Andrew Cuomo

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Cuomo vaccine czar's pleas to support governor raise ethical concerns – reports

      by

      The coronavirus vaccination czar for New York governor Andrew Cuomo made appeals for political support for the embattled politician, prompting ethical concerns, according to multiple media reports Sunday.New York’s “vaccination czar”, longtime Cuomo aide Larry Schwartz, reportedly pivoted in at least one telephone conversation with a county executive from a discussion of vaccination policy directly to an appeal for support for Cuomo.Schwartz has denied mixing political and policy calls or acting improperly.Cuomo, the state’s governor since 2010, is in a fight for his political life under the weight of a half-dozen sexual misconduct allegations and a scandal over the deliberate misreporting of Covid deaths in nursing homes.Both US senators from New York and most of the congressional delegation have called on Cuomo to resign, as prosecutors investigate the charges against the three-term governor.“There is no way I resign,” Cuomo said last week. The governor has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct. He is up for re-election in 2022.One county executive has already filed a preliminary report with state attorney general Letitia James of a possible ethics violation by the Cuomo administration in the Schwartz matter, according to reporting in the Washington Post and New York Times.“At best, it was inappropriate,” an unnamed executive told the Post of Schwartz’s mixing discussions of vaccination policy and Cuomo’s political future. “At worst, it was clearly over the ethical line.”At least two other county executives reported a close juxtaposition of phone conversations about vaccine policy with other conversations with Schwartz about supporting Cuomo.Schwartz served as the governor’s top aide for four years during Cuomo’s first administration and was called back into service after the outbreak of the coronavirus emergency.He denied inappropriate conversations with county-level officials; he acknowledged he made calls but said he did so as a long-time friend of Cuomo and did not discuss vaccines in them. “I did nothing wrong,” Schwartz told the Washington Post. “I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard.”With the most influential Democrats in the state already having turned on Cuomo as his third term wanes, the governor’s political fate may be beyond the ability of county-level officials to decide.The rollout of vaccines in New York state has roughly tracked the national average. The state endured one of the worst and deadliest outbreaks of Covid-19 early in the pandemic, with Cuomo’s clear daily communication at the time about the threat winning him praise, especially in contrast with former president Donald Trump.But outgoing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who has for years been locked in a personal feud with Cuomo, was among those criticizing Albany for not doing enough to get vaccine doses to the city.“We don’t get our fair share of vaccines for this city,” De Blasio told CBS News’ Face the Nation program on Sunday. “We’re vaccinating people not just from the city, but also from the suburbs, surrounding states.”De Blasio predicted that Cuomo would resign under pressure from an impeachment inquiry that was opened by the state assembly judiciary committee last week.“He is used to getting things his way, and it has been almost an imperial governorship,” De Blasio said. But the folks in this state and the political leadership don’t believe him anymore. He doesn’t have any credibility. I think an impeachment proceeding will begin, and I think he will be impeached, and perhaps right before that he’ll decide to resign.”Nearly 6,000 people in New York state tested positive for coronavirus on Saturday, and 62 people died.The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post joined most of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation in calling on Cuomo to resign in an editorial.“Simply put: Any fair effort to get to the bottom of the avalanche of sexual-harassment allegations could take months – whereas legislators already have all the evidence they need to move to impeach Governor Cuomo immediately for his nursing-home horrors,” the paper said.At the height of the early coronavirus crisis, while Cuomo’s tone and leadership struck a defining contrast with Trump, the latest allegations against the Cuomo administration evoked a different kind of unflattering association with Trump.The former president explicitly tied coronavirus aid for states on the willingness of governors to demonstrate political fealty to him. Now county executives allege that a Cuomo aide has hinted at a similar tie.Among those who caught the association was Donald Trump Jr, who tweeted on Sunday afternoon: “Andrew Cuomo is everything the media pretended Trump was times about 1000.” More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      Andrew Cuomo's unraveling: hold on power appears weak amid multiple crises

