25 November 2021: Cuomo Kept $5.12M Book Deal Secret from COVID Task Team Staffers

Cuomo’s early book dealings outrage officials tasked with pandemic response

Members of New York state's COVID task team are weighing in on the $5.12 million book deal that Andrew M. Cuomo negotiated in the early weeks coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 while they were overwhelmed by the crisis:

Officials who worked around-the-clock on the state’s early response to the coronavirus pandemic were livid after hearing that ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plot to publish a “leadership” book began on before the worst of the outbreak even hit New York.

“We were not even at the height of the pandemic in March [2020],” said one source who participated in the response to evidence unearthed in the Assembly Judiciary Committee’s impeachment probe report on Cuomo.

The governor’s emergency directive ordering the closure of non-essential businesses didn’t take place until March 22, 2020, but his literary agent had already started having conversation with publisher Penguin/Random House about the book three days earlier....

“We were scrambling to make sure we had enough hospital beds, that we had enough ventilators,” fumed the state official involved in the COVID-19 response, who requested anonymity because of ongoing probes of Cuomo.

That's not the only anonymous complaint from former Cuomo administration staffers who were unaware Andrew M. Cuomo's pandemic "leadership" book deal had been struck:

Officials also expressed surprise by the whopping $5.1 million paycheck he’d receive for the tome.

“It’s making people wonder how that offer and those conversations so early on factored into the COVID response. If you were aware from the very early days [you were writing a book], how does it impact how you operationalize response and make decisions?,” a second official in the Cuomo team’s emergency response said.

“None of the rank and file staff knew about that.”

The Albany insider added, “It is frustrating because there were a lot of people working these insane hours and doing everything they could to build hospitals or set up testing sites or help with the response efforts and PPE and I think now all of that is going to be tainted by the fact in the background of all it there was a book deal being negotiated.”

The book deal gave Cuomo a large financial incentive to interject his "leadership" in New York's response to the coronavirus pandemic from which he would personally profit. His repeated interference in statewide and local public health responses produced both harmful and deadly consequences within New York.