Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) filed a lawsuit Friday against a New York ethics board in an attempt to stop it from confiscating profits from a book he wrote while he was governor about his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the lawsuit, Cuomo claimed that the New York State Joint Commission on Public Ethics violated his due process rights and “demonstrated extraordinary bias against him.”
The suit comes after the commission in December ordered Cuomo to return his proceeds from the book, which were reported earlier that year to total at least $5.1 million.
New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) sent a letter to the commission shortly after it issued the order saying that it needed to complete additional measures before it could claim the money.
“Never in the history of New York has an agency so breathtakingly and irresponsibly prejudged a matter on which it is the final decision maker,” the lawsuit states of the commission.
The order to return the proceeds came four months after Cuomo resigned as governor following the release of a report by James that said an investigation found Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women and violated state and federal laws.
The commission initially granted Cuomo approval for the book deal but revoked its decision in November after an investigation showed that the former governor had utilized state resources and personnel in writing the book.
In a request for comment, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi deferred to the lawsuit but sent The Hill an August 2020 memo in which an ethics officer said that no state resources were used in writing the book and that staff members who assisted Cuomo in the book did so on their own time.
The news comes as Cuomo has launched an ad blitz in recent weeks that portrays him as a victim of political attacks and raises doubts about the validity of James’s investigation.