      by

      Earlier this month the Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, sat down in front of TV cameras in the executive chamber of the state capitol in Albany to deliver one of the most awkward messages of his decade in office.By then three women had accused him of sexually inappropriate behaviour. Among them was Lindsey Boylan, a former economic development adviser who in a Medium post alleged that while they were on board an official flight he proposed a game of strip poker and, in a separate incident, forced a kiss on her.Given the uproar, Cuomo, 63, managed to remain remarkably composed. He struck a posture that could be described as contrite aggression, or aggressive contrition.Speaking slowly and emphatically, as though addressing a class of pre-schoolers, he apologized while denying he had done anything wrong.“I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable,” he said, adding: “I never touched anyone inappropriately.”To drive the point home, he repeated the phrase. “I never touched anyone inappropriately”.The remark was intended to buy time, shoring up a crumbling political position while an independent investigation by the state attorney general, Letitia James, ran its course. It was not intended to deepen Cuomo’s travails by triggering a traumatic reaction in another alleged victim who happened to be standing a few feet away.[embedded content]The Cuomo staff member was dutifully listening when he punched out that line about never having “touched anyone inappropriately”. According to the Albany Times Union, she grew emotional, later telling a supervisor he had done precisely that to her.The female staffer said Cuomo had summoned her to the second floor of the executive mansion – his private quarters – supposedly to help him fix his phone. Then he shut the door, and in the Times Union’s account “allegedly reached under her blouse and began to fondle her”.The allegation of aggressive groping took the maelstrom surrounding Cuomo to a new level. What began as a dispute over the apparent cover-up of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and escalated with claims of bullying against a fellow Democrat, Ron Kim, exploded into a fully-fledged sexual harassment scandal involving seven women.The bush fires Cuomo is fighting have gained a momentum of their own, with a new revelation or political setback seemingly erupting with every hour that passes. Renowned for having an iron grip on his own political narrative – to the extent that last year he wrote a book heaping praise on himself for his handling of the Covid crisis, subtitled Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic – Cuomo is looking increasingly impotent as he watches his image unravel in what is fast becoming a fall from grace of legendary proportions.“The governor is fighting day to day right now,” said John Kaehny, executive director of a watchdog group, Reinvent Albany. “He’s looking terminally afflicted with scandal – he’s going down.”On Friday, several of the most prominent Democrats on the New York stage, including US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jerrold Nadler, who chairs the House judiciary committee, called for Cuomo to go. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand followed, joining a growing army of Democrats demanding the governor’s head, notably 59 state lawmakers who the day before signed a joint letter calling on him to “put the people of New York first”.We need to be unwavering in our values and hold on to those standards for anyone, no matter their political affiliationsSuch a large and growing rebellion has the potential to render Cuomo only the second New York governor to be impeached – the first was William Sulzer in 1913. It is not an idle threat. The judiciary committee of the state assembly has already opened an inquiry into the sexual harassment allegations that is the initial step towards impeachment.‘We need to be unwavering in our values’Jessica González-Rojas, a Democratic assembly member representing parts of Queens and one of the 59 calling for resignation, said she was now going further and pressing for impeachment. It didn’t matter that Cuomo was a leader from her own party, she said. What mattered was accountability.“We need to be unwavering in our values and hold on to those standards for anyone, no matter their political affiliations,” she said. “Enough is enough – we must stop being distracted by the misogynist behaviour and abuses of power of this governor.”González-Rojas said she saw a strong common threat connecting the scandals battering Cuomo. To her, they all flow from the same source: his abusive wielding of power and the toxic and cruel culture that has proliferated around him in Albany.“What we’re seeing here is a pattern of overarching behaviour that for years has been accepted by New Yorkers because they saw it as strength. But as we peel back its layers we can see it more clearly as deeply undemocratic and morally repugnant, and we are starting to hold him accountable.”For González-Rojas, Cuomo’s misogyny was evident even in the mantra he championed during the devastating early days of the pandemic when New York was at the core of the crisis: “New York tough”.“There are ways to lead,” she said, “that are about being compassionate, vulnerable, as opposed to the tough-guy image he puts forward.”That tough-guy image continues to prevail, remarkably so given the opprobrium Cuomo is facing. In his responses to his female accusers, he has belittled one woman as a “known antagonist” and accused others of peddling falsehoods. In the case of Boylan, questions are being asked about who leaked damaging details from her personnel file.On Friday, Cuomo maintained his pugnacious profile when he repeated his determination not to resign, insisting “I never harassed anyone, I never abused anyone, I never assaulted anyone, and I never would”. Throwing down the gauntlet to the growing band of Democrats turning on him, he cast their call for his resignation as an act of “cancel culture” and said: “I was not elected by politicians, I was elected by the people.”But his bombast belies the fact that his hold on power looks increasingly weak as he is whiplashed by so many crises. Paradoxically, the scandal that could prove to be most perilous legally is the one receiving least attention – the nursing homes furor.This is a defining moment for survivor justiceThat is where Cuomo’s unravelling began, with the revelation – admitted in part by his top aide Melissa DeRosa to state lawmakers – that the administration suppressed the number of nursing home deaths by several thousand in order to avoid a federal inquiry. DeRosa claimed the move was made to avoid Donald Trump tying them up in knots, but it sounded suspiciously like a cover-up.‘We have a duty to remove him’The nursing home crisis sparked a federal investigation that could haunt Cuomo for months or years. But it was not until the storm turned more personal, with details emerging of his bullying behavior, that his stumble turned into free-fall.It came in February from an unlikely party – the relatively unknown state lawmaker Kim, who told the New York Post that after he spoke out about nursing home deaths he received a call from Cuomo. According to Kim, the governor threatened him.“You have not seen my wrath … I can tell the whole world what a bad person you are and you will be finished. You will be destroyed,” he said, according to Kim. Cuomo denied the account.In an interview with NPR on Friday, Kim said the call was part of “a pattern of ‘[Cuomo] abusing his position of power”. The lawmaker added his voice to the calls for impeachment, saying: “We have a duty to remove him.”Kim’s action in going public opened the floodgates. Since then a host of politicians, employees and reporters have lined up to add their own strikingly similar stories about the toxic culture Cuomo has nurtured around him. Among those emboldened individuals was Lindsey Boylan – and in her wake the six other women who came forward with reports of inappropriate sexual conduct.The fate of the man lauded as recently as a year ago as “America’s governor” is rapidly taking on a significance greater than his own political future. Many see it as the next big test of the MeToo movement.“This is a defining moment for survivor justice,” said Shaunna Thomas, a co-founder of the progressive women’s group UltraViolet. “We need to send a very clear signal – that harassment and abuse in the workplace must have consequences, and that includes not being governor of New York state.” More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Cuomo faces most serious allegation yet as aide says governor groped her

