Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara took an apparent swipe at Gov. Cuomo when an interviewer asked him about the short-lived ethics panel the governor reportedly interfered with.
“Our interest above all other interests is to make sure that the job is getting done — because we are the people who do our jobs,” Bharara told PBS’s Charlie Rose Wednesday.
“So we asked for and received — we were voluntarily offered — all the documents that have been collected by the [Moreland] Commission so the work could continue, because if other people aren’t going to do it, then we’re going to do it.”
The hard-charging federal prosecutor is now pushing the investigation forward and said his office has the “fearlessness and independence” to tackle a tough corruption case.
The interview with Rose came the same day The New York Times published findings from a three-month investigation showing that Cuomo’s secretary, Larry Schwartz, had repeatedly interfered with the anti-corruption commission and tried to prevent the panel from investigating groups connected to the governor, including campaign contributors.
Cuomo created the commission last July and abolished it in March. Bharara requested records from the unfinished investigation.
“I testified at the first public hearing of that commission and talked about the need for independence and the need to be aggressive and the need to go after public corruption the same way our office had been going after it,” Bharara told Rose. “And then after nine months, which appeared to be a shorter period of time than was expected, we understood that the commission was being shut down.”