Because Donald Trump was no longer in office, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell persuaded his Republican conference in the Senate to acquit him of the high crimes and misdemeanors arising out of the events of Jan. 6.
In sharp contrast, not a Democratic voice is to be heard in support of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, elected in 2018 by 59% of the 6 million New Yorkers voting for governor. Cuomo resigned rather than face impeachment on charges of sexual harassment and other more venial sins, but the state Assembly Judiciary Committee just won’t let go. They want to issue a report of their own. In a letter to the Committee dated October 8, Cuomo asks them to withhold judgment so he can get the evidence he needs to make his case.
Unlike Trump, who had the support of members of his own party even though they knew he was wrong,the Democrats in Albany don’t like Cuomo because he doesn’t play ball. “He’s not a nice person and he doesn’t have any real friends,” says former Democratic Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch. Democrats invariably eat their young. Just ask Al Franken.
How quickly they forget what Cuomo’s bullying nature accomplished. He succeeded in pushing through the Second Ave. subway and the renovation of LaGuardia Airport. He displayed calm and steady leadership of New York through the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, he had a record 77% favorability rating. He was even talked about as the Democratic nominee for president in 2024.
There are other less serious and more tenuous charges against Cuomo, but let’s face it, Cuomo has been hounded out of office like his predecessor Eliot Spitzer, for the crime of sexual misbehavior. For this, he must be kicked in what Attorney General Letitia James, herself a probable candidate for governor in 2022, called in her Aug. 3, 2021, report on Cuomo the “privates.” James herself is reportedly weighing a run for governor now that Cuomo is out of office.
Cuomo was the target of a smear campaign authored by two supposedly independent lawyers working for James. The report concluded that Cuomo “sexually harassed 11 women.” But sexual harassment is defined in state law as workplace discrimination for employees subjecting “an individual to inferior terms, conditions or privileges of employment.” “Petty slights or trivial inconveniences” don’t count. Yet of those “victims” named in the Joon Kim-Anne Clark report, two did not work for the State of New York at the time of the alleged misconduct, and the four others, even if their allegations are true, only experienced minor forms of harassment too trivial to make out a violation.
Also seriously, Cuomo has never been given an opportunity to confront his accusers and probe this area on cross-examination. He has never been given full access to the hundreds of interview transcripts on which many of the report’s conclusions are based.
No wonder Cuomo, through his attorney, is now asking James to correct her report because of material omissions and errors that render the report “flawed, unreliable and misleading.”
In denouncing Cuomo, James appears tainted with the appearance of bias and impropriety. Cuomo’s March 1, 2021 referral letter to her under Executive Law 63(8) requested that she “select an independent law firm to conduct an inquiry” into “sexual harassment claims against the governor.” Some independent investigation! Cuomo contends that James herself admitted to interviewing witnesses, and made findings of credibility.
Meantime, in this “he-said, she-said” tale, Cuomo claims that the testimony of two key witnesses has “evolved” over time, meaning that their testimony is riddled with inconsistencies. According to Brittany Commisso, Cuomo rubbed her butt for five seconds, and more seriously pushed her up against the wall in his Governor’s Mansion office, groped her breast and then kissed her. But the woman never mentioned to her colleagues the hand on the butt incident during the course of four conversations with them about his allegedly inappropriate behavior. As for the grope, the story is materially inconsistent with what she told James’ investigators in her initial interview, and what she later told the Albany Times Union in an interview published April 7.
Another complainant, Lindsey Boylan, relied on heavily in the James report, purportedly told then-counsel to the governor Alphonso David in January 2018 “that she had not been subject to sex discrimination, harassment or retaliation” But in December 2020 she alleged that Cuomo had “sexually harassed me for years.”
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, and Assembly Judiciary Committee Chair Charles D. Lavine, another Democrat from Long Island announced after Cuomo agreed to resign last August that they would no longer seek to impeach him, but would write up their findings in a separate report. How many Democrats does it take to beat a dead horse? As Alice said in wonderland, it gets “curiouser and curiouser.”
Zirin is a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.