      by

      An aide to Andrew Cuomo says the New York governor groped her in the governor’s residence, marking the most serious allegation among those made by a series of women against the embattled Democrat, according to a report published in a newspaper Wednesday.The Times Union of Albany reported that the woman, who was not identified, was alone with Cuomo when he closed the door, reached under her shirt and fondled her. The newspaper’s reporting is based on an unidentified source with direct knowledge of the woman’s accusation. The governor had summoned her to the Executive Mansion in Albany, saying he needed help with his cellphone, the newspaper reported.The three-term governor faces harassment allegations from five other women, including former aide Charlotte Bennett. The 25-year-old’s attorney, Debra Katz, said in a statement released Wednesday evening that the latest allegations are “eerily similar” to Bennett’s own story.Bennett has said she was summoned to the Capitol on a weekend and left alone with Cuomo, who asked her for help with his cellphone. She has said Cuomo asked about her sex life and propositioned her.“The governor’s sexual harassment, which Charlotte Bennett reported, was buried by his aides and never properly investigated,” Katz’s statement said. “Because of their enablement, another young woman was left in harm’s way.”The woman whose account was reported by the Times Union also indicated that Cuomo had touched her and made flirtatious comments on multiple occasions. According to the newspaper, her allegations came to light as Cuomo staffers watched the governor’s 3 March press conference, his first after initial sexual harassment claims made in late February.In it, he denied ever touching a woman inappropriately. The aide subsequently became emotional, and told a female supervisor who approached her about her encounters with the governor. At least one supervisor reported the allegation to an attorney in the governor’s office Monday, the newspaper reported.Prior to Wednesday’s report, the allegations against Cuomo include a combination of claims that he made the workplace uncomfortable for young women, ranging from flirtatious comments to a nonconsensual kiss.At least five accusers – Bennett, Lindsey Boylan, Anna Liss and Karen Hinton – worked for the governor in Albany or during his time in Bill Clinton’s cabinet. Another, Anna Ruch, told the New York Times that she met Cuomo at a friend’s wedding.The three-term governor has denied inappropriately touching anyone, but said he is sorry if he made anyone uncomfortable and didn’t intend to do so.“As I said yesterday, I have never done anything like this. The details of this report are gut-wrenching,” Cuomo said through a spokesperson Wednesday evening. “I am not going to speak to the specifics of this or any other allegation given the ongoing review, but I am confident in the result of the attorney general’s report.”The state attorney general, Letitia James, has put together an investigative team to probe Cuomo’s workplace conduct. The governor has called on lawmakers and the public to await the results of that investigation. Federal investigators are also scrutinizing how his administration handled data concerning Covid-19 outbreaks at nursing homes.Cuomo has repeatedly maintained he won’t resign.“How can we allow this man to lead our state? We must impeach,” Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a Democratic assembly member, tweeted Wednesday night.The Republican assembly member Mike Lawler on Twitter called Cuomo “a sexual predator” who should be charged.Both lawmakers had previously called for Cuomo’s impeachment. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Cuomo suffers major blow as top New York Democrats say governor must go

