The governor is being protected, not investigated.
The governor is being protected, not investigated.
W hen is an investigation not an investigation?
When it’s a stall. When it’s what they used to call the “four corners” offense before the introduction of the shot clock — the hoops version of the statute of limitations. An investigation is not an investigation when it is a rescue operation. That is what New York State’s Democratic Party establishment is conducting on behalf of Andrew Cuomo.
The governor should already have been impeached.
Not over his decision to force nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. That, to be sure, was a disastrous policy decision. It illustrates Cuomo’s weirdly arrogant incompetence. Science-based knowledge that Democrats claim to venerate (often hilariously) was not as developed in the early stages of the pandemic as it is now; it was common sense, though, that forcing the homes to house people who were still suffering from a transmissible disease risked endangering a vulnerable population.
Still, to condemn Cuomo for this is Monday-morning quarterbacking. Unlike the governor, we here in the peanut gallery were not on the hook for what he had to face. If the sick were not accepted by the nursing homes, they would have to go somewhere. At the time, with COVID exploding, the state government was legitimately worried that hospital-bed space and facilities would be tapped out. As it turned out, the fears about medical-treatment capacity were overblown, but that could not be known for sure at the time.
Cuomo’s impeachable conduct lies in the aftermath. He covered up his poor decision-making. He misled the state legislature, egregiously, on the number of nursing-home deaths. He did it by willful statistical flimflam — not counting nursing-home COVID patients who died after being transferred to the hospital as nursing-home deaths. He fraudulently claimed New York was doing better than other states when its outcomes were among the worst. To maintain the fraud, Cuomo had his staff strong-arm state medical experts when they endeavored to publish a report that would have revealed the true extent of the deadly nursing-home debacle.
Moreover, though the governor told New Yorkers that testing and treatment resources were sparse, they weren’t sparse if you were a member of the Cuomo family or a Cuomo crony. Bumping relatives and friends to the front of the line is almost certainly a violation of New York State’s ethics law.
As all this was going on, the governor cashed in on the lie, wangling a book contract for over $5 million to project his self-image of steady, unparalleled mastery of unprecedented crisis conditions. He induced his state-funded staff and other state employees to participate in negotiating the book deal, then to help research, write, and edit it.
Moreover, he withheld nursing-home information from the Justice Department. As I’ve observed before, his administration probably did not, as is often supposed, give the DOJ false information; the issue is likely to be whether accurate nursing-home information, to the limited degree it was provided, was so incomplete as to be patently misleading (as, hypothetically, would be disclosing COVID deaths of nursing-home patients, but withholding COVID deaths of nursing-home residents who died in the hospital). But in any event, he subsequently had his staff lie to state legislators about why it had lied to them. Cuomo’s top aide told them the administration had concealed data from them because it was afraid the Trump Justice Department would politicize it. In reality, Cuomo concealed the data before there was any DOJ inquiry — his concerns were his political image, his book contract, and the potential exposure of his strong-arm tactics.
If Cuomo were a Republican — no, bad example … I need to come up with a person who could plausibly be elected governor in 21st-century New York. If Cuomo were a recently elected mainstream Democrat, he would already have been impeached. After all, as I’ve also recounted, this is not his first corruption rodeo. Cuomo barely escaped prosecution in a federal investigation that saw his then-top aide and longtime confidant, Joseph Percoco, convicted on various felony charges, largely based on the accomplice testimony of Todd Howe, another longtime Cuomo insider.
Just think: Cuomo could have beaten his nemesis, Donald Trump, to double-impeachment status.
Cuomo, however, is a powerful Democrat — scion of a powerful Democratic family who was married, for a time, into an iconic Democratic family. He has been governor for a decade, has influential allies in the national party and the state legislature, and has appointed many judges and other officials who would have a say in any investigation leading to potential impeachment.
Nearly as significantly — and here’s where the essentially one-party politics of the Empire State comes in — though Cuomo is a preening old-school progressive, he is the last line of defense against the ascendant Bolshevik Left that is destroying New York City. Most of the rest of the state is not as insane as the Gotham Dems. Cuomo is enough of a thin-skinned bully that most New York Democrats would privately tell you he’s a jerk, but the brute fact is that they fear even more what would come after him if he were removed. Cuomo and his party allies are well aware of this. Thanks to the hard Left, he stands a far better chance of being reelected than impeached.
Wholly apart from his appalling conduct with respect to nursing homes, Cuomo is under investigation on several sexual-harassment complaints. The big story in New York this week is that the special prosecutors working under Attorney General Letitia James’s supervision just issued subpoenas to the complainants. The general reaction to this revelation was that the probe must be getting serious. But the more informed (and thus jaded) reaction would be: They’re just getting around to that now? The investigation has been going on for over two months. Meanwhile, the New York Post reports that the sexual-harassment probe will continue through the summer, and probably longer.
Well, you say to yourself, the legislature needn’t dawdle over a sexual-harassment investigation when the nursing-home malfeasance is ripe, right? After all, the sexual-harassment allegations may, for all the big wind, yield no rain. Essentially, Cuomo is accused of making women uncomfortable — of creating a hostile work environment for staffers — by his boorishness. These are not, in the main, sexual-assault allegations. There are some claims of unwanted kissing and touching, but only one allegation of conduct — groping an unidentified state employee under her blouse — that may arguably cross the line into criminal assault under state law. That latter instance, as is typical in these cases, appears to be a “he said, she said” situation that would be difficult, to say the least, to prove in court.
As is his wont, Cuomo has proved to be haughtily inept in public statements about the germane facts and law (including harassment-law provisions that he himself championed). That, however, is a side issue; the main thing is that the harassment probe is proceeding at a snail’s pace.
That does not matter, though, to Cuomo’s allies in the State Assembly. With studied indignation, they insisted that they would leave no stone unturned in their impeachment investigation: the nursing homes, the book deal, the favorable treatment for family and friends, the sexual harassment, even a kerfuffle over bridge safety. Democrats pledged to get to the bottom of every Cuomo scandal (at least the current ones — the corruption scandal from a few years back is apparently water under the unsafe bridge).
As I explained when all this theater was rolled out, the Democrat vow to conduct a comprehensive probe was not a statement of determination; it was a pose. Democrats do not want to investigate Cuomo; they want to say they are investigating him. They are claiming to do a comprehensive probe because the more extensive it is, the longer it will take. As torpor sets in, any idea of removing Cuomo will pass. State Democrats have no intention of impeaching the governor, just of looking like they’re reacting in a serious way to convincing reports of impeachable conduct.
Naturally, it turns out that they’re so very serious about the sprawling Cuomo investigation that they’ve allocated a whopping $250,000 for Davis Polk & Wardwell, an elite New York law firm, to conduct it. That happened about a month ago, and the retention contract anticipated a year of work. I have no doubt that the “investigation” will grind on, after a fashion, for a year and more. Nevertheless, as the Post reports, $250,000 is enough … maybe … if you cut a few corners … for … wait for it … three weeks of work by Davis Polk.
That wouldn’t be enough to pay Cuomo and his staff to crank out a chapter of “his” book … although it might be enough to cover total purchases.
If there were any intention of impeaching Cuomo, he’d be impeached. New York Democrats, instead, are trying to score the best seats at his next inauguration.