The US Supreme Court agreed to take up the corruption case against Joe Percoco, a longtime aide of disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Percoco, who managed Cuomo’s 2014 re-election campaign, was convicted in 2018 for accepting more than $300,000 from companies that wanted to gain influence with the former governor’s administration.
He was sentenced later that year to six years in prison before being quietly released late last year two years early.
A SCOTUS ruling in his favor would effectively bar federal bribery charges against private citizens no matter their amount of influence over elected officials.
“Generally speaking, bribery cases involve somebody paying a government official or giving something to a government official, right? Percoco wasn’t a government official at the time,” Yaakov Roth, an attorney at Jones Day who is representing the former Cuomo confidante, told The Post Thursday.
“He was a campaign manager, so the question is: Can he still be convicted of taking a bribe even though he didn’t hold any government office?”
Roth added that he expects a hearing on the issue sometime toward the end of the year.
Percoco’s attorneys have argued that the jury was given improper instructions during his trial based on a 1982 case, United States v. Margiotta.
They described the case, which concerned a GOP party boss on Long Island, as “an aberrational vestige of judicial history” that didn’t apply to Percoco.
“That decision … opened a dangerous new frontier for prosecutors to pursue lobbyists, donors, constituents, and even officials’ family members,” reads a petition filed before the Supreme Court in early June.
A representative of the US Solicitor General, which is the respondent in the appeal by Percoco, did not respond to a request for comment.
The court is also slated to take up a case involving businessman Louis Ciminelli, who was sentenced to 28 months in prison in 2018 for his alleged role in the “Buffalo Billion” bid-rigging scandal involving an economic development program championed by Cuomo.