15 August 2021: Editorial - Don't Stop Investigation of Cuomo

Don't stop investigation of Governor Cuomo

The Albany Times-Union's editors are calling for the NY Assembly's investigation of Cuomo to continue, with the ambition of fixing the institutional problems that allowed Andrew M. Cuomo's corruption and scandals to fester unchecked for so long:

Lawmakers need to go beyond Attorney General Letitia James’ report and discuss, for example, what can be done to strengthen the state’s laws, policies, procedures and reporting mechanisms on sexual harassment, not to mention its training requirements for high-level officials. Mr. Cuomo’s seeming shock that his behavior was unacceptable suggests he missed not just the societal memo but the courses required by laws he himself signed.

The Legislature still needs to fully understand how it was bamboozled and strung along for months by the administration and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker when it came to the stonewalling of data on nursing home resident deaths from COVID-19. How did this cover-up go on so long? Could better rules be in place to require the release of public information and information sought by the Legislature — including more severe consequences for willfully withholding it?

New York needs to understand how the ethics rules concerning the use, and misuse, of public employees for private gain broke down in Mr. Cuomo’s drafting of staff to help with his memoir. And as we have said many times before, it needs to review just how the Joint Commission on Public Ethics and the Office of the Inspector General have become so compromised that Mr. Cuomo and those around him would have little fear of being investigated, with an eye toward strengthening ethics mechanisms.

Yes, there are multiple investigations going on, but only the Legislature can pull this all together and implement binding changes that can’t be easily undone by future governors.

And yes, much of what went wrong here was the result of individuals violating the public’s trust and thinking they could get away with it. Power can do that.

But when a governor can get away with so much for so long, the situation cries out for a clear understanding of how that happened and how it could be prevented from happening again. New York has a case study in high-level corruption before it. We should not close the book so soon.

Had it not been for the highly visible scandal of the COVID deaths among New York's nursing home residents resulting from the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive during 2020's coronavirus pandemic, it is highly unlikely Cuomo's other scandals would have come to light under New York's corrupted oversight system for public officials. New Yorkers deserve to be protected from their public officials misdeeds in office.