By Bob McManus     July 26, 2014

Andrew Cuomo is a f—ing steamroller. You gotta problem with that?

US Attorney Preet Bharara apparently does, judging from his reaction to last week’s remarkable, 6,400-word essay in The New York Times detailing gubernatorial interference with an investigating commission Cuomo very publicly imposed on Albany 13 months ago — only to disband it when it started putting heat on him.

Even Cuomo doesn’t dispute that he stuck his thumb in the soup. But he says it was his very own commission — and that he was free to compromise it, or to kill it, whenever.

So he did. So there.

But Bharara, every corrupt New York pol’s monster under the bed, takes exception: “If other people aren’t going to [fight official misconduct], then we’re going to do it. That’s our main mission.”

Cuomo’s legal pettifoggers are, well, pettifogging. But the governor clearly has poked a big stick into a bear cave, and he’s not likely to walk away from the episode with his reputation intact.

Just like the last self-designated avenging angel of Albany — the very much former governor Eliot Laurence Spitzer.

That is, just like the man who — three weeks into his abbreviated gubernatorial term — famously pronounced himself to be a “f—ing steamroller” poised to “roll over [Albany] and anybody else!” (History records that Albany was not amused.)

There are many differences between Spitzer and Cuomo, but the two men have this in common: They are bombastic, profane-in-private control freaks who rarely opt for persuasion when blunt-force trauma is available.

Spitzer’s arrogance is rooted in great wealth, steeped in the unshakeable conviction that he is — in every situation and all possible circumstances — the smartest man in the room. If not the world.

Cuomo is less scrutable. He’s never met the man he can’t stare down, or so he clearly believes. But sometimes the arrogance seems tentative — the product, perhaps, of the same outer-borough insecurities that often hobbled his father, Mario Cuomo.

No matter. The hubris is real, and therein reside the origins of his current problems.

Spitzer, for the record, accomplished precisely nothing during his brief term.

Always a slave to his instincts and appetites, his epic tirades generated first resistance, then paralysis. His effectiveness, such as it was, ended in July 2007, when The Post’s Fredric U. Dicker revealed that he had sent state troopers after political enemies. And when he left office nine months later, the central figure in a bizarre sex scandal, Albany was in near total meltdown.

Then came the surreal David Paterson interregnum — punctuated by the increasingly frequent corruption convictions won by Bharara. Meltdown descended into farce.

And so the scene was set for Andrew Mark Cuomo, who came to office pledged to reform Albany once and for all.

The low-hanging fruit was quickly plucked: Budgeting reform and peripheral tax relief were achieved, and a sense progress was real.

But friction always takes a toll. Cuomo proved to have no appetite for the heavy lifting real change would require — for truly taking on the Legislature, the public-employee unions and other left-leaning special interests — and presently stagnation set in.

And frustration, manifested in unguarded public moments with hectoring speeches characterizing dissenters from the company line — traditional Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Second Amendment supporters and so on — as “extremists” unworthy of intellectual engagement.

Ugly stuff, but par for the Cuomo course.

Meanwhile, Bharara’s federal gumshoes were hard at work. Their increasingly frequent indictments and convictions, from the governor’s perspective, simply underscored how little he himself had accomplished in that respect.

Fast forward to a year ago, after Cuomo’s third legislative session failed yet again to produce significant anti-corruption legislation.

Once more the governor reached for the bludgeon: He appointed a special anti-corruption commission under the state’s 107-year-old Moreland Act — properly employed, that’s Albany’s version of the nuclear option — and handed it a very clear mandate.

“Anything (the commission) wants to look at, they can look at — me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman,” declared Cuomo. [Members] have total control and ability to look at whatever they want to look at.”

Which Albany pol dared argue with that? Complain, yes. Obstruct, no. It was classic, naked Cuomo my-way-or-the-highway coercion.

Imagine Cuomo’s surprise, then, when he discovered that his handcrafted commission had taken him at his word. That it was indeed, according to the Times, looking squarely at his own campaign practices.

That would never do. Key Cuomo aide Larry Schwartz, a bludgeon of his own in hand, descended swiftly on the mutineers.

What happened next isn’t entirely clear — but this much is beyond dispute:

n  The Albany establishment was not at all intimidated by Cuomo and his commission, which he folded in less than a year. The entire exercise yielded nothing.

n  Preet Bharara, who swiftly confiscated the commission’s records, is now combing through them — methodically and ominously.

