13 February 2022: Cuomo's Lawyer Claims COVID Nursing Home Scandals Played No Role in Cuomo's Resignation to Avoid Impeachment

Cuomo attorney denies impact of COVID-19 nursing home deaths on impeachment talks

This report is from 10 February 2022. The following excerpt describes the Andrew M. Cuomo's personal attorney's effort to diminish the role Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals had in driving his resignation.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s attorney, Rita Glavin, once again held a briefing with reporters Thursday to insist on his innocence on claims of sexual harassment and denounce the report from the state Attorney General’s Office detailing Cuomo’s alleged misconduct. Glavin once again laid out her case against the women who accused Cuomo, repeating the same evidence she has offered for weeks to question their credibility and slamming Attorney General Letitia James as politically driven. Cuomo continues to remain out of the public eye.

But when asked about her radio silence on the many other scandals Cuomo faced when he left office, including misuse of government resources to write a memoir and hiding the true number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, Glavin sidestepped those topics, saying those controversies were not as consequential to the disgraced governor’s downfall, despite the fact that the Assembly’s impeachment investigation concluded both were serious offenses. “I do not believe the governor would have been impeached on any of those other issues,” Glavin said. “He would not have stepped down on any of those other issues....

“The sexual harassment drove all of this,” Glavin repeated. She offered no new evidence to contradict the findings of the Assembly report on nursing homes or that would suggest that Cuomo could have successfully fought articles of impeachment brought on those grounds. Glavin instead blamed what she considered the misleading and prejudicial attorney general’s report once again for Cuomo’s resignation, asserting that had people asked the right questions at the time, the ex governor would still be at the Executive Mansion despite all his other problems.

Glavin's failure to provide any new evidence to contradict the Assembly's findings on Cuomo's nursing home deaths scandals is as much a public relations strategy as it is a legal defense strategy. In her attempt to diminish Cuomo's role in the excess deaths that occurred as a result of his deadly 25 March 2020 directive and the acknowledged cover-up, we think she's exploiting the Hochul administration's reluctance to pursue any serious probe because of the political damage that would hurt the interests of the members of New York's Democratic party still serving in the state government.

Always remember that Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals involved the participation of far more of these officials than did his sexual harassment scandals. There's a very political reason why NY replacement governor Kathy Hochul is shirking her commitment to provide transparency into the role state government officials played in what happened in New York's nursing homes during the period Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.