Cuomo Has Lost Control of His Self-Investigation Theater

New York’s shrewd attorney general is frustrating the embattled governor’s efforts to once again steer a misconduct probe.

D on’t for a moment buy New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s act. We’ve seen this one before.

Knowing he was certain to be subjected to an investigation into recent sexual-harassment allegations against him by, now, three women (and counting), the governor tried to put the best spin on it by appearing publicly to demand that investigation. Behind the scenes though, he was trying to orchestrate an investigation that he could influence.

Cuomo knows how badly an actual independent investigation could go because he’s already had one blow up on him. The last time he tried to orchestrate an “independent” state-corruption investigation, he so botched it that an actually independent federal criminal probe ensued. When the dust settled, Cuomo barely managed to escape indictment, but top figures in his administration were convicted on corruption charges.

This time around, Cuomo is in more trouble. He tried to contest the state’s ambitious attorney general, Letitia James, for control of the now-inevitable investigation into his allegedly predatory behavior. After making a couple of desperate proposals this weekend, though, he caved. Politically and legally, he had no choice.

Let’s review the state of play.

In December, a former Cuomo staffer named Lindsey Boylan came forward on Twitter, alleging that Cuomo had subjected her to lewd commentary, and worse, when she worked for him between 2016 and 2018. Boylan is a progressive Democrat with hopes to become Manhattan Borough president. On February 24, she published an article on Medium elaborating on her harassment claims. Though it was no secret that Boylan was married (and then in her early thirties — she’s now 36), she claims that Cuomo subjected her to sexually suggestive advances, inappropriate touching (lower back, arms, and legs), a proposition that they play strip poker, and an unsolicited, unwelcome kiss on the lips, said to have been initiated by Cuomo when they were alone in his Manhattan office.

Boylan claimed that Cuomo’s proclivities were well-known, and that his closest aides reinforced an atmosphere of intimidation in the administration. She says she decided to publish her revelations after another Cuomo staffer, whom she did not identify, contacted her and confided that she’d been subjected to similarly degrading treatment. Boylan’s account of her own experiences with the governor included a late 2016 email in which his office director, Stephanie Benton, passed Boylan a message from Cuomo suggesting that she “look up Lisa Shields” — whom, Boylan recounts, is rumored to be a former girlfriend of Cuomo’s. “You could be sisters,” the governor’s message read, “Except you’re the better looking sister.” Boylan recalled that, thereafter, Cuomo took to calling her “Lisa” at meetings. (Benton denies that the email was meant to be message from Cuomo, claiming in a statement released last week that it was her own attempt at banter.)

Over this past weekend, a second former Cuomo aide came forward. Charlotte Bennett, a former executive assistant, who is nearly 40 years younger than the 63-year-old governor, told the New York Times that Cuomo had asked her about her sex life. His remarks probed whether Ms. Bennett was monogamous when in sexual relationships, and whether she had sex with older men. On that topic, Cuomo allegedly observed that he was open to relationships with women in their 20s. In the conversation, which she said happened in his Albany office last spring, Cuomo lamented that, due to the pandemic, he “can’t even hug anyone,” and tried to get her to discuss whom she liked to hug.

Disturbed, Bennett complained about the incident a few days later to Cuomo’s chief of staff, Jill DeRosiers. Bennett was swiftly reassigned to a different job as a health-policy adviser, with an office on the other side of the State Capitol complex, remote from Cuomo’s office. She liked the new job and did not wish to press the matter further, though she did give a statement to Judith Mogul, a special counsel to the governor. Bennett reports that Cuomo did not attempt any physical contact with her.

Then Monday, a new allegation from a third woman, Anna Ruch, a 33-year-old who is active in Democratic Party politics (she worked in the Obama administration and on the 2020 Biden campaign), but has never worked for the governor. In fact, the Times reports, she did not even know Cuomo when she encountered him at a wedding they both attended in September 2019. After some pleasantries, she said Cuomo put his hand on her bare back. When she pulled his hand away, he grabbed her by the cheeks, asked if he could kiss her, and leaned in to try, as she pulled away. Things ended there, she indicates. The Times report included a photograph of the encounter, and added that there are relevant witnesses and contemporaneous text messages.

The latest revelations come on the heels of reports that Cuomo extorted Assemblyman Ron Kim, a progressive Queens Democrat who has been highly critical of the Cuomo administration’s misleading of the state legislature in drastically undercounting COVID-19 nursing-home deaths. The undercounting had been acknowledged to Kim and other lawmakers by Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa.

