Perhaps school guidance counselors should add corrupt New York State official as a desirable goal for employment.
Afterall, how many jobs allow you to use other people’s money to defend yourself against criminal charges?
That’s what former state Majority Leader Dean Skelos and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver both did in unsuccessfully fighting corruption charges.
Skelos, a Rockville Centre Republican who led the state Senate from 2011 to 2015, used $762,145 in campaign contributions to pay his lawyers. Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, who led the Assembly from 1994 to 2015, spent $1.4 million on defense attorneys paid for by campaign contributors.
State election laws do not prohibit elected officials from spending campaign contributions on defending criminal charges.
But is that what campaign contributors to election campaigns are signing up for supporting — the next election campaign and the corruption trial afterward?
Based on the Skelos and Silver trials, maybe.
We can’t imagine that the average voter believes this is right.
This is also not an isolated incident.
In the past 10 years, 30 current or former state officeholders in New York have been convicted of crimes, sanctioned or otherwise accused of wrongdoing.
Included are two governors, the state comptroller, two Senate majority leaders and the Assembly Speaker.
All were eligible to defend themselves using campaign contributions.
Adding insult to injury, longtime state officials like Skelos and Silver can still file for pension benefits even after being convicted of misusing their office. Which is what Skelos did in December.
The Empire Center for Public Policy estimates that Skelos will receive an annual pension of as much as $95,590 a year – even if he was sentenced to jail.
The state Legislature passed a law in 2011 to strip the pensions of newly elected lawmakers convicted of corruption, but protected longtime officials like Skelos and Silver.
Efforts to amend the state Constitution to remove the pensions of all corrupt lawmakers floundered in the Legislature this year.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office convicted both Skelos and Silver, has suggested he will use civil forfeiture laws to claw back the disgraced lawmakers’ pensions.
We believe that if Bharara has the legal authority to claw back the money he will.
The state Legislature? Not so much.
In his recent state of the state address, Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for capping outside incomes for lawmakers — who are considered part-time — at 15 percent of their base annual salary of $79,500. He also proposed stripping those convicted of corruption of their pensions, closing a loophole that allowed companies to funnel contributions through subsidiaries to avoid donation limits and making the Legislature subject to freedom of information law requests.
All would be a step in the right direction in cleaning up the disgrace that is the state Legislature.
But Cuomo’s proposals do not address the use of campaign funds to defend criminal charges.
It is also the fourth year in which Cuomo has proposed state ethics reforms
Bharara recently cleared Cuomo of any wrongdoing in abruptly disbanding the Moreland Commission in the midst of its investigation of corruption in the state Legislature – one of his previous reform proposals.
Forgive us for saying we’ll believe the state is serious about putting a halt to the corruption when we see it.
