A black lawyer claims in a $3.5 million lawsuit filed in Brooklyn federal court that Gov. Cuomo, as state attorney general, passed her over for promotion in favor of an inept white colleague.
Jeanna Hussey, 54, says the job in the Manhattan office of the AG’s Environmental Protection Bureau was handed to a lawyer who didn’t know how to perform basic legal tasks.
The suit calls Hussey the bureau’s only black attorney and says there are just 25 black attorneys in the entire AG’s office.
Several of Cuomo’s senior AG staffers, including a woman who once led the bureau, were black, and 2009 records list 18 percent of his staff as minorities.
A spokesman for AG Eric Schneiderman declined comment.