Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Opinion

Big Foot vs. Big Foot–Bharara’s warning to Cuomo & Co.

In the matter of Andrew Cuomo vs. his own big fat mouth, the price of poker just went up.
The governor has been wriggling like a worm on a hook for 10 days now, ever since The New York Times reported how he had big-footed an anti-corruption commission he himself had created — apparently because he feared the panel was going rogue. The blowback was considerable.

So what did Cuomo do next?

He big-footed the commission yet again, according to US Attorney Preet Bharara — and this time the governor may have gone a prosecutable step too far.

Now, Big Foot’s gotta do what Big Foot’s gotta do.

But that goes for Bharara, as well — which seems somehow to have eluded Cuomo.

The prosecutor, as reported in the Times last week, effectively took over the work of Cuomo’s Moreland Act Commission on Public Corruption after the governor shut it down in March because the panel had begun looking at his political operation.

Cuomo then went deep for five days — dramatically surfacing on Monday to deny he’d tampered with anything. But if commission Co-Chairman William J. Fitzpatrick’s near-simultaneous affirmation of Cuomo’s claim was meant to be taken as a coincidence, Bharara wasn’t biting.

“We have reason to believe a number of commissioners recently have been contacted about the commission’s work,” the prosecutor immediately wrote to the panel, “and some commissioners have been asked to issue public statements characterizing events and facts regarding the commission’s operation.

“To the extent anyone attempts to influence or tamper with a witness’s recollection of events relevant to our investigation, including the recollection of a commissioner or one of the commission’s employees, we request that you advise our office immediately, as we must consider whether such actions constitute obstruction of justice or tampering with witnesses that violate federal law.”

Scary stuff — if only because virtually every phrase in the second paragraph can be linked loosely to a specific section of the federal Penal Code.

The message seems clear enough: Hang with Cuomo and maybe you’ll, well, just hang.

And then, as if to add emphasis, Bharara on Wednesday enjoyed an ostentatiously public lunch with state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, at a downtown restaurant very popular with politicians — and federal judges.

Schneiderman, of course, was legally as much a father of the commission as Cuomo, having sworn its members in as deputy AGs.

Whether anything here rises to obstruction of justice isn’t clear — but as once was said in another context, a smart prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

And Bharara is nothing if not smart.

But what, in the end, is he up to? He says he means to clean up New York — but what, exactly, does that mean?

So far, he’s been taking down corrupt pols in wholesale lots — 37 indicted, convicted or otherwise sanctioned over the past several years, most at Bharara’s hands.

But those have been little fish, scum-skimmers of the sort that keep aquariums clean. They’re content to grab a dime here and a dollar there — and while rolling them up is God’s work, it doesn’t really address the heavyweights who enable New York’s culture of corruption.

Ironically, Andrew Cuomo’s father, Mario, shoved the discussion in that direction this week.

Lying never came naturally to the 52nd governor of the Empire State, and it still doesn’t: “Andrew is as honest a politician as we have seen in New York,” he said in an interview.

It was classic Mario — parsed to perfection, a little enigmatic, but clear enough: His son, he says, is to be judged by New York standards.

Which have always been notoriously loose.

One can only imagine the shenanigans that went into the construction of the glorious Italianate-style building known now as the Tweed Courthouse — 140-some years ago. Even FDR had Jim Farley, a machine-politics virtuoso, to manage the grubby gubernatorial details.

Today, however, governance is conducted almost wholly at the sufferance of special interests — chiefly the public unions. Andrew Cuomo’s groveling as he sought the union-cat’s-paw Working Families Party endorsement in May demonstrated that.

Cuomo came stunningly close to publicly promising policy concessions in return for the WFP endorsement — shocking, yes, but strictly business as usual.

It’s precisely that sort of thing that Cuomo implied was at the core of his mission to “clean up Albany” when he ran for governor four years ago. Obviously, that hasn’t worked out.

And it is precisely what Bharara needs to address if he is to fulfill his promise to succeed where Cuomo has failed.

Whether he understands that remains to be seen — but his public admonition of Cuomo’s corruption-enabling bullying suggests that he does. A hopeful sign.

rmcmanus8@gmail.com