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    Andrew Cuomo is gone. But his lawless legacy will live on | David Sirota

    OpinionAndrew CuomoAndrew Cuomo is gone. But his lawless legacy will live onDavid SirotaHad Cuomo not been a sex pest, he would have gotten away with hiding thousands of deaths in nursing homes to protect his donors Wed 11 Aug 2021 06.26 EDTLast modified on Wed 11 Aug 2021 15.56 EDTThe amazing thing about Andrew Cuomo’s announcement that he is stepping down as governor of New York is not that he left office; it is that it took this long for him to resign. And among the most troubling parts of the saga is how many crimes he and New York politicians normalized in the process – because so many of these officials were complicit, too.Cuomo resigned in the wake of Attorney General Tish James’s report detailing his sexual crimes. But here’s the truth that’s hard to say aloud: if the New York governor had not been a sex pest, he likely would have gotten away with hiding thousands of people’s deaths in nursing homes and shielding his healthcare industry donors from any liability – all while profiting off a $5m book deal and being venerated by liberals and corporate media outlets as a shining star.In fact, unless things suddenly change, he will get away with those crimes. With US attorneys so far declining to prosecute Cuomo on those matters – and with New York’s legislature refusing to begin impeachment proceedings on those issues – the federal and state political systems made sure these crimes weren’t considered transgressions at all. Same goes for many New York Democratic voters – a new poll shows that even now, a plurality of them say they approve of the way Cuomo has done his job.To be sure, Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim’s nursing home crusade, and his allegations that Cuomo tried to bully him into silence, created a singular political earthquake that shook the New York political system and media into finally scrutinizing the gubernatorial monster that had long been rampaging through Albany. But the refusal to prosecute or impeach Cuomo over that epic scandal has further normalized that kind of unethical behavior.Indeed, presiding over the mass death of elderly people and shielding the perpetrators all to ingratiate oneself with political financiers is now just regular politics. That’s now what politicians are allowed – and even expected – to do, everywhere. While President Biden’s former top aide lobbies the White House on behalf of the nursing home industry, the Biden justice department recently said it will not open an investigation into nursing home negligence and Covid-related deaths in New York and other states. Case closed.The nursing home scandal is just one of many examples of Cuomo lawlessness that should have elicited a law enforcement response – but didn’t. The Albany Times Union details eight other scandals that Cuomo presided over. And those don’t include other questionable dealings, like reportedly giving his book publisher special tax breaks and funneling bond deals to his donors.On Tuesday, the New Yorker reported that Cuomo tried to strong-arm the Obama White House in 2014, to get the justice department to stop probing his decision to shut down an anti-corruption panel. Obama officials said nothing publicly about this for years, and decided only to speak their piece when Cuomo was unpopular and disempowered, so they would be safe from any blowback from MSNBC watchers and #TeamBlue enforcers.Up until the last few months, media outlets, Democratic politicians, and Democratic voters averted their eyes from Cuomo’s crime spree, instead seeing him as an idol to be worshiped, endorsed and supported as the great Cuomosexual future of the party.In light of his rampage, Cuomo leaving office only because of his grotesque sexual aggressions is not enough. Not even close. It’s good thing and the downfall is well-deserved – especially when sexual harassment, assault, and abuse are so pervasive and perpetrators are rarely punished. But the Cuomo misdeeds that remain unpunished also send a message about what we continue to tolerate – and that tolerance isn’t passive or accidental. It is deliberate.Punishing Cuomo for his deadly dealings with nursing home and health care donors would scandalize similarly unethical ties between these corporate interests and other politicians. For example: the health care lobby group that donated to Cuomo and drafted his nursing home immunity bill also funneled large sums of cash to New York Democratic legislators who passed that bill. And once that immunity bill was signed into law, Republican politicians then copied and pasted the language into their own state and federal bills, while raking in cash from health care interests.Prosecuting or impeaching a governor over such unethical behavior could threaten this entire system of legalized bribery, which politicians of both parties benefit from. And so even as brave Democratic legislators such as Kim and state Senator Alessandra Biaggi tried to blow the whistle, that system effectively granted Cuomo the same immunity he gave to his nursing home industry donors, while thousands of elderly people perished. Impeachment and resignation only entered the discourse in response to his grotesque interpersonal behavior – in part because that could be portrayed as merely a problem of one bad apple in the barrel.The trouble is, we also have a barrel problem.We live in an era of politicians screaming “law and order”, while they champion corporate immunity, authorize ethics waivers, and oversee law enforcement machines that have reduced prosecutions of political corruption and white collar crime.This is a bipartisan affair – at the federal level, there’s a continuous theme from George W Bush loading up his administration with corporate cronies, to Barack Obama refusing to prosecute a single banker involved in the financial crisis, to Donald Trump’s lawless rampage through Washington. On the I-95 corridor, it’s been the same bipartisan phenomenon in miniature – corruption scandals in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts are the blue and red corners of the same quilt of corruption.This quilt is now over our head, suffocating our country – and Cuomo’s departure leaves its links intact. It’s great that Cuomo is leaving, but make no mistake: his legacy of lawlessness lives on, arguably stronger than ever – and it will continue to do so until voters start demanding something different.
    David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
    This article was originally published in the Daily Poster, a grassroots-funded investigative news outlet
    TopicsAndrew CuomoOpinionUS politicsNew YorkSexual harassmentcommentReuse this content More

