Cuomo’s Hot Water Gets Hotter

T his is shaping up as another bad week for New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

On Monday, the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, appointed two well-regarded lawyers to investigate Cuomo’s sexual-harassment scandal. By then, as NR’s Brittany Bernstein reported on Sunday, two more women had come forward to allege abusive behavior by the governor, bringing the total to five. The lawyers are deeply experienced, one in criminal investigations, the other in harassment litigation.

Joon Kim is the criminal-law expert. He was a top assistant to Preet Bharara, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, when the SDNY conducted an extensive corruption investigation of Cuomo’s administration. Kim, who became acting U.S. attorney for ten months when then-President Donald Trump removed Bharara in 2017, was involved in the eventual prosecution and 2018 conviction of Cuomo’s top aide, Joseph Percoco, on several felony charges. Though his administration was deeply implicated in the probe, which centered on Cuomo’s shutting down of an anti-corruption commission he had established with great fanfare, the governor himself was not charged in the case.

The harassment-law expert is Anne Clarke. She is a partner at a New York City firm, where she specializes in employment litigation. The New York Times reports that she has represented several plaintiffs in sexual-harassment claims, arising in both government and private-sector contexts.

The governor will not get that warm and cozy feeling at the prospect of an investigation, ordered by Attorney General James (a fellow Democrat, but a potential challenger for his job from the progressive left), which will be run by both a former prosecutor who has already studied Cuomo through the lens of political corruption, and an employment lawyer whose clients have been very much like the women who are Cuomo’s accusers. The investigators will have subpoena power, which could be used to compel testimony from the governor himself. They will report weekly to James on their progress.

As for the two most recent accusers, the more intriguing but probably less consequential one is Karen Hinton, a longtime political and media consultant in Democratic circles. Her connection to Cuomo, who is her age, goes back to her service as his press secretary when he was Clinton administration Housing and Urban Development secretary.

Also working for Cuomo at the time were Howard Glaser, a top HUD aide who remained a close friend, later holding high positions in the governor’s administration; and Bill de Blasio, HUD’s regional director for New York and New Jersey, who became New York City mayor and a bitter political rival of the governor.

Now for two twists that could not have been better scripted by the Big Apple’s tabloids. First, Glaser eventually married Hinton, and for a time was caught up (but never charged) in the mortgage shenanigans that became part of the SDNY’s case against Percoco. Second, Mayor de Blasio eventually hired Hinton to be his press secretary; she quit in 2016 after about a year, and she is credited with pushing him to stop letting Cuomo walk all over him. Oh, there’s more: Hinton recently penned an op-ed in the New York Daily News denouncing both Cuomo and de Blasio. The title? “How to Counter Penis Politics: What it’s like to work for Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio” (since you asked!).

You’ll not be surprised, then, to hear that Hinton had a tempestuous relationship with Cuomo at HUD — tempestuous relations being a common state of affairs between the hard-charging, mercurial Cuomo and his subordinates, according to this Washington Post deep dive. But Hinton was not working directly for Cuomo in 2000 when, she says, he got too familiar with her in his hotel room. She was then a private media-relations consultant in California, where she’d relocated with her first husband (she married Glaser years later), upon leaving HUD in 1999 after a falling out with Cuomo. But they’d patched it up enough that Hinton agreed to assist HUD with a Cuomo visit to California.

During that visit, she accepted the then-HUD secretary’s invitation to come to his hotel room for what she expected would be a conversation with an old friend. She ended up discussing personal problems and marital troubles she was having. As she got up to leave, she says Cuomo embraced her — “too long, too tight, too intimate.” She pulled away, he pulled her back toward him for another similar embrace, but she says she pulled away and left. They continued to have contact over the years, sometimes friendly, sometimes . . . not so much.

Hinton is a character — going all the way back to 1984, when she recalls that an Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton hit on her — so bet on her adding more fireworks to the story. Still, her new allegation comes 21 years after the fact, even though she has long been critical of Cuomo. The claim can’t be proved (there are no witnesses other than Hinton and Cuomo); the governor’s spokesman vehemently denies it happened; and her relationship with Cuomo is further complicated by her marriage to one of his closest allies and fleeting alliance with one of his bitterest enemies. She did not work for Cuomo in his years as governor, and the issue in the ongoing state probe is the allegedly hostile environment he created in that capacity, not at HUD.

On the other hand, Ana Liss, the other new accuser, did work for the governor as a policy and operations adviser from 2013 to 2015. She says he referred to her in unprofessional and demeaning ways, asked her personal questions, and got too familiar with her physically on one occasion in 2014. As Brittany’s report details, she says he hugged her, kissed her on the cheeks, put his arm around her lower back, and grabbed her waist as they were photographed. Liss never made a formal complaint, but she did request a transfer to another office, and she blames her experience working for Cuomo for her need to seek mental-health counseling in 2014, and for leaving the job the following year.

This is relevant to two issues that Rich and I discussed on the most recent episode of The McCarthy Report podcast, and that I wrote about here.

First, these interactions occurred prior to October 2019, when Cuomo spearheaded changes in New York law that make it easier to prove sexual-harassment claims. That would be very important if Liss were filing a lawsuit against Cuomo. But it will make little or no difference to the state inquiry being conducted by attorneys Kim and Clarke. The investigators will eventually compose a report which is likely to be more concerned with whether Cuomo, over the years, has created a toxic working environment in the state government than with whether Cuomo’s accusers have actionable sexual-harassment claims. Any of the accusers who thinks she has a viable case can sue privately.

Second, at his counterproductive press conference last week, Cuomo seemed to be trying to draw the sting of potential additional revelations by rationalizing that it’s his style to kiss and hug people all the time, and thus predicting that other photographs could turn up — similar to the one published two weekends ago of his embrace of an alarmed-looking Anna Ruch, another of the complainants. Well whaddya know: The report about Liss, published by the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, included a photo of Cuomo with his arm around Liss’s waist.

Meantime, those calling for Governor Cuomo to resign now include Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the powerful Democratic majority leader in the state senate, whose comments along those lines were echoed by Carl Heastie, the Democratic speaker of the state assembly. The governor has reportedly been pleading with state lawmakers behind the scenes, seeking to dissuade further calls for him to resign — which he insists he has no intention of doing.

Oh, and did I mention that Cuomo’s sexual-harassment scandal is secondary in importance to Cuomo’s nursing-home deaths scandal?