26 July 2021: Team Cuomo's Smear Campaign Aimed at Boosting Public Support

Cuomo said AG probe would clear him. Now his aides say it’s political.

This report focuses on the motivations behind Team Cuomo's decision to ramp up its attempted smears of New York Attorney General Letitia "Tish" James. The following excerpt describes what changed since 19 April 2020, when New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli made a criminal referral to the Attorney General's office related to Andrew M. Cuomo's use of state employees and resources to produce his pandemic "leadership" book, from which he stands to collect a personal gain of $5.1 million from its publisher:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, facing a cascade of misconduct claims earlier this year, dashed off a letter in March directing state Attorney General Tish James to investigate the scandals that were threatening to end his career.

When James is done with her work, Cuomo assured the public, everyone will see he had done nothing wrong. “I ask the people of this state to wait for the facts from the attorney general's report before forming an opinion,” he said at the time, refusing calls to resign.

Nearly five months later, James and the outside attorneys she hired to conduct the work appear close to wrapping up the inquiry after interviewing the governor last weekend. But Cuomo’s top aides no longer seem convinced James will deliver the findings their boss had promised and staked his future on.

In recent days and weeks, the governor’s communications team has sprinkled comments about any investigation-related news with assertions that James — the first Black woman to hold statewide office in New York — is using the probe to launch her own run for governor next year, when Cuomo may seek a fourth term.

Without Andrew M. Cuomo's preferred outcome guaranteed, former prosecutors identify a deliberate political motive for Team Cuomo's attempted smear attacks:

Calling an investigation politically motivated is “par for the course” among political figures, agreed Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor in New York and Columbia Law lecturer. The attacks aren’t very likely to cause witnesses with relevant information not to participate, as Lavine suggested, and it’s also not a smart play during multiple high stakes investigations, she said.

But that’s not the point.

“This is obviously geared not towards the people who are going to be making a decision about proceeding on impeachment but towards the public in the hopes that he can escape from this,” she said. “If he wants to run again, he wants the public to buy into this.”

Team Cuomo hasn't limited itself to attacking Tish James. It also attacked former Obama-era U.S. attorney Preet Bharara on 21 July 2021.

Bharara responded on Thursday, 22 July 2021 on his podcast. This report provides a the relevant transcript of his comments:

“Kind of demented if you ask me,” Bharara said during a Thursday episode of his legal news podcast “Stay Tuned with Preet.” Bharara rejected the idea that he will challenge Cuomo in a primary next year and called it a decoy tactic from an administration he knows well. While the words aren’t coming from the governor’s mouth, they have his voice, he added.

“For what it’s worth, based on my experience over a number of years in the state of New York and as U.S. attorney, there is no way on earth that people around Andrew Cuomo — spokespeople, allies, those speaking on the record, off the record — are making any of these statements, including the lies about me, without the direct approval and or direction of Andrew Cuomo himself,” Bharara said. “That you can take to the bank.”

The same can be said of the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive, which contributed to hundreds and possibly thousands of excess COVID deaths among New York's nursing home residents. Deaths that would not have occurred if not for the directive's issuance.