Why bribery is no longer a crime for the bribed

Christmas came early this year for a hack politician who was briefly elevated to a position a breath or scandal away from leading New York despite plenty of previous press coverage about how he used his campaign cash from his state Senate position to pay for a lavish wedding celebration for himself attended by a who’s who of Gotham’s political elite while leaning on a big donor who wanted public money in exchange for those “donations” to hide contributions to his failed city comptroller campaign that busted the limits of the matching-funds system that turns each dollar donated into eight and that’s intended to open up NYC’s democracy when a federal judge threw out the top bribe-taking charges against him.

Welcome to New York’s nasty new normal, in which people who bribe politicians can still go to prison but the politicians who take those bribes, like former Lieutenant Gov. Brian Benjamin, have little to fear.

That’s the upshot of Manhattan Federal Judge J. Paul Oekten’s ruling on Monday, finding that “proof of an express promise is necessary when the payments are made in the form of campaign contributions.”

What an awfully fancy way to say pols are free now to use public money to reward their donors — in Benjamin’s case, even after that donor pleaded guilty to bribing him — so long as they’re not stupid and sloppy enough to explicitly declare “I am paying you off with government money in exchange for the money you put into my political operation.”

Benjamin, who resigned in April on the same day the feds charged him after just seven months on the job Kathy Hochul tapped him for as she needed a Black downstate politician to fill her old job and balance her ticket, still faces two lesser charges of trying to cover up the corrupt schemes he didn’t yet know a judge would find weren’t criminal in a decision that Southern District prosecutors are appealing.

But given how the Supreme Court keeps opening the floodgates for effectively legalizing government corruption, that appeal looks to be a longshot.

As it happened, Benjamin got his good news days after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases involving people who’d been convicted by Southern District prosecutors of corruption related to the administration of then Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in a hearing that made clear the justices intend to reverse the convictions and continue their push over recent years to expand the ways elected officials and their agents can legally get paid by people with business before the government.

“What is curious about this case is that the State of New York doesn’t seem to be upset about this arrangement,” Justice Clarence Thomas said at one point, referring to how an aide close to Cuomo for decades left his government job and got paid by people hoping to get special treatment from the state while working on the governor’s re-election campaign. “It seems as though we are using a federal law to impose ethical standards on state activity.”

As the Supreme Court seems determined to make it easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for prosecutors to hold corrupt politicians to account, maybe some of the New York pols at the state and federal level who’ve defined themselves against native-son-turned-Florida-man Donald Trump and the threat he poses to our democracy can step up and pass laws clearly defining public corruption.

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Speaking of Trump, Benjamin is represented by Barry Berke, who served as Democrats’ chief counsel at the former president’s second impeachment trial and before that represented Mayor Bill de Blasio as Southern District and local prosecutors worked to bring a corruption case against him in 2017.

That case, too, ended up with the bribers imprisoned while the pol who took those bribes never even faced a trial.

After Oekten’s ruling, Berke trumpeted that “The dismissal of this now discredited bribery theory also makes clear how the indictment was a direct assault on the democratic process.”

The “Democratic process” in New York these days can be hard to distinguish from a money-laundering operation, like when de Blasio ran for Congress this year in a race that went so badly with voters he vowed afterward to never run for office again but that served him well by providing one last campaign to take in and pay out money and settle old political debts.

And speaking of old debts, there’s no sign yet that de Blasio has done anything to cover what would now be about a half million dollars with interest that he still owes Berke’s firm, which regularly lobbied his administration on behalf of real estate developers and other clients and seems to be in no rush to collect.

It’s all obscenely barely legal.

Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.