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COMMISSION ON ETHICS & LOBBYING IN GOVERNMENT (COELIG)
"Selection Member" Governor Hochul's proposed nomination of James Caras, ESQ.
1.
2. I will gladly e-mail the comment to you, if you send me an e-mail address for doing so. I am available to answer question[s] -- and would welcome the opportunity to do so under oath. Thank you. Elena Sassower, Director/Center for Judicial Accountability, Inc. (CJA)" COMMENT
Governor
Hochul’s July 3, 2024 announcement
of her proposed nomination of James Caras to the Commission on Ethics
and Lobbying in Government states: "James Caras served as
Special Counsel to the current Speaker of the New York City
Council until his retirement in 2023 and as General Counsel
and then Special Counsel to the City Council under the prior
Speaker." Not included in the
announcement are the dates of his service in those positions
– or his duties, particularly as “Special Counsel”. Had Mr. Caras been doing his
job – certainly as General Counsel – he would know that the
City Council and its relevant committees are in flagrant
violation of the New York City Charter,
Chapter 2, §29, requiring oversight “on a regular
and continuous basis”, including yearly hearings, of “the
activities of the agencies of the city”. The most important of these
“agencies”, for purposes of ensuring the integrity of city
governance, are the New York City Public Advocate, the New
York City Conflicts of Interest Board, the New York City
Department of Investigation, and New York City's five district
attorneys. Below are links to webpages
substantiating this comment. In addition to the first
pertaining to my testimony at the September 7, 2022 City
Council hearing and my correspondence to the City Council
and its pertinent committees and members relating thereto,
are links to my FOIL requests to the New
York City Council, which are
handled through its General Counsel’s
Office. These are, most importantly:
To the September 8, 2022 FOIL
request, there was only a dilatory, insufficient response
reflecting the City Council’s non-compliance
with Chapter 2, §29 of the City Charter. To the September 13, 2022 FOIL request, there
was NO response whatever. Also posted are my FOIL
requests to the City Council, from 2021,
alerting it to the situation with respect to the Public
Advocate, to whom the FOIL requests were also
addressed:
All three of these FOIL requests were acknowledged by the City Council’s FOIL officer, but the only response thereafter was to the second, deferring to the Public Advocate’s palpably deficient, Charter-violating response. As for the Public Advocate’s responses to the other two FOIL requests, they also were palpably deficient and violative of Charter requirements. Suffice to add that as to the
third FOIL request pertaining to the Public Advocate’s
website, the ONLY change thereafter made was to the sentence highlighted
by the FOIL request: “These duties, worded somewhat
ambiguously, are laid out in Section 24 of the City
Charter.” This was changed to remove the “worded somewhat
ambiguously”. No hyperlinking to
Section 24 was added, nor listing of the Public
Advocate's duties pursuant thereto, as my FOIL had
requested, thereby concealing the Public Advocate's past
violations, which would be continued. What did Mr. Caras know and what should he have known, consistent with his General Counsel and Special Counsel duties? And what does Mr. Caras believe to be his ethical duties now, upon being furnished with this evidence-substantiated comment, where, additionally, my September 7, 2022 written testimony against Anthony Crowell (at pp. 3-6) and its two-minute summary exposed not only his corruption in 2015 as a member, if not de facto chair, of the JCOPE/LEC review commission, and, in 2021, as a member of the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board, but, since 2022, as chair of the Independent Review Committee (IRC) that will be reviewing the Govenor's proposed nomination of Mr. Caras’ to COELIG. This, in addition to exposing the corruption of the IRC’s 14 other law school deans – all fully knowledgeable, since my first June 12, 2022 letter to them, of the lawsuit CJA v. JCOPE, et al. (Albany Co. #904235-22), brought "on behalf of the People of the State of New York & the Public Interest", whose sixth cause of action is dispositive of the unconstitutionality and fraud of the “ethics commission reform act of 2022” that replaced JCOPE with COELIG. As my subsequent correspondence to the 15 IRC deans reveals -- and it spans from July 2022 to February 2023 -- they have covered-up the wilful failure of COELIG's "selection members" -- the Governor among them -- to reject their own proposed nominees based on investigation of adverse comment, and, upon approving these corrupt proposed nominees, have, thereafter, covered up their corruption as COELIG commissioners, as, for instance, their dismissal, without investigation, of COELIG’s first complaint, to wit, CJA's July 8, 2022 complaint and October 6, 2022 supplement against Attorney General Letitia James for corrupting the judicial process in CJA v. JCOPE, et al., rewarded by fraudulent Supreme Court decisions. As for what has become of CJA's subsequent complaints to COELIG -- CJA's October 2, 2023 complaint and January 29, 2024 complaint, each involving CJA v. JCOPE, et al. -- COELIG has been "sitting on" them. As reflected by my most recent June 5, 2024 e-mail to the COELIG commissioners, COELIG has not even acknowledged receipt of these two fully-documented complaints. Meanwhile, the IRC and COELIG have been defending against two subsequent lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the "ethics commission reform act of 2022" -- Lavine v. State of New York...IRC, defended by outside counsel, for which the taxpayers have needlessly paid tens of thousands of dollars, and Cuomo v. COELIG -- each lawsuit, as they know, mooted by the sixth cause of action of CJA v. JCOPE, et al. Will Mr. Caras, if approved to be a COELIG commissioner by the IRC deans, have the integrity to "blow the whistle" on what's been going on? I am available to answer questions
about the foregoing and would welcome the opportunity to do
so, under oath. Thank you. Elena Sassower, Director
Confirmations of Anthony Crowell & Milton Williams, Etc. CJA's 2022 FOIL to NYC Council CJA's 2021 FOIL to NYC Council & Public Advocate CJA's complaints & FOIL requests to COELIG
A Tale of Three Lawsuits
------------------------------------------------- is Speaker from January 2022
Corey Johnson was Speaker of
the New
York City Council -------------------------------------------- PRESS
July 3, 2024
July 3, 2024
July 3, 2024
July 3, 2024
July 3, 2024
July 3, 2024 |
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