28 October 2021: Opinion - Cuomo Lackey Malatras Needs to Go

To truly clean up Albany, Kathy Hochul needs to boot SUNY Chancellor James Malatras

This opinion piece by Fred Smith lays out the case that James Malatras needs to be shown the door. The following excerpt picks up from replacement NY Governor Kathy Hochul's pledge to fire everyone named in the state attorney general's 3 August 2021 report, which along with the threat of removal from office by impeachment, prompted Andrew M. Cuomo to resign in disgrace.

She pointedly pledged to purge her dominion of the shady types who thrived under Cuomo’s odious regime, especially those cited in Attorney General Tish James’ investigation of alleged sexual harassment. She’s done some of that in her first 45 days.

Malatras, who wasn’t mentioned in the report, so far hasn’t been included in the to-be-purged group but should be — even if it means Hochul must demand Cuomo’s carryover trustees un-appoint him.

There are several reasons for this: Most important, Malatras abetted the coverup of COVID-19 nursing-home deaths on Cuomo’s watch. His spin is that he never changed the stats but merely helped edit the undercount.

Then he supposedly “volunteered” his own time to advance Cuomo’s self-glorifying $5 million book on leadership during the COVID crisis.

Finally, in March, a few days after the AG’s report was released, he wrote a letter to SUNY’s college presidents expressing outrage at the “repugnant” acts detailed in it: “I have worked with the Governor at certain points for many years. It was always a difficult and demanding environment to work in,” he claimed.

He assured them that he “had no knowledge of the actions corroborated in the Attorney General’s report, conduct that far exceeded anything I could even fathom during my time in the Governor’s Office.”

The chancellor doth protest too much: After all, for a guy so close to Cuomo for so long and who’s been so intimately aware of his management style and habits, his sudden “Shock, shock!” fails the nose test.

We think Smith mididentifies the timing of Malatras' reaction to the attorney general's 3 August 2021 report. His comments were originally reported in the New York Post on 10 August 2021, which quotes them from a letter Malatras delivered to State University of New York leadership on Monday, 9 August 2021.