      by

      Andrew Cuomo suffered a major blow on Sunday in his attempt to stay as governor of New York in the face of allegations of sexual harassment and workplace bullying and a scandal over nursing home deaths under Covid. The majority leader of the senate and the speaker of the assembly, two of the most powerful Democrats in the state, said it was time for Cuomo to go.“We need to govern without daily distraction,” the majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said. “For the good of the state, Governor Cuomo must resign.”Assembly speaker Carl Heastie backed Cousins, calling the allegations “disturbing” and saying Cuomo should “seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York”.Five women have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment, accusations he denies. On Saturday the Washington Post published new claims of bullying. One former aide claiming Cuomo ran “a systemic, intentional, hostile, toxic workplace environment”.Other lawmakers have called for Cuomo to quit over allegations that his administration misled the public about coronavirus fatalities in nursing homes.Cuomo told reporters earlier on Sunday he would not resign because he was elected by people not politicians and the system depended on due process.The premise of resigning because of allegations is actually anti-democratic“I’m not going to resign because of allegations,” the governor said. “The premise of resigning because of allegations is actually anti-democratic.”Prominent national Democrats including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, who is from New York, and the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, expressed support for the women who allege harassment and for an investigation run by the state attorney general, Letitita James.But Cousins went further.“Every day there is another account that is drawing away from the business of government,” she said. “We have allegations about sexual harassment, a toxic work environment, the loss of credibility surrounding the Covid-19 nursing home data and questions about the construction of a major infrastructure project.“New York is still in the midst of this pandemic and is still facing the societal health and economic impacts of it. We need to govern without daily distraction for the good of the state, Governor Cuomo must resign.”Speaking to CNN, Whitmer, who has discussed her own experience of sexual assault, said she had “the same gut-wrenching reaction that a lot of women in America did” when she heard one of five women who say Cuomo sexually harassed them describe her alleged experiences.But like other senior Democrats, Whitmer stopped short of saying Cuomo should resign, despite comparisons to recent cases in which powerful men, among them the former Minnesota senator Al Franken, were swiftly forced to step down.“I think the allegations here are very serious,” she said, “and I do think that an impartial thorough independent investigation is merited and appropriate. And if [the allegations are] accurate and true, I think we have to take action.”Last year, Whitmer was one of many prominent Democrats to back Joe Biden when he denied an accusation, telling CNN: “Just because you’re a survivor doesn’t mean that every claim is equal. It means we give them the ability to make their case. And then to make a judgment that is informed.”This week, former Cuomo aide Charlotte Bennett told CBS how she says Cuomo behaved.“I thought, ‘He’s trying to sleep with me,’” she said. “‘The governor is trying to sleep with me and I’m deeply uncomfortable. And I have to get out of this room as soon as possible.’”Whitmer was asked how she felt while watching Bennett’s interview.“I think that there are a lot of American women who have felt how she felt,” she said. “And I think that’s something that resonates and why we need to take this seriously, and why there needs to be a full investigation, and whatever is appropriate in terms of accountability should follow.“I wouldn’t help anyone for me to prejudge where this is headed, but I had the same gut-wrenching reaction that I’m sure a lot of women in America did.”Lindsey Boylan, a former Cuomo adviser, has said the governor made inappropriate comments, kissed her on the lips and suggested a game of strip poker on a plane.Anna Ruch, who did not work for Cuomo, has described him putting his hands on her face and asking if he could kiss her when they met at a wedding.Ana Liss told the Wall Street Journal that when she was a policy aide, Cuomo called her “sweetheart”, kissed her hand and asked personal questions, including whether she had a boyfriend. She said he sometimes greeted her with a hug and kisses on both cheeks.Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, told the Journal: “Reporters and photographers have covered the governor for 14 years watching him kiss men and women and posing for pictures. At the public open-house mansion reception, there are hundreds of people, and he poses for hundreds of pictures. That’s what people in politics do.”The Washington Post, meanwhile, published a claim by Karen Hinton, a press aide to Cuomo when he was US housing secretary under Bill Clinton. She told the Post he “summoned her to his dimly lit hotel room and embraced her after a work event in 2000”.Peter Ajemian, Cuomo’s director of communications, told the paper: “This did not happen. Karen Hinton is a known antagonist of the governor’s who is attempting to take advantage of this moment to score cheap points with made-up allegations from 21 years ago.”Of the accusations of bullying, Ajemian said: “The governor is direct with employees if their work is sub-par because the people of New York deserve nothing short of excellence.”Earlier this week, Cuomo denied touching anyone inappropriately. But he also apologised for behaving in a way he said he now realised upset women.“I understand sensitivities have changed,” Cuomo said. “Behavior has changed. I get it and I’m going to learn from it.” More