Cuomo, according to Kim, called and threatened to “destroy” him if Kim refused to draft a statement claiming that DeRosa had merely told lawmakers that the administration first had to deal with a federal investigation before providing information to state lawmakers. (In reality, DeRosa reportedly apologized to lawmakers for misleading them because the administration was worried about what the Justice Department would do if the true nursing-home death numbers were revealed.) Kim says an angry Cuomo warned him, “You have not seen my wrath,” and that Kim would be “finished” if Cuomo publicly portrayed him as a “bad person.”

With the walls already closing in, the new sexual-harassment allegations left no room for doubt that Cuomo would face an investigation. Realizing this, he tried to get ahead of it in two ways.

First, after long giving the back of the hand to Boylan’s claims against him, Cuomo offered a self-serving half-apology after Bennett’s revelations: “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that.” In essence, he’d have you believe he’s just one of those funny but overworked guys who occasionally tries to break the tension by teasing and joking with the people who work for him — but he had no idea they’d take him seriously or feel in any way pressured by him, so he’s really, really sorry that their hypersensitivity led them to misunderstand him. He remains adamant, however, that he never got physical with staffers — i.e., Boylan is lying . . . though Ruch’s new claims will complicate the Cuomo camp’s Clintonesque campaign to destroy Boylan’s credibility.

Second, Cuomo wanted to be seen as asking for an independent investigation of the allegations against him. In reality, he was trying to steer the probe so that it would be run by investigators he hoped would be sympathetic to him.

In this regard, the governor’s insurmountable problem turned out to be New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. She is a darling of the state’s ascendant hard Left, and she, it is widely believed, would like to have Cuomo’s job — at least for now, Cuomo is planning to seek a fourth term in 2022. It was James who, in February, released the report confirming that the governor’s administration had significantly underreported COVID nursing-home deaths (following Cuomo’s March 2020 executive order, rescinded two months later, that forced nursing homes to take COVID patients).

By Monday, James had forced Cuomo to buckle and accept an independent investigation that may actually be, you know, independent.

After Bennett’s allegations became public, Cuomo initially floated the possibility of asking former federal judge Barbara Jones to conduct the probe. For what it’s worth, I think very highly of Judge Jones. She is deservedly well-regarded by Democrats and Republicans, and she ran the Organized Crime Unit in the Southern District of New York when I was a young prosecutor there in the ’80s. Still, while she has conducted many credible investigations of the sort we’re talking about, there was no way anyone Cuomo proposed was going to get the gig — as we’ll see, James had the power to prevent it. In addition, Jones formerly had business ties to a top Cuomo aide, Steve Cohen, so the suggestion that she be appointed never got off the ground.

Cuomo’s next gambit was a proposal to have the independent investigator chosen jointly by James and the state’s top judicial officer, Janet DiFiore. It was Cuomo who, in 2015, appointed DiFiore — who was then the Westchester County district attorney — to be chief judge of the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest judicial tribunal.

James quickly sank Cuomo’s trial balloon. She figured, correctly, that she did not need to negotiate with the governor because state law vests her alone with the decision of whom to appoint to conduct an independent investigation.

The controlling provision, State Executive Law § 63(8), exclusively gives the state attorney general discretion to conduct an inquiry “into matters concerning the public peace, public safety and public justice,” including appointing investigators recruited from outside the government. The statute empowers the governor to ask for such an investigation but not to control how or by whom it is conducted.

Cuomo was obviously trying to leverage his power to approve the investigation into a license to wield influence over it. At this point, however, James realized that Cuomo would not dare refuse to approve an investigation — not with multiple complainants coming forward, three federal investigations of the nursing-home scandal underway, the Democrat-controlled state legislature deliberating over whether Cuomo’s emergency pandemic powers should be rescinded and even whether he should be impeached, and influential national Democrats from President Biden to House speaker Nancy Pelosi to Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer now abandoning their initial reluctance to express concerns about Cuomo’s conduct.

The governor’s deceptive posturing is nothing new. In 2013, in his third year in office (after four years as attorney general), Cuomo tried to get out in front of the state’s reputation for rampant political self-dealing by establishing the Moreland Commission. But this high-profile anti-corruption panel quickly found that the governor’s administration was itself a wellspring of corruption. After unsuccessfully trying to steer the commission away from his office, Cuomo abruptly shut the panel down in 2014. The result of this bully-in-a-china-shop routine was a wide-ranging federal investigation. While the governor managed to evade prosecution, his top aide and longtime confidant, Joseph Percoco, was convicted on multiple felony counts, largely based on the accomplice-witness testimony of Todd Howe, another longtime Cuomo insider who had pled guilty to several felony charges based on influence-peddling.

Back then, the Left had not turned on Cuomo. Now, its long knives are out.