18 July 2021: Editorial - Cuomo Scandals Not Going Away

The scandals aren't going away, Governor Cuomo

This editorial is one of the first to follow the deposition of Andrew M. Cuomo by investigators from the New York State Attorney General's office. Though it doesn't reference that event, it provides an opportunity to review the scandals Cuomo has wrought. Here's the full excerpt:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo may have thought that by rejecting calls to step down, or at least step aside, the scandals swirling around him would just fade away. They haven’t.

The news this past week of yet more discrepancies in the state’s COVID-19 death statistics — representing thousands of fatalities left off the state’s own website — only serves as a reminder of why he is in such hot water.

The governor, we realize, isn’t alone in wanting the controversies to go away. There he was at a news conference on gun violence Wednesday with, among others, state Assembly Member Diana Richardson and Sen. Zellnor Myrie. Just four months ago, the two lawmakers, both Democrats of Brooklyn, had issued a scathing press release saying Mr. Cuomo had “irreparably damaged his trustworthiness and ability to lead,” and calling on him to resign. When a reporter asked Ms. Richardson about that statement in light of her appearance with the governor, she blew up, saying that “politics is politics, business is business.”

Ms. Richardson’s call for the governor to resign may have been just politics in her mind, but it’s very much about the public business of New York. Let’s not forget the entirely official reasons the governor is under such fire.

His administration grossly and purposely understated the number of nursing home residents who died from COVID-19. It kept the real numbers from the Legislature and the public for months until its hand was finally forced by a report from the attorney general’s office. It did so while the administration was being questioned about whether a directive that nursing homes accept COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals may have caused more infections, and while the governor was producing a self-laudatory book on his handling of the pandemic. In short, it had all the appearance of a cover-up.

There are also questions about the administration’s handling of a still-undetermined number of bolts on the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Memorial Bridge, defects whose impact on the bridge’s safety remain unclear.

The governor has been accused by multiple women who are or were state employees of inappropriate behavior ranging from sexual overtures to unwelcome touching and kissing to outright groping.

And there are questions as to whether he unethically used state employees to help with his pandemic memoir, for which he received a more than $5 million advance.

Those aren’t petty political nits. These are all about the business Mr. Cuomo conducts on public property and taxpayer time, using — or abusing — the power of his position. So is the latest revelation this past week that the state underreported on its website the numbers of pandemic deaths in prisons and certain other institutions by 11,000 people. The administration’s insistence that it reported the correct numbers to the federal government only makes this lapse more puzzling.

New Yorkers in search of information from their state shouldn’t have to go wandering around the internet to get it when the state itself has it. Nor should they have to assume that everything Mr. Cuomo or his administration says comes with an asterisk and fine print. It’s no wonder that most New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run again, and why we continue to call on him to resign. He squandered the public’s trust, and time will not restore it.

The Albany Times-Union's coverage of the Cuomo scandals has been among the best in New York, especially among media outlets with a left-leaning bias. By our count, they list no fewer than six major scandals that are not going away, including the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of elderly New Yorkers who became infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus during the period the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.

We think that if not for that original scandal, all the others that have erupted since would not have come to light.