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      'Set the standard': Cuomo allegations test Democrats' commitment to #MeToo

      by

      [embedded content]
      Flannery Amdahl’s memories of working for Andrew Cuomo are sharply at odds with the rock-star status the New York governor enjoyed last year.
      “People talked all the time about how he would yell and berate and belittle people,” says Amdahl, 37, who describes the governor’s office as the most toxic and abusive place she has ever worked.
      “His staff members copied that behaviour and so I felt like I was treated that way by my supervisor. I think it was rampant and well-known: everybody in Albany talks about how nasty the chamber is.”
      As Cuomo goes from hero to zero, such complaints are just the tip of the iceberg. He stands accused of covering up the number of coronavirus deaths in state nursing homes. Amdahl, a former labour policy adviser, believes he should resign for this alone. But it is the other scandal consuming the three-term governor that offers particularly treacherous ground for national Democrats.
      Four women have come forward to accuse Cuomo, 63, of sexual harassment. Charlotte Bennett, 25, a former aide, told CBS that during a one-on-one meeting last June, Cuomo’s questions led her to conclude that “the governor’s trying to sleep with me”.
      Another former aide, 35-year-old Ana Liss, made allegations on Saturday night, telling the Wall Street Journal Cuomo “asked her if she had a boyfriend, called her sweetheart, touched her on her lower back … and once kissed her hand when she rose from her desk”.
      Before Liss came forward, Cuomo apologised for comments that made any of the women uncomfortable while denying inappropriate touching. Although an independent investigation is under way, he is facing calls to resign from the congresswomen Kathleen Rice, a Democrat, and Elise Stefanik, a Republican, as well as Democratic state officials.
      But no other national Democrats have joined the chorus. The Axios website branded it the party’s “hypocrisy moment”, arguing: “Governor Andrew Cuomo should be facing explicit calls to resign from President Biden on down, if you apply the standard that Democrats set for similar allegations against Republicans. And it’s not a close call.”
      The charge of double standards points to a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep pace with shifting public attitudes towards gender roles, power dynamics and sexual boundaries.
      Its hierarchy defendedBill Clinton over his inappropriate relationship with the young intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s. But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men accountable, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator who holds Hillary Clinton’s former seat in New York, argued that the former president should have resigned over the affair. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      The New York attorney general holding Trump and Cuomo accountable