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    Aide who accused Cuomo of groping says: ‘What he did to me was a crime’

    Andrew CuomoAide who accused Cuomo of groping says: ‘What he did to me was a crime’Brittany Commisso, a former aide, identified herself publicly and is one of 11 women who have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment Edward HelmoreSun 8 Aug 2021 14.46 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 17.35 EDTA former executive assistant who filed a criminal complaint against New York governor Andrew Cuomo last week for allegedly groping her has said he “needs to be held accountable”.Brittany Commisso is one of 11 women Cuomo is accused of sexually harassing, according to a devastating investigative report released by the state attorney general’s office last week.Sheriff hails courage of woman accusing Andrew Cuomo of sexual misconductRead moreThe former aide identified herself publicly in an interview with CBS which is set to be broadcast in full on Monday morning.“What he did to me was a crime. He broke the law,” Commisso said in an excerpt released ahead of its broadcast. Coming forward, she said, was “the right thing to do. The governor needs to be held accountable.”Commisso, identified only as “executive assistant no.1” in the report, told state investigators that Cuomo fondled her breast on one occasion. She also said he rubbed her backside while taking a photo. She has said the alleged incident took place at the governor’s mansion in Albany.Albany county sheriff Craig Apple told reporters on Saturday that Cuomo could face a possible misdemeanor charge. Apple said the investigation is in its “infant stages” and the complaint made against Cuomo is “criminal in nature” and the alleged conduct was “sexual in nature”.When asked what possible charge the governor could face, the sheriff said: “From what I’ve read so far I can say we’re floating around a misdemeanor, but again, that’s just from the attorney general report.”Cuomo, facing impeachment and removal from office by state lawmakers, has denied the allegations and resisted widespread calls for his resignation, including from fellow Democrats, including Joe Biden.His lawyer, Rita Glavin, has described Commisso’s account as fabricated, citing emails and other documentary evidence she said undermines her story. “There has been no open minded fact-finding … the investigators acted as prosecutors, judge and jury,” Glavin said. TopicsAndrew CuomoSexual harassmentUS politicsNew YorknewsReuse this content More

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    Biden Says Cuomo 'Should Resign' Amid Sexual Harassment Findings

