A corruption conviction doesn’t necessarily stop elected officials from profiting at the taxpayers’ expense. But a new effort led by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara aims to go after politicians’ public pensions when the courts find them guilty.
“Our primary mission is to address and to undo injustice, and, in the public-corruption context, a galling injustice that sticks in the craw of every thinking New Yorker is the almost inviolable right of even the most corrupt elected official — even after being convicted by a jury and jailed by a judge — to draw a publicly funded pension until his dying day,” Bharara, attorney for the Southern District of New York, testified on September 17 at the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption. He added that “convicted politicians should not grow old comfortably cushioned by a pension paid for by the very people they betrayed in office.”
National Review Online has found that since 2008, at least four convicted politicians in New York have drawn pensions, all in excess of $3,000 per month.