      by

      The two men were born a decade apart in Queens, New York, one the heir to a real estate fortune and the other to a political dynasty. Donald Trump went on to be president, and Andrew Cuomo became governor, like his father.Over the course of their long and controversial careers, both men have seemed untouchable. But thanks to the recent work of one lifelong public servant, who was born into a big family in Brooklyn without legacy money or power, each man is suddenly facing a moment of unaccustomed accountability.The state attorney general, Letitia James, the first woman of color ever to hold statewide elected office in New York, blasted a hole in the fable of Cuomo’s pandemic leadership with a report in January showing the state was under-reporting deaths in nursing homes by as much as half.A quick succession of sexual harassment claims against Cuomo in the ensuing weeks has knocked him from his political perch and left open the question of whether he will withdraw his 2022 re-election bid – or even resign before his current third term ends.Trump might be in even greater peril. Since 2019, James’s office has been conducting an investigation of business practices inside the Trump Organization and family. Trump has fought fiercely in court, but month after month, James has succeeded in unearthing financial records that appear to be adding up to a giant legal hazard for the former president, analysts say.“He should be very concerned,” said George Albro, co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network who has known James going back to when he was a union officer in New York City and she was a public defender. “She’s going to take this to its logical conclusion.”The Trump case and the Cuomo nursing home scandal have generated a torrent of national attention for James, with people outside New York politics wondering how a single state officer could make such big legal waves.People who know her from her time as public advocate in New York City – when she was the first woman of color to be elected citywide – and her time as a city council member before that nod in recognition: that’s Tish.As state attorney general, James has aggressively pursued a full catalogue of progressive causes.She sued the police department over brutality against people of color, blocked unlawful evictions during the pandemic, won a major sexual harassment settlement for women in the construction industry, filed an amicus brief before the supreme court opposing a rushed census, and sued to dissolve the National Rifle Association.She also sued Amazon for allegedly failing to protect workers, sued Facebook as an alleged monopoly and investigated Google on similar grounds. She has asked federal regulators to clamp down on toxins in baby food and called for student debt relief.I see the law both as a shield and as a sword“I see the law both as a shield and as a sword,” she said in a public discussion last year about Black leadership. “And so I wake up every day with a fire in my belly, and I march into the office – well, I actually march into my kitchen – and the question is, what can I do today to make a difference in the life of somebody? Who can I sue?”James has acknowledged past critics who thought that she filed too many lawsuits without making enough stick. But she argues that “the law should be a tool for social change” – and with the pressure she has exerted on Trump causing visible stress among family members, the impact of her efforts is plain and the public mood is enthusiastically with her.That kind of momentum has led to speculation about what might be next for the political pioneer with impeccable grassroots credentials who maintains a huge store of goodwill in New York City as well as a disarming, down-to-earth approach on and off the campaign trail.“Everyone still calls me Tish,” she told Melva M Miller, chief executive officer of the census watchdog Association for a Better New York, in a public forum last year. “I still have to do my laundry later – I’m still Tish. I have to go to the grocery store – I’m still Tish.”James, 62, one of eight children, went to Brooklyn public school, graduated from the City University of New York’s Lehmann college and earned a law degree at Howard University, the historically Black university in Washington DC.Her earliest memory of the legal system, she has said, was seeing a court officer verbally abuse her mother at a hearing for a brother.“When I looked around the courtroom, all the defendants and all the family members looked like me, but everyone in a position of power did not, and there was something really unbalanced about that and unfair about that,” James told Miller.Before her election to the New York city council in 2003, James worked as a public defender, as counsel to the speaker of the state assembly and as an assistant attorney general for Brooklyn, where she targeted predatory lenders, advocated for working families and brought the first case against the New York City police department for so-called stop-and-frisk abuses.She lost a primary race to join the city council, but was able to resume her bid when the incumbent was shot and killed inside city hall. In her 10 years on the council, she emerged as an advocate for police reform and for better public housing.She also showed a fearlessness about taking on powerful political figures, helping to lead the charge against an effort by the then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to change city rules and seize a third term in power (a fight Bloomberg won).She told us that she would be independent of the governor and I think she’s proven thatSome political allies wondered, however, whether James’s posture of antagonism towards the powerful would apply to Cuomo, who cleared the path for her political future by endorsing her to be attorney general.As a candidate under Cuomo’s protection, James insisted she was “unbossed and unbought” by the governor. The results of her bombshell investigation of how the Cuomo administration failed to report Covid-19 nursing home deaths shows she meant those words, said Albro.“She told us that she would be independent of the governor and I think she’s proven that,” he said.Her battle against Trump has the potential to elevate James’s profile – and prospects – even further, encouraging open speculation about whether she might even succeed the governor whose alleged misconduct she helped expose. Before he was elected governor, Cuomo was state attorney general – the very job James now holds.“I think she wants to be governor, I think that’s clear, and she’d be a formidable candidate,” said Albro.“I think she’d be a formidable candidate because she is very well liked and known in the city and that’s a big chunk of the vote.” More