    Investigators said they corroborated the claims of 11 women who accused Mr. Cuomo of inappropriate behavior, from suggestive comments to instances of groping.Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women, including current and former government workers, whose accounts of unwanted touching and inappropriate comments were corroborated in a damning report released on Tuesday by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James.The 165-page report prompted multiple calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, including from President Biden, a longtime ally of the governor, and it cast doubt on Mr. Cuomo’s political future. The Democratic speaker of the State Assembly said on Tuesday that he intended to quicken the pace of a separate impeachment inquiry, adding that Mr. Cuomo “can no longer remain in office.”The report, the culmination of a five-month investigation, included at least three previously unreported allegations of sexual harassment from women who accused Mr. Cuomo of improperly touching them, including a state trooper assigned to the governor’s security detail. It also highlighted far-reaching efforts by the governor, his staff and close associates to disparage and retaliate against one woman who made her allegations public.All told, the investigators said they corroborated the claims of 11 women, nine of whom are current or former state employees, who accused Mr. Cuomo of a range of inappropriate behavior, from suggestive comments to instances of groping, through interviews with 179 witnesses and tens of thousands of documents.The report described in stunning detail how Mr. Cuomo’s behavior and actions by his top officials violated both state and federal law, offering a look at the inner workings of the governor’s office and how it failed to properly handle some of the women’s allegations. It also shed a light on a sprawling network of associates, including former aides and close allies, enlisted by Mr. Cuomo and his staff to aggressively fight the allegations on behalf of the governor.Investigators said that Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, and his aides fostered a toxic work culture that was rife with fear and intimidation, and helped enable “harassment to occur and created a hostile work environment.”“The independent investigation found that Governor Cuomo harassed multiple women, many of whom were young women, by engaging in unwanted groping, kisses, hugging, and by making inappropriate comments,” Ms. James, a Democrat, said during a news conference in Manhattan, adding, “I believe these women.”Mr. Cuomo responded to the findings in a 14-minute prerecorded statement delivered from Albany. In a sweeping, slightly disjointed soliloquy, the governor denied most of the report’s serious findings, reiterating his contention that he had never touched anyone inappropriately. He suggested the report was politically motivated and declared that “the facts are much different from what has been portrayed.”Mr. Cuomo denied any wrongdoing following the release of a report by the state’s attorney general into allegations of sexual harassment against him. Office of the New York Governor“I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances,” he said. “I am 63 years old. I have lived my entire adult life in public view. That is just not who I am, and that’s not who I have ever been.”In defending his behavior, Mr. Cuomo mentioned that one of his relatives was sexually assaulted in high school and suggested it was sexist to accuse his female supervisors of creating a hostile workplace. His speech was even interlaced with a slide show of photographs of him kissing public officials on the cheek, gestures he said were “meant to convey warmth, nothing more.”The political fallout from the report was swift: It prompted Mr. Biden, a longtime friend of the governor, to call on Mr. Cuomo to resign on Tuesday, months after stopping short of asking the governor to step down because the investigation was ongoing.“What I said was if the investigation by the attorney general concluded that the allegations were correct, back in March, I would recommend he resign,” said Mr. Biden, who had not spoken with Mr. Cuomo. “That is what I’m doing today.”“I think he should resign,” the president said.Representative Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, joined the existing and ever-growing chorus of calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, as did three House Democrats from New York who originally said they wanted to wait on the report before weighing in on Mr. Cuomo’s fate.Even Mr. Cuomo’s fellow Democratic governors in nearby Northeastern states joined the chorus. In a joint statement, the governors of Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey said that they were appalled at the investigation’s findings and that Mr. Cuomo should step down.The contents of the report, and the subsequent backlash, would seem to limit Mr. Cuomo’s political future, and serve as a serious obstacle to being re-elected to a fourth term — once regarded as a near certainty for a governor previously hailed a national leader during the coronavirus pandemic.The Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which could impeach Mr. Cuomo with a simple majority vote, has been conducting a broad impeachment investigation into the governor, examining a series of scandals with a common theme:whether or not Mr. Cuomo abused his power while in office.Democrats in the Assembly held a closed-door emergency meeting on Tuesday to discuss whether to draft articles of impeachment based solely on the findings of the attorney general report, a move that appeared to have support among many of the 50 or 60 lawmakers who spoke, according to four people with knowledge of the meeting.After the meeting, Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, said his chamber would “move expeditiously and look to conclude our impeachment investigation as quickly as possible.” It could take a month to complete the existing inquiry and draw up the articles of impeachment, according to a person familiar with the process.A trial in the State Senate could commence as soon as September or early October, the person said. If Mr. Cuomo were to resign or be removed from office, Kathleen C. Hochul, the state’s lieutenant governor, would succeed him, making her the first woman to become governor in the state’s history.On Tuesday, Ms. Hochul said she believed the governor’s accusers, describing Mr. Cuomo’s documented behavior as “repulsive and unlawful.” She said that it was up to the Assembly to determine the next steps, adding that “it would not be appropriate to comment further on the process at this moment” because she is next in the line of succession.The attorney general’s investigation was spearheaded by two outside lawyers: Joon H. Kim, a former federal prosecutor who once served as acting U.S. attorney of Manhattan, and Anne L. Clark, a well-known employment lawyer.On Tuesday, Mr. Kim said their investigation revealed a pattern of troubling behavior from Mr. Cuomo and found that the culture within the executive chamber “contributed to conditions that allowed the governor’s sexually harassing conduct to occur and to persist.”“It was a culture where you could not say no to the governor, and if you upset him, or his senior staff, you would be written off, cast aside or worse,” Mr. Kim said. “But at the same time, the witnesses described a culture that normalized and overlooked everyday flirtations, physical intimacy and inappropriate comments by the governor.”Ms. Clark said that the governor’s conduct detailed in the report “clearly meets, and far exceeds” the legal standard used to determine gender-based harassment in the workplace.“Women also described to us having the governor seek them out, stare intently at them, look them up and down or gaze at their chest or butt,” she said. “The governor routinely interacted with women in ways that focused on their gender, sometimes in explicitly sexualized manner in ways that women found deeply humiliating and offensive.”Understand the Scandals Challenging Gov. Cuomo’s LeadershipCard 1 of 5Multiple claims of sexual harassment. More

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    An Accusation Blew Up a Campaign. The Media Didn’t Know What to Do.

    Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More