Government reform groups say you can add one more item to the long list of reforms that they believe are needed in Albany. They say limits are needed on campaign contributions to county political committees. The committees collection and distribution of money factor into a growing criminal case against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, and upstate Senate races in 2014.
A memo from the chief enforcement officer at the New York state Board of Elections, first leaked to the Daily News, accuses the mayor’s staff of improperly supervising a plan to help more Senate Democrats win office that skirted campaign contribution limits.
According to investigator Risa Sugarman, de Blasio aides solicited large campaign contributions from unions and real estate developers. The donations were made to county party committees, including in Putnam and Ulster Counties in the Hudson Valley, where as much as over $100,000 can be donated by a single entity. The money was then transferred from the party committees to individual Senate campaign accounts. The limit for an individual contribution to a Senate candidate is closer to $10,000 dollars.
In the memo, Sugarman said that amounts to violating the contribution limits for the Senate races.
De Blasio’s counsel confirmed Wednesday night that his office has received subpoenas in the case from the Manhattan district attorney.
Susan Lerner, with the watchdog group Common Cause New York, is not commenting on whether anything illegal actually occurred, saying she doesn’t know all the facts, but she says transfers of funds between varying political accounts is common, and needs to be fixed.
“It seems to be a shell game back and forth,” said Lerner. “It’s very difficult to follow the money when there are virtually limitless transfers between different committees at different levels.”
Lerner says dramatically lowering contribution limits for party county committees would effectively curb the funneling of money to skirt donation limits.
Common Cause issued a report on the LLC loophole in the state’s campaign finance system. It allows donors to form multiple Limited Liability Companies to get around donation limits. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said he wants to close that loophole, but he dropped a proposal to put it in the state budget, saying he’ll push in the remaining months of session. Lerner says the governor’s support for closing the LLC loophole is key, but she says more needs to be done to change the state Capitol’s culture of corruption, which has led to the conviction of both former leader of the legislature on multiple corruption convictions.
The office of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara will sentence former Assembly Speaker Silver on May 3, and former Senate Leader Skelos and his son on May 12. Both face potentially lengthy prison terms.
“We can’t just have the U.S. Attorney be the cop on the beat when there are no systemic changes,” Lerner said. “That’s not the way to end the problem.”
Sugarman, the Board of Elections official who recommended the criminal prosecution, was appointed to her job by Cuomo. She previously was deputy commissioner in Cuomo’s Transportation Department.
Cuomo and de Blasio have had a rocky relationship. Blair Horner, with the New York Public Interest Research Group, says that will lead to charges, by some, that the investigation is tainted.
“Any ethics enforcer who comes right from the governor’s office or the legislature, is going to be operating under a cloud,” Horner said.
But he says the bipartisan state Board of Elections signed off, and both the U.S. attorney and Manhattan DA are investigating, so they too must believe there could be something there.
“Any argument that this is about a political vendetta sort of melts away when you get back to the facts,” he said. “The facts at the end of the day is, was this a violation of the campaign finance laws or not, and increasingly it looks like it could have been.”
So far, the two Senate candidates, who both lost, have not been implicated in the growing scandal. But Sugarman did say in her memo that there’s evidence that some of the same illegal funneling of campaign contributions could have occurred in western New York, in Senate races in the Rochester and Buffalo areas. But she said without anyone actually filing a complaint, she could not take any further steps. That changed Wednesday, when Monroe Republican County Chair Bill Reilich wrote a letter to the Board of Elections asking for a review of the matter.
“This is very serious,” Reilich said. “This is something that could result in a misdemeanor or felony charges.”
The request could widen the investigation.