    • 213 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Andrew Cuomo was never a hero. Karma is coming for him, with a vengeance | Ross Barkan

      by

      For so long, television was good to Andrew Cuomo.The most famous governor in America charmed millions of viewers with his televised briefings in the earliest months of the coronavirus pandemic, reciting bare facts from his homely PowerPoints. Journalists, pundits and cable television hosts swooned – he was primetime material, the winner of an actual Emmy award, the Queens-bred foil to the frothing Queens native in the White House.In this narrative, Cuomo was every bit the heroic protagonist – his myth only becoming more inflated as tens of thousands died of coronavirus in his own state, the mass carnage a result, in part, of his poor decision-making. The mythic Cuomo never made sense to those who had covered the pandemic closely and investigated the shadowy workings of the government he controlled, but that didn’t seem to matter. The biggest media companies in America had their plot lines to write; inconvenient facts, like immunity shields and hidden nursing home death counts and early comparisons to the flu, were left on the cutting-room floor.Now Cuomo returns to the center of the media universe. This time, he has been accused of sexual harassment by three different women. This time, he is facing an FBI investigation into how he handled the state’s nursing homes, where the true coronavirus death toll was allegedly intentionally masked for months. This time, a state legislator who went public with unhinged threats Cuomo made against him can become famous himself.Cuomo is on the front page of every New York City newspaper, a headliner of the nightly newscasts, and a constant subject of debate and intrigue on CNN and MSNBC. Corporate media abhors a vacuum. If Donald Trump was still president of the United States, Cuomo could count on the idiocy and scandal in the White House to distract from whatever came out of New York.That’s how he became a star in the first place. Trump’s federal response to the pandemic was so plainly inept and horrendous, any questions about failure on the local level could always be deflected, especially by eager, Cuomo-worshiping Democrats. One salacious, incendiary or perplexing Trump tweet could seize a headline and give cover to all of those, like Cuomo, who were failing out of view.Those days are long gone. Joe Biden, a conventional Democrat, is president now. He does not like to tweet. He does not feud with the media, celebrities, Democrats or even most Republicans. He has his own serious shortcomings, but they are not the stuff that the de facto showrunners at cable TV stations are hunting for. Media executives like Jeff Zucker saw a great story in Trump – they admitted as much themselves – and carried his early campaign rallies on live television, an unprecedented decision that helped pave the way for his ascent in 2016.The Cuomo scandals are perfect for cable TV because they are both legitimate and compellingNow what? CPAC excluded, Trump has left the stage, his Twitter account deleted, his rantings confined to occasional Fox appearances. The major media companies need new scandal to occupy their viewers, to seize their imaginations and keep them coming back for more.Cuomo is dying by the sword he once lived by. The Cuomo scandals are perfect for cable TV because they are both legitimate and compelling. There is a natural narrative arc, a rising and falling action; these media companies helped create a myth, and now they will tear it down. The myth, in any sane world, would never have existed in the first place. But that’s where we are.Many politicians in New York are now calling for Cuomo to resign. Once so commanding, the governor now hides, refusing to appear on TV or talk to the press. His schedule is emptied out. He is hoping this all blows over.But that’s not quite how the modern media work. If there is a void to fill, it will be filled, and the distractions of Trump are no longer there to bail Cuomo out. Sexual harassment allegations can drive news cycles for weeks. Given Cuomo’s behavioral history, there could very well be more to come.This is the fate a television character as abhorrent as Cuomo deserves. He is huddled somewhere in Albany, pining for a comeback arc. But cancellation is just as likely.Ross Barkan is a writer based in New York City and the author of the forthcoming book The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York More