11 February 2022: Replacement NY Governor To Turn Over Cuomo's COVID-19 'Volunteers' Records

Gov. Kathy Hochul will turn over records tied to Andrew Cuomo’s COVID ‘volunteers’

The most important thing about this report is that replacement New York Governor Kathy Hochul is choosing to comply with a subpoena related to the governor's office's records from Andrew M. Cuomo's tenure in office.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office will comply with a subpoena asking for records about unpaid “volunteers” that her disgraced predecessor – ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo – used to help work on New York’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Joint Commission on Public Ethics sent a subpoena to the executive chamber on Feb. 7 requesting information about individuals who were employed by Cuomo during the coronavirus crisis – but exempt from ethics standards laid out in New York’s public officers’ law, thanks to now-defunct executive orders.

“We are reviewing the subpoena and fully intend to comply,” Hochul press secretary Hazel Crampton-Hays told The Post on Thursday.

The three-page document seeks:

1. The total number of individual exempted from the provisions of the public officers law and the jurisdiction of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics during the period when the orders were in effect between March 18, 2020, and April 29, 2021
2. Identify any particular volunteers about whom conflicts of interests or potential conflicts of interest were identified
3. With respect to those individuals, any arrangements for recusal or other means to address the conflict or potential conflict

The governor has until Feb. 28 to turn over the records.

If Cuomo still had meaningful support within New York's Democratic party, Hochul would almost certainly have acted to stonewall the subpoena.

But with no criminal charges having been filed against Andrew M. Cuomo related to his alleged sexual harassment of multiple women, despite the district attorneys in each county where they were filed claim they found the charges to be credible, the 'volunteers' scandal represents Hochul and her political party's latest effort to keep Andrew M. Cuomo's scandals contained to those they've already successfully ousted from power. As such, it provides a targeted means of limiting Cuomo from attempting to regain power, where he must continue consuming his available resources to defend himself.

What it doesn't do, despite the near overlap in relevant dates, is address the much bigger issue of Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals during the period Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect. If NY pols really wanted to put Cuomo down once and for all, they would drop the hammer on that. We think they won't because that would mean removing many more party members serving in the state government from their positions.