7 February 2022: Andrew M. Cuomo Claims He's Been "Vindicated"

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/andrew-cuomo-says-he-s-been-vindicated-won-t-rule-out-run

This report by Bloomberg's Laura Nahmias indicates Andrew M. Cuomo has a unique interpretation of what it means when prosecutors decline to file criminal charges. The following excerpt cuts straight to how the resigned-in-disgrace former governor is trying to sell his spin to the public:

Cuomo has also seized on decisions by four different New York District Attorneys not to prosecute allegations, despite each saying they found Cuomo’s accusers credible. A fifth, the Manhattan D.A.’s office, dropped its own inquiry into sexual misconduct allegations, but has not made a public statement, according to CNN.

“It turns out in a remarkably short period of time that it did become all bogus. 11 became zero,” Cuomo said. “If you do an honest summary, which is what I get from people on the street, I have been vindicated.”

But has he really? Here's the very next paragraph from the report:

In truth, the New York DAs said they found the accounts of the women to be credible despite not pursuing criminal charges against Cuomo. The decision is “not an exoneration” of Cuomo, said DA Gregory Oakes in upstate Oswego County, noting that current New York statutes “fail to properly hold offenders accountable and fail to adequately protect victims.”

That last passage indicates the media, who if CNN is any indication, once constituted the strongest sector of support for Cuomo, isn't buying it.

The report also deals with the prospects for a new run for office by the resigned-in-disgrace politician in its introduction:

Five months after he resigned over a swirl of sexual harassment allegations, New York’s former Governor Andrew Cuomo isn’t ruling out another run for public office. He insists it’s too soon to talk about it.

Instead, he’s consumed by what he alleges are serious mistakes by New York State Attorney General Letitia James and the independent lawyers who investigated the sexual harassment claims against him.

Her office determined the accounts of 11 different women were credible and that Cuomo “violated multiple federal and state harassment laws,” according to the Aug. 3 report. The findings were so damaging and explosive that Cuomo resigned weeks after the report’s release.

But if he had to do it all over, he wouldn’t have resigned, the former governor, 64, told Bloomberg News in a Friday telephone interview, one of a handful since leaving office. “I never resigned because I said I did something wrong. I said, I’m resigning because I don’t want to be a distraction,” Cuomo said.

James’s office is unsparing in its rebuttal. “No one, including Andrew Cuomo, can dispute the fact that multiple investigations found allegations of sexual harassment against him to be credible,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Only he is to blame for inappropriately touching his own staff and then quitting so he didn’t have to face impeachment. His baseless attacks won’t change the reality -- Andrew Cuomo is a serial sexual harasser.”

The choice of how to juxtapose sentences and paragraphs in a news article like this is 100% in the control of the reporter and their editors. That they're immediately following Cuomo's statements with opposing views confirms they view Cuomo as little more than a sideshow, one they feel free to directly challenge.

Andrew M. Cuomo has a $16 million budget to fund his sideshow, but if this article is any indication, he's up against a media that's willing to take him down a few notches everytime he speaks for free. For a politician who made his reputation as someone to be feared if they were crossed, it's a sign he's lost that reputation. Whether he quit to avoid being a distraction as he claims or he quit to avoid being impeached over what the prosecutors who declined to charge him over what they describe as credible sexual harassment allegations is now immaterial. The bottom line is the one thing he's proven beyond any reasonable doubt to the public is he's a quitter.