"Cuomo Caught Up in Rare Conflict With Prosecutor"

The national party ignores what's been going on in New York State at its own peril. There is something *seriously* wrong here.

This made page 1, NYT, yesterday.

Again: attention must be paid.

>>>>IRONDEQUOIT, N.Y. — An unusually public confrontation between two of the state’s most powerful officials escalated on Thursday. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, not known for engaging in on-air rebukes of elected officeholders, took aim at Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo over his decision to dissolve an anticorruption panel.

Mr. Bharara went on the radio to criticize Mr. Cuomo for quietly shutting down the panel, the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption. The governor had appointed the panel last year — with considerable celebration — to develop reforms to state law that would protect against corruption in Albany, a real-life petri dish for all manner of political malfeasance.

“If you begin investigations and you begin them with great fanfare,” Mr. Bharara said, “you don’t, I think, unceremoniously take them off the table without causing questions to be asked.”


It was a rare moment in which the governor, a former state attorney general who is accustomed to questioning others, found his own motives under scrutiny, and on a highly charged subject.



On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo — after giving a speech in this Rochester suburb — tried to play down the end of the panel, also known as the Moreland Commission, as an expected and inconsequential step. He said he never intended to create what he called “a perpetual bureaucracy” to investigate wrongdoing.

But the harsh glare on Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, was largely of his own making. The governor, many lawmakers believe, had created the commission last July in a bid to burnish his image as a corruption buster. Instead, Mr. Bharara’s decision to inject himself into the issue put a spotlight on Mr. Cuomo’s tactics, not those of the rogue legislators originally targeted by the governor.>>>>

in its entirety:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/nyregion/us-attorney-says-he-will-take-up-work-of-corruption-panel-cuomo-disbanded.html?_r=0