POLITICO: …For months now, Christie’s administration has been petrified by a pair of probes — one by the Democratic state Legislature and another by the Department of Justice — into his aides’ deliberate tampering with traffic patterns in Northern New Jersey. Last week, the federal investigation took an apparently grave turn when ABC News reported that U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman had convened a grand jury to consider the case.
Cuomo felt the prosecutor’s bite in a different fashion this week. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, savaged Cuomo in public for his decision to shutter a state panel, known as the Moreland Commission, formed to investigate rampant corruption in Albany. Bharara suggested the decision may have arisen from an improper deal with the Empire State’s famously crooked legislature and left the door open to an investigation.
The two cases are not identical. There is no grand jury investigating Cuomo, who is up for reelection this year, and it is unclear what actions Bharara may take to scrutinize the New York governor specifically. At least at this point, Christie is in a far graver predicament. Both men may ultimately be cleared in full… (more)
