to fight Albany’s “the pay-to-play culture.” (Both of the companies accused of bribing Percoco had donated — legally — to Cuomo’s campaigns.) Republican opponents of the governor have also piled on, calling on the state attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney to investigate.

For all of that clamor, it seems that there is little legislative ardor to pass new ethics laws in Albany. A budget plan unveiled last week by the Republicans who rule the Senate, for instance, makes no mention of ethics. In the Assembly, where the Democratic majority typically has more appetite for such legislation, even the chamber’s speaker seemed wary of conflating Percoco’s behavior with others.

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“The overwhelming majority of people who take on the job of being in public service do the right thing,” said Carl E. Heastie, D-Bronx, who is the Assembly’s speaker. He questioned what state laws might be drafted to prevent corruption.

“What’s the legislative remedy for something that a jury has decided is against the law?” he said.

Cuomo said Wednesday that he believes the Legislature was to blame for not banning outside income for lawmakers, a thorny and much-debated issue that was not part of the Percoco trial. “That’s the reform that I’ve been pushing, and I’m going to continue to push,” he said, adding he would make it a campaign issue in the fall. (Republicans in the state Senate, whom Cuomo has worked with in the past, have opposed such limits on income.)

While Cuomo dismissed the actions of Percoco as a “total aberration,” editorial boards around the state have said that more must be done, including the governor’s response.

“Gov. Andrew Cuomo takes personal credit for every action of state government, projecting an image of a man in charge and burnishing his credentials to be president,” The Post-Standard of Syracuse wrote. “He ought to take personal responsibility for the corruption in his own executive chamber.”

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Cuomo has not faced the Capitol press corps since the verdict — he left an event in Albany without taking questions Tuesday, just before the verdict was announced. But questions persist, including why Percoco was allowed to come and go from the governor’s executive offices in 2014 while serving as his campaign manager, a possible violation of laws against use of taxpayer-funded resources on campaigns. (Records show that Cuomo was often there at the same time.)

It is also not clear how it was that Percoco kept a state identification that allowed him to swipe in and out of those offices during that period, and the extent to which he was present — some 68 days, according to testimony at trial, making hundreds of phone calls — also seems to outstrip the definition of “transition work,” as the governor described it.

“It’s a surprising explanation,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, adding that if such work was authorized by a state ethics panel then that should be made public. “And if not, I don’t know what transition means.”

As for Percoco’s ID, Horner — a former special adviser to Cuomo when he was attorney general — was even more flabbergasted.

“When I left the AG’s office, they held me by the ankles and shook everything out,” he said.

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On Wednesday, Cuomo acknowledged that “there should be no other work done from a government office besides that transition work,” and if there was, such behavior was “a violation of the rules.”

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the governor, said on Sunday that Percoco had not been authorized to keep the state ID.

“And since this fact came to light, we put new procedures in place during the exit process to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

JESSE McKINLEY © 2018 The New York Times

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