Spitzer proved that sometimes steamrollers pop gaskets. Too bad for Cuomo that he wasn’t paying attention.

(Reuters) Wed Jul 23, 2014 4:57pm EDT

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office meddled with a commission he created to root out corruption in state politics, pushing back whenever it focused on groups tied to Cuomo, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

The commission that Cuomo established in July 2013 to investigate violations of campaign finance laws and other matters was hobbled almost from the start by demands from the governor’s office, despite a public promise of independence, the Times said.

Within a year, it was disbanded by Cuomo, who had initially indicated it would operate for about 18 months.

Now the commission’s scrapped probes, which included hundreds of emails, subpoenas and internal documents from politicians and state agencies, are being investigated by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the Times said. Federal prosecutors also are looking into what role Cuomo and his aides played in the panel’s shutdown.

Cuomo’s office did not immediately respond to calls about the Times story and a spokesman for Bharara declined to comment on it.

The bipartisan Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, more commonly known as the Moreland Commission, was created after the state capital was rocked by a series of scandals involving legislators, which Cuomo said had undermined the public’s confidence in state government.

The commission was granted the power to subpoena state officials, lawmakers and records from state agencies, such as the Board of Elections.

“Anything they want to look at, they can look at – me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman,” Cuomo, a Democrat, told reporters in August 2013.

But the commission soon encountered resistance from Cuomo’s office when it issued a subpoena to a media-buying firm, Buying Time, which unbeknownst to investigators happened to include Cuomo as one of its clients, the Times said.

The governor’s most senior aide, Lawrence Schwartz, directed the commission to withdraw the subpoena, which it did.

“This is wrong,” Schwartz was quoted in the Times as telling the commission. “Pull it back.”

Similar responses from Cuomo’s office had shut down several other investigative efforts whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Cuomo or on issues that might cast him in a negative light, the Times said.

That included stopping a subpoena the commission planned to send to the Real Estate Board of New York, the trade group whose members have generously supported Cuomo, the Times said.

After he abruptly disbanded the commission in March and caught the eye of the U.S. attorney’s office, Cuomo downplayed the idea that he had interfered with its work.

“It’s my commission,” the governor told the editorial board of Crain’s New York Business in late April. “I can’t ‘interfere’ with it, because it is mine. It is controlled by me.”

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Additional reporting by Carey Gillam; Editing by Bill Trott)

July 18,2014, 11:12 a.m.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CUOMO SPENDS MORE THAN
QUARTER BILLION TAX DOLLARS ON TV ADS

—–
$237.5 million Figure Revealed only After Year of FOIL Requests;
State Comptroller Audit Announcement

——-
Astorino Calls for Cessation of Spending in Election Season

New York–July 18…New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is spending $237.5 million — including almost $40 million in money intended for Hurricane Sandy victims — to run false television advertising, telling voters here and nationally that everything is coming up roses in New York under his administration, the campaign of New York gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino today said.

The shocking figure, which was obtained by Gannett news after a year of effort, is $87.5 million more than what was previously thought. New York ranks 50th among states in economic outlook, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, and it has the highest taxes in America. It was ranked the worst state in America in which to retire, and its state government is ranked the most corrupt in America by the University of Illinois.

“This is a swindle of historic proportions,” Mr. Astorino said. “Andrew Cuomo has taken more than a quarter billion dollars of taxpayer money and put it into television advertising for his own political gain. People have been locked in jail for far less than that.”

Mr. Astorino said it should be illegal for taxpayer ads like Mr. Cuomo’s to run inside New York, especially in an election year, and he called on Mr. Cuomo to halt the television campaign immediately.

“Mr. Cuomo is literally taking money from homeless New York families on Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and elsewhere and put it on TV for his own political gain, three months before an election. He can’t be allowed to get away with that. This is what having the most corrupt state government in America looks like.”

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July 18, 2014, 12:48 p.m.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Statement from Rob Astorino on today’s report of new subpoenas issued in the U.S. Attorney’s investigation of Governor Cuomo

“Andrew Cuomo rode into town saying he was going to tackle corruption.  But he’s only brought corruption to a new level. Between his nefarious Moreland and JCope deals, and his swindling of Hurricane Sandy dollars, this Administration may go down as the most corrupt ever.”

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