Saturday, June 12, 2021

12 June 2021: Assemblyman Ron Kim Targeted for Harassment by Cuomo Supporters

Lawmaker critical of Andrew Cuomo says he’s been sent racist messages — and multiple copies of gov’s books

Andrew M. Cuomo's political supporters are making their presence felt by a change in the tactics they're employing against the governor's critics.

One of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s most outspoken critics is finding out that if you mess with the three-term Democrat, bad things can happen.

Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens) told The Post on Friday that he’s been bombarded with hateful emails and Facebook messages for repeatedly calling out Cuomo over his handling of nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kim, who is Asian, said he’s been called a “gook,” told he’s “rotten to the core,” and asked whether his “fixation” on Cuomo was affecting his marriage.

One writer even issued a veiled threat, saying, “If I were you I would repent. Make peace with the governor. Because time is short. You don’t want to make God angry.”

“The lord Jesus has his back. He will protect him…And his enemies will be scattered,” the writer added.

The last portion of that excerpt provides a taste of the abusive electronic communications Kim has received. The article provides longer examples.

For his part, Kim is continuing his stance demanding Governor Cuomo be held accountable for COVID deaths in New York nursing homes resulting from the administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive. But Kim notes the threats may take a toll:

Kim also called it “disturbing that there are still people susceptible to Cuomo’s demagoguery and will go out of their way to target someone like me for doing my job, which has been to stick up for older adults and vulnerable constituents.”

He added, “I do not want to lower my voice but at some point, if I feel like my family and my staff are in an uncomfortable place, I may have to.”

Related items from the timeline:

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12 June 2021: Cuomo's Protective Detail Interviewed by Atty General Investigators

Troopers in Cuomo protective unit interviewed as part of sexual harassment probe: report

This report was published by the Albany Times-Union on 11 June 2021.

Troopers assigned to an elite unit that protects the governor are being interviewed as part of a state attorney general's investigation into sexual harassment and groping allegations that multiple women have been made against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The interviews with current and former members of the governor's Protective Services Unit indicate the investigation has crossed into a realm that is rarely pierced by outside investigations. Indeed, the members of the governor's protective unit are generally hand-selected for their abilities and expected to keep secret what they see or hear in terms of the governor's official and private dealings.

The officers selected for the detail are also required to sign non-disclosure agreements. Those agreements however do not exempt them from reporting ethical misconduct or potential criminal activities.

The attorney general's investigators have drawn that same conclusion and forged ahead with their interviews of the governor's guardians, including gathering details from their observations of the Executive Chamber's "culture," and the manner in which women have been treated or interacted with the governor and his staff. Female troopers have also been among those interviewed, the sources said.

One of the people with knowledge of the matter said that the private attorneys conducting a parallel impeachment investigation on behalf of the state Assembly's Judiciary Committee have also begun preliminary interviews with at least some current or former members of the governor's protective detail. But that probe is moving much slower than the attorney general's investigation, which is being led by attorneys Joon H. Kim and Anne L. Clark.

Kim has a deep background in criminal investigations as a former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan; Clark has extensive experience in sexual harassment cases.

The report provides a lot of background on the recent history of the governor's protective detail of state troopers, including their role scandals involving Cuomo administration officials and previous governors.

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Friday, June 11, 2021

11 June 2021: Cuomo Signs Spending Bill Funding NY Lawmakers' Impeachment Activities

Cuomo approves funding for potential impeachment

The weekend news cycle would be much more interesting if he had vetoed it, but for now, Governor Cuomo is on board with spending taxpayer dollars on the New York Assembly's glacially-paced impeachment investigation and a potential impeachment trial if the Assembly's probe ever reaches an end in the state Senate:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday evening signed into a law bill that would fund his own potential impeachment proceeding in the state Legislature after it was given final approval by state lawmakers this week as investigations into multiple controversies facing the three-term Democrat continue.

As it is, we think this weekend's news cycle out of Cuomoland will be fairly light.

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11 June 2021: NY Assembly to Tap State Legal Fund to Pay for Cuomo Impeachment Probe

Lawmakers set aside money for potential Cuomo impeachment

The New York legislature approved bills this week that would draw funds from the money the state government normally sets aside to pay judgments in lawsuits it loses to pay for its unlimited impeachment probe. This report provides some details for how it would use the money:

A potential impeachment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo would be funded under legislation given final approval by state lawmakers this week as investigations into multiple controversies facing the three-term Democrat continue.

The bill would allow lawmakers to dip into a $156.9 million fund of existing money usually set aside for the state to pay for lawsuits. If signed into law by the governor himself, the money would be used to conduct interviews, investigations and hold hearings "necessary to inform the decisions relating to such proceedings" under the impeachment provisions in the state constitution.

Cuomo would be barred from seeking reimbursement for services and expenses related to legal representation in an impeachment, however.

Under this legislation, the legislature would pay the cost of both the Assembly's super-slow motion impeachment investigation and any subsequent impeachment trial of Governor Cuomo in the New York State Senate by tapping money from this fund.

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11 June 2021: Opinion - Experts and Political Leaders Let Us Down in Pandemic

Fauci emails show how our COVID experts and leaders failed us

Governor Cuomo's pandemic leadership performance figures prominently in Tom Wrobleski's column:

Hindsight is 20-20 for non-professionals like me, but the experts should have had a clue.

The best we can say is that there appear to be no experts. And that’s OK. Just don’t shout at us to “follow the science” and “trust the experts” (looking at you, Gov. Andrew Cuomo).

He goes on to cite other examples, but returns to Governor Cuomo:

Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio told us New Yorkers that we were at low risk from COVID. Cuomo and de Blasio told us not to change our routines, not to avoid crowds, not to boycott shopping and eating in Chinatown.

They were wrong. And Cuomo was wrong to shunt COVID-positive patients into state nursing homes.

If you’re being honest, you’ll say that there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Let’s hope the experts and the pols do better next time. Lives literally depend on it.

The saddest part is that Cuomo knew he was wrong to "shunt COVID-positive patients into state nursing homes". He did it anyway.

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11 June 2021: Sham NY Assembly Impeachment Probe Produces No Results Before Legislative Session Ends

Pols go home with Cuomo impeachment up in the air

The NY legislature's 2021 session has ended without any results to show for their three month long "investigation". But they did write themselves a blank check to continue conducting a never-ending and expanding probe of Governor Cuomo's multiple scandals.

Republican lawmakers voiced frustration Thursday that their Democratic counterparts concluded the 2021 legislative session before wrapping up an impeachment inquiry into alleged misconduct by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The Assembly investigation began nearly three months ago, state Sens. Michael Martucci and James Tedisco noted in a letter to the chairman of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, Charles Lavine, D-Long Island: “Impeachment should be due process and not overdue process.”

At a press briefing Thursday evening, Senate GOP Leader Rob Ortt, R-Niagara County, decried the fact Democrats have not stripped Cuomo of his emergency powers even as COVID-19 infections have fallen and with the governor facing probes by federal prosecutors, the state attorney general’s office and the Assembly.

He also cast doubt Assembly Democrats will go forward with an impeachment proceeding, though he argued there is already sufficient evidence to warrant such a move.

“I don’t think they have the guts to do what the people of New York expect them to do,” said Ortt.

Assembly Democrats say Cuomo is entitled to due process while an outside law firm the chamber has retained delves into multiple allegations of sexual harassment against the governor. The Albany Times Union has reported that one married woman employed in the governor’s office alleges she was physically groped by Cuomo after he asked her to meet him at his state-owned residence, the Executive Mansion.

Democrats this week also got bills passed in both the Senate and the Assembly providing what amounts to a blank check in public funds to keep the Assembly investigation going. Previously, the projected legal bill had been set at $250,000 for the impeachment inquiry.

They no longer have the excuse of insufficient funds or resources to conduct a timely impeachment probe. If only they're serious about it.

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Thursday, June 10, 2021

10 June 2021: How Big Is Michigan's Undercount of COVID Nursing Home Deaths?

Problems with state stats on nursing home deaths due to COVID-19

This article is by Stephen Delie of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, whose investigation with Charlie LeDuff turned up a very large gap in Michigan's official count of COVID deaths among residents of its long term care facilities.

In this first excerpt, he describes the kind of long term care facilities where Michigan Department of Health and Human Services officials have exempted from reporting COVID death data:

Adult Foster Care and Homes for the Aged are also required to report data, but only to MDHHS. Additionally, these facilities are only required to report death and case information if they were licensed by the state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs to house 13 or more residents.

Smaller facilities are not required to report, despite accounting for 76% of these facilities in Michigan. In other words, 3,480 smaller long-term care facilities, serving more than 22,000 elderly Michiganders, are not being tracked.

This is the first part of the problem. Because these facilities are not required to report COVID-19 deaths, there is no way to know how many people have died at these facilities from this disease. This is important information, especially valuable to inform policymakers regulating these facilities.

Delie then describes how death certificate data may be used to improve the accuracy of the state's accounting of COVID nursing home deaths:

... death certificate records could be used to determine how many residents of these facilities died from COVID-19. The state regularly reviews these records and relies on them as a source for the state’s total tally of COVID-19 deaths. But MDHHS has not tried to link these death certificate records to long-term care facilities since last June, citing time and cost constraints. This is the second part of the problem.

The state is not counting any of the COVID-19 deaths it finds by reviewing death certificates to the tally for long-term care facilities. When the state had done this previously, it found that 44% of death certificates were for residents of long-term care facilities. Because of this, it is very likely that the state’s overall tally of deaths of residents of long-term care facilities is an undercount.

Creating more accurate data is simple. The health department could simply check if the address of the deceased listed on each death certificate matches an address of a licensed long-term care facility.

If it does, and it was not already reported directly by a long-term care facility, the death would be added to the state’s total long-term care facility count. Again, the state used to conduct this type of analysis, so it is obviously possible in practice.

Of course, as Director Hertel pointed out in the committee hearing, this will not provide a full accounting. If, for instance, the address on a death certificate is listed as the deceased’s residential home, rather than their long-term care facility, it would not get classified as a death at a long-term care facility. But that’s not a reason not to do it. The resulting data would still be more accurate than the state’s current figures.

Michigan's official tally of COVID deaths among residents of nursing home and other long term care facilities in the state is 5,900. Delie's analysis suggests a more accurate count could add as many as 3,000 deaths to that total if Michigan's public health officials were to ever complete the death certificate review practices they abandoned.

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Wednesday, June 09, 2021

9 June 2021: Lawsuit Filed Against New York Nursing Home for COVID Deaths

Lawsuit over couple’s Covid-19 deaths challenges nursing homes' immunity

We're featuring this story because it may be representative of the kind of claims that will be settled in court seeking to pierce the immunity from legal liability for COVID deaths that Governor Cuomo agreed to gift to a powerful lobby group whose members include hospitals and nursing home operators during the coronavirus pandemic on 2 April 2020.

The Covid-19 deaths of a husband and wife who died two days apart in an Albion nursing home has set the stage for what's believed to be among the first lawsuits challenging the controversial pandemic immunity the state granted to medical facilities.

The lawsuit alleges William F. Ames, 89, and Martha F. Ames, 88, contracted the virus at the Villages of Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center because the nursing home lacked adequate preventative infectious control policies, sufficient staffing and enough personal protective equipment.

“Things were bad at that nursing home way before the pandemic and things were exacerbated with the pandemic,” Susan A. Fuller said. “It is definitely their fault my mom and dad died of Covid.”

She provided death certificates showing her parents died of Covid-19; William on April 22, 2020, and Martha on April 24.

Nursing homes and hospitals were protected from lawsuits stemming from the pandemic, except in the most egregious cases, from March 2020 through the early days of this past April when the immunity protection was repealed by state lawmakers....

The immunity provision, which was part of the 2020 state budget, provided a narrow exception, allowing lawsuits when “harm or damages were caused by an act or omission constituting willful or intentional criminal misconduct, gross negligence, reckless misconduct, or intentional infliction of harm by the healthcare facility or health care professional ..."

But the provision also insulated the facilities and workers, stating that if staffing shortages were to blame, immunity remained in place.

The legal question now is whether the legal immunity from COVID deaths gifted by Governor Cuomo will apply in this case. The nursing home in question has a history of being fined for deficient care practices and is currently the subject of a state investigation. The nursing home experienced a disproportionately large number of COVID deaths.

The case is also interesting because the timing of the Ames' deaths indicates they were initially exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus during the period the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect. At the same time, the issue of inadequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) supplies are related to purchasing arrangments established by the Cuomo administration that favored funnelling these supplies to hospitals at the expense of the needs of nursing homes.

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9 June 2021: Former Aide Worked Secretly as Cuomo Lawyer on Scandals

Cohen an attorney for Cuomo during Boylan issues

Steven M. Cohen is a former secretary to Governor Cuomo who has been appointed by the governor to be a commissioner to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. At his confirmation hearing in New York's state senate, his previously secret role in providing legal advice to Governor Cuomo during his multiple scandals came to light:

Steven M. Cohen, a longtime confidant and advisor to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said he was working as an attorney for the governor’s administration during the time when there were internal discussions about leaking the personnel file of former staffer Lindsey Boylan, who accused the governor of sexual harassment in December.

Cohen avoided detailing the nature and scope of any legal advice he provided Cuomo during that time, but he told the state Senate Finance Committee this week that he was serving as an attorney for the governor on a voluntary basis.

“I suspect that if I got into too much detail here, I’d probably be waiving an attorney-client privilege,” Cohen told the committee that was questioning him about his nomination by Cuomo to serve as a board member to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The committee later approved Cohen's nomination for the influential Port Authority position.

The report describes some of that role:

Cohen authored a lengthy statement on behalf of the governor in February defending the administration's nursing home policies, including the withholding data from the public.

"I really had nothing to do related to the nursing home issues other than basically being brought in to take a look and make a statement and explain the administration's position," Cohen told legislators during his confirmation hearing on Monday. "I don't have first-hand knowledge with respect to what came before me and I leave it to others in the administration those issues."

When O'Mara shifted gears from nursing homes to Boylan's personnel file, Cohen immediately offered less information, citing attorney-client privilege. News reports have placed Cohen in the room during the decision process by the executive leadership to push out Boylan’s personnel record in the wake of her initial allegations at the governor.

“Steve Cohen was in the room where Cuomo folks decided to leak a supposed personnel file on me when I spoke about abuse from our boss,” Boylan tweeted earlier this week about the Port Authority nomination. “This is all so monstrous and I know history will treat it this way. I will help make it so.”

In a statement to the Times Union on Tuesday, she said: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve were part of the organized smear campaign against me because for so long he’s done the governor’s dirty work."

In the previous passage, O'Mara refers to NY State Senator Tom O'Mara (R-Big Flats).

The decision to publish Boylan's personnel records is being investigated as an act of unlawful retaliation by New York's attorney general's office. Boylan was the first woman to come forward with allegations of sexual harassment against Governor Cuomo, making her allegations public on 14 December 2020.

Returning back to Cohen, it appears he took steps to keep his role in providing legal advice to Governor Cuomo off the books:

Cohen said he provides legal consultation for the administration "from time to time." It was not immediately clear from Cohen's testimony whether he has been compensated for any legal work or consulting that he has provided to the governor.

O’Mara asked Cohen whether he was choosing to avoid talking about the Boylan situation to prevent self-incrimination. Cohen responded that he was just avoiding speaking out of turn before the governor’s administration. O’Mara pressed Cohen on whether he was an attorney for Cuomo during the Boylan personnel file discussions six months ago.

“I was operating as an attorney,” Cohen said, “but I can’t really characterize what I was or wasn’t advising on.”

The Port Authority has long been considered a "political patronage job paradise", which the governors of both New York and New Jersey have used to reward loyal supporters and donors.

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Tuesday, June 08, 2021

8 June 2021: Cuomo Mired in Multiple Criminal Probes

Andrew Cuomo's administration contends with invetigative scrutiny on multiple fronts

The Washington Post takes a stab at describing all the criminal investigations of Governor Cuomo and members of his administration regarding their multiple scandals that have come to light during the past year:

A team appointed by the New York state attorney general probing the workplace conduct of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is seeking to determine whether laws banning retaliation against sexual harassment victims were broken.

The attorney general's public integrity unit is separately scrutinizing whether the Democratic governor misused public resources when his administration provided Cuomo relatives with preferential conronavirus testing and aides helped him write a book last year that netted him more than $5 million.

And federal investigators have quizzed at least five former state Department of Health employees about the administration's handling of the coronavirus in nursing homes and whether the office deliberately misled the federal government and the public about the number of deaths last year.

An initial state probe launched earlier this year after several women accused Cuomo of inappropriate behavior has mushroomed into a number of wide-ranging investigations in which at least a dozen current and former staffers have been interviewed, according to eight people familiar with the various inquiries who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the cases are ongoing.

We couldn't help but notice the New York Assembly's boundless impeachment probe of Governor Cuomo's multiple scandals didn't even make the cut in the listing of investigations at the top of the WaPo's article. It is as if it is not considered to be in the same league by the authors of this report.

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8 June 2021: What Does CNN Gain from Continuing to Employ Chris Cuomo?

What Use Is Chris Cuomo to CNN?

It seems like just two-and-a-half weeks ago we asked an almost identical question! In this analysis piece, Charles C.W. Cooke takes a stab at answering it:

At this point in the proceedings, one is tempted to conclude that Chris Cuomo must have laced CNN’s corporate offices with dynamite and informed the powers that be that, if he goes, they go, too. What else could explain the network’s eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by the man? Here, at the tail end of his long experiment in deficiency, Cuomo resembles nothing more keenly than the inadequate tee-baller who gets to stay in past eight or nine strikes because his uncle coaches the team. His ratings are poor. His insights are vacuous. His conduct is a permanent source of ignominy. All the perfumes of Albany could not sweeten this little man. “What’s in a name?” inquired Shakespeare. Little did he know.

It is unclear why Cuomo was selected by CNN to begin with. He’s a lawyer who knows nothing of the law; a journalist who knows nothing of journalism; an American who knows nothing of America. His temper is third-rate, his interests are bewilderingly narrow, he possesses no discernible sense of shame or self-knowledge, and the opinions he proffers are so ruthlessly subordinated to expedience that hypocrisy is his default mode. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” was meant as an extolment of the virtues of personal growth. Cuomo seems to have taken it literally.

And that's just Cooke getting started. Here's his concluding paragraph (follow the link above for Cooke's presentation of examples of the questionable journalism and analysis Chris Cuomo has regularly produced while on CNN's payroll):

Alas, it is too late, for Cuomo and CNN have now dug themselves a hole from which they cannot escape. Their current position is that it was entirely acceptable for Chris Cuomo to cover his brother’s COVID response because that was a “human interest” story, but that it would be entirely unacceptable for Chris Cuomo to cover the sexual-harassment allegations against his brother because that would violate the longstanding rule against Chris Cuomo interviewing Andrew Cuomo, but that, despite this, Cuomo is still not allowed to help his brother in a private capacity, but that if he does do that it’s bad, but that it’s not bad enough to earn him a suspension, but that — oh good God, can’t they just find another anchor, already?

So what exactly do CNN's editors and managers gain by continuing to have its ethically-tainted, scandal-mired prime time show host represent the network? Because the longer this situation continues, the deeper and more thorough the house-cleaning will need to be to correct the network's deteriorating condition. Heads will need to roll at all levels of CNN's organization.

From the timeline:

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8 June 2021: Prosecutors Subpoena Cuomo Book Material in Probe of COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Federal Prosecutors Subpoena Material Related to Andrew Cuomo's Book

Federal prosecutors have become very interested in what Governor Cuomo and his staff knew and when they knew it:

Federal prosecutors have subpoenaed material related to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s recent memoir as part of their probe into Covid-19 deaths in the state’s nursing homes, people familiar with the matter said.

Prosecutors working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn asked for communications related to Mr. Cuomo’s October 2020 book, “American Crisis,” including contracts and materials used to pitch the book to publishers, the people said. They said the subpoenas indicated prosecutors are interested in nursing-home issues in the book, which more broadly recounted the governor’s response to the pandemic.

The demands were included in subpoenas sent last month to individuals who were involved in editing early versions of the book, the people said, including state officials.

The subpoenas show the criminal probe is continuing to widen beyond its initial request for data on when and where nursing-home residents died during the pandemic. Republican and some Democratic lawmakers have said the governor undercounted the number of Covid-19 deaths attributed to nursing homes as he sought to deflect criticism of his handling of the pandemic’s spread in long-term-care facilities.

Prosecutors could be interested in book-related materials because they captured a real-time snapshot of Mr. Cuomo’s work around nursing homes during the pandemic, said Michael Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor.

Related background information and analysis from the timeline:

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Monday, June 07, 2021

7 June 2021: Opinion - COVID Nursing Home Deaths Are a Government Failure

Time for government – not nursing homes – to shoulder collective COVID-19 blame

In this op-ed, Brendan Williams, the president/CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, says it is long past time to hold politicians and public health officials accountable for their roles in contributing to COVID deats among nursing home residents. In the following passage, he takes on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy:

In New Jersey and New York, nursing homes were compelled to take COVID-positive hospital discharges. While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has at least faced bipartisan condemnation over this, including a critical report from a fellow Democrat – the attorney general – New Jersey’s Senate president reneged on a pledge to form a bipartisan committee to examine how his fellow Democrat, Gov. Phil Murphy, handled nursing home care.

Confronted at one press conference about nursing home deaths, even as he sought to protect golfers from COVID-19 through restrictions, Murphy simply blamed providers, stating, “The uneven performance of this industry is jaw-dropping, and that’s as charitable as I can get.”

Yet it was an order from Murphy’s own administration that stated: “Post-acute care facilities are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized patient/resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.” Nor was “a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19” grounds to deny admission.

Is it too much to expect contrition, if not accountability?

Williams doesn't stop his criticism there, returning to Governor Cuomo's malfeasance after discussing how Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf at least acknowledged some responsibility for the spread of COVID in his state.

In Pennsylvania, the state’s Democratic auditor general reported that the state-run nursing home for veterans, which suffered terrible losses due to the virus, was run negligently. An independent investigative report commissioned by Gov. Tom Wolf confirmed those findings and acknowledged “misjudgments and lost opportunities in controlling and limiting the spread of the virus.”

Here at least blame over government actions was assigned, as opposed to a well-massaged, farcical report Cuomo’s administration had issued – reportedly “rewritten several times by senior advisers to Mr. Cuomo” – that deflected all blame for nursing home deaths.

Williams identifies partisan politics as the reason for Governor Cuomo's seemingly "favorable" public polling:

Last month, a Sienna College poll found 50% of New Yorkers felt Gov. Cuomo did at least a “fair” job of “[m]aking public all data about COVID-related deaths of nursing home patients” – when, in fact, all reporting shows his administration assiduously concealed that information. And as is, sadly, true of everything these days, respondents perceived the answer through a partisan lens: Only 33% of Democrats felt Cuomo had done a “poor” job, with 41% thinking it was no less than “good.”

It would be interesting to see the results of a poll asking New Yorkers what percentage of deaths from other conditions are acceptable for state officials to conceal from lawmakers and the public.

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7 June 2021: Cuomo Stuck on Sidelines as Power Diminishes

Cuomo on the sidelines as legislators wrap up session

This report from Politico emphasizes the extent to which Andrew Cuomo's power as New York's governor has diminished as a consequence of his multiple scandals.

Embattled Gov. Andrew Cuomo has held a series of public events in recent weeks to discuss everything from a car show to a plan to give free Lotto tickets to people who get vaccinated, all designed to present an air of normalcy. But he has been almost completely silent on nearly all of the major policy debates unfolding in the final days of the legislative session. At no point during Cuomo’s decade in office has he played a less prominent role in lawmaking. “Since all the allegations about him kind of came out, he’s been kind of quiet on most things [in the Legislature],” said Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan). “He concentrates on Covid and infection rate and opening the state back up.”

Governors often have their best successes influencing the Legislature by using their pulpit to bully lawmakers. But Cuomo could have a lot to lose if he antagonizes his fellow Democrats or complicates the debate just before legislators are due to end their session on Thursday. “There's probably nobody who’s going to be happier this year that we’re gone than the governor, for obvious reasons,” said Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt.

One way to describe Governor Cuomo's current political situation is that he is serving at the pleasure of top legislators rather than the voters of New York. That won't stop when the legislature goes into recess.

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Sunday, June 06, 2021

6 June 2021: NY Legislators Tire of Having Impeachment Probe Called a Sham

Bill to fund Cuomo impeachment to pass early this week

New York legislators must be getting tired of having their impeachment probe treated as if it is a complete and total sham. At least enough to make it a much more expensive joke at the public's expense, as this report indicates they now appear willing to devote more taxpayer dollars to it:

The new bill, sponsored in the Senate by Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and in the Assembly by Speaker Carl Heastie, provides a blank check for the investigation and any other expenses tied to an impeachment process, including any eventual trial. A legislative source confirmed that the bill is expected to pass early this week.

"This will allow expenses related to investigations conducted by the Legislature to be covered under this existing appropriation. Expenses incurred by the governor and attorney general are already accommodated in the enacted budget," said Mike Whyland, spokesman for Heastie.

There are two warning signs indicating the move may not be as meaningful as is being presented: the names of the spending bill's sponsors in the Senate and Assembly, NY Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and NY Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. We view their current effort as having more to do with damage control, given how their leadership related to the Assembly's impeachment probe has come into question. Be sure to follow the links for each to see content from the timeline that provides background information for why their respective leadership roles have come into question.

It also follows Governor Cuomo tapping New York taxpayers for at least $2.5 million to pay for his defense from criminal and civil misconduct allegations, while they had only approved $250,000 to investigate an ever-expanding list of allegations of misconduct on the part of Governor Cuomo in the Assembly's impeachment probe.

More on that last story below from the timeline:

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6 June 2021: FBI Focusing on Cuomo Nursing Home Deaths Cover-up

Nursing home mortality remains focus of FBI's Cuomo probe

The Albany Times-Union's Brendan J. Lyons has a long article getting into what exactly the FBI is investigating. He leads with a description of how the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was drafted, which is new information:

Fifteen months ago, New York was becoming deluged with coronavirus cases when state health department officials received an urgent late-night call from a top administrator at a Newburgh hospital. He informed them a van had just dropped off more than 15 nursing home residents who had tested positive for COVID-19, and if more followed it could create a critical shortage of beds.

Although none of the nursing home residents clinically required hospitalization, the scene was not unique. Other nursing facility operators were also beginning to move COVID-positive residents to hospitals out of fear they could spread the illness in the assisted-living facilities.

That same month, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had been publicly declaring that New York would not be able to maintain enough hospital beds for coronavirus patients if infection rates continued to climb. Inside the governor's office, that March 2020 phone call from an official at Montefiore St. Luke's hospital in Newburgh prompted the administration to craft a hastily prepared memo that directed nursing homes to allow residents afflicted with COVID-19 to remain in or return to those facilities, even if they were being discharged from hospitals while still testing positive.

After reviewing how the Cuomo administration sought to present itself in its presentation of COVID deaths data, including in Governor Cuomo's pandemic book project, Lyons turns to the Cuomo administration's collection and reporting of COVID death data from nursing homes, which it blocked from being reported to state legislators and the public, which appears to have become a primary focus of the FBI's investigation:

Now, roughly six months into a federal criminal investigation of Cuomo's administration that is being steered by the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn, many of the investigative interviews have focused on why the administration — under the direction of top members of the governor's task force — had begun "stockpiling" information on people who were presumed to have died of COVID-19 in nursing homes. At one point last year, the number of unreported deaths in that category rose into the hundreds, a person briefed on the investigation said.

In early May 2020, the hiccups in the state health department's reporting of nursing home deaths were also revealed when more than 1,600 "presumed" deaths were suddenly added to the state's nursing home fatalities dashboard overnight on a Sunday. That increase in deaths attributed to COVID-19 pushed the number of New York nursing home deaths to more than 4,800 — a figure that would eventually top 15,000.

The federal investigation is focused in part on current and former health department officials who were involved in the data gathering and reporting of the nursing home fatalities — and what they were directed to do by top Cuomo aides. According to interviews with people familiar with the probe, it also is examining the administration's reporting of COVID-19 deaths to the CDC; alleged efforts to list nursing home fatalities as hospital deaths; and whether data on nursing home fatalities were deliberately withheld or delayed.

The report also provides an overview of the history of the U.S. DOJ's investigation, giving this summary of the personnel changes over time and an indication of what resources the DOJ has committed to the investigation:

The Cuomo administration had initially attributed the inquiry to Justice Department officials with political ties to administration of President Donald J. Trump. But the investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in the Eastern District of New York has continued even after Mark J. Lesko was appointed acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn in March by the administration of President Joe Biden; Lesko succeeded Seth DuCharme, who had been appointed U.S. attorney in that district last summer by Attorney General William Barr.

That transition has not derailed the federal investigation and, notably, the Eastern District is continuing to devote several FBI agents, assistant U.S. attorneys and investigators with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to the probe. Given those resources, people familiar with federal investigations and with knowledge of the case said they do not believe politics are influencing the direction of the case.

Overall, the report presents a lot of background information that we haven't seen summarized in a single account elsewhere, including more information than we've excerpted here. If you have the time, we recommend reading the whole thing.

The article refers to a number of events that are documented in greater detail within the timeline:

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6 June 2021: Michigan's Whitmer Administration Warned of Deadly Consequences of Its Version of Cuomo's COVID Nursing Home Directive

LeDuff: Elderly Covid Deaths In Michigan Don't Add Up. Why Doesn't The Media Care More?

In his column critquing the poor media coverage of both New York and Michigan's COVID nursing home deaths scandals, which we featured in a separate timeline entry focusing on that subject, columnist Charlie LeDuff also broke news related to Michigan Govenor Gretchen Whitmer's version of the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive:

The latest smoking gun? A memo from the Health Care Association of Michigan, which represents nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities. It was sent to the Whitmer administration and the Department of Health and Human Services on April 16, 2020. It reads in part:

Mandate that facility with census below 80% establish a Covid-19 dedicated unit

... the vast majority of nursing facilities will be mandated to create a dedicated hub, with no funding or PPE to care for Covid-19 affected residents. While most buildings will be forced to do this, many will not be able to because of physical plant restrictions, the lack of adequate PPE, and insufficient staff to care for these residents.

Even worse, this provision will introduce Covid-19 into units where it is not yet present, endangering residents who are the most vulnerable to this virus. Because of these dangers and restrictions, this provision should be eliminated.

But the provision was not eliminated. Rather, Whitmer signed the executive order the next day.

Politicians and the press -- I can't tell much difference anymore. But no matter which side of the aisle you sit on, no matter which master we serve, we should all want the truth. There's nothing progressive about letting old people die in the darkness.

To the best of our knowledge, LeDuff is breaking news with his reporting of the Health Care Association of Michigan's "smoking gun" memo. We also think he may be off on where it fits within the timeline, so let's look more closely at that aspect of the story.

The executive order to which LeDuff refers was issued on 15 April 2020, where the Health Care Association of Michigan's memo was written the following day according to LeDuff's dates. As such, the "smoking gun" memo would represent the Health Care Association of Michigan's warning to the Whitmer administration what they believed would be the consequences from the executive order Governor Whitmer issued the day before.

The scandal would still be the failure of the Whitmer administration to either modify or rescind the policy it established after it was warned of its potential consequences by the group whose members would be charged with implementing it. They cannot say they were not told, nor that they did not know. They were warned and they chose to let Governor Whitmer's deadly executive order run unchanged for months afterward.

Here is related coverage from the timeline:

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6 June 2021: Press Failing to Hold Power to Account in COVID Nursing Home Death Scandals

LeDuff: Elderly Covid Deaths In Michigan Don't Add Up. Why Doesn't The Media Care More?

Columnist Charlie Leduff has a theory for why the news media in both New York and in Michigan seem so uninterested in pursuing the big stories of both states' undercount of COVID nursing home deaths:

Why is the media so bewitched by Gov. Andrew Cuomo's creepy office conduct? For the same reason the media is intoxicated with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's little airplane lies.

It is a misdirect by the press corps to cover their failure to expose the bigger lies. Lies the press willingly went along with. Lies that the press must own up to since they amplified and broadcast them.

Untold more elderly died in long-term elderly care facilities from Covid-19 than either governor would admit. Both Whitmer and Cuomo knew the data they were feeding the public was misleading or incomplete.

But the press didn't bother to hold power to account, no matter what their Twitter pages say....

This should have been worldwide news months ago, had the press pushed harder.

Instead, theirs was a happy-to-be-there sort of deal. In New York, the media starred as bit players in Cuomo's press conference serial. In Michigan, it was see us next to Big Gretch in the VP sweepstakes. See us next to Big Gretch taking a knee. They were right there in the same virtual room, virtually standing alongside the Governor.

All the while the elderly were dying in their wards.

The media blithely accepted Whitmer's claims of science and data without ever seeing any besides the daily vomit of positivity projections and growth rate variations and vital records reviews. The most central and basic data – nursing home deaths – went unchallenged. The press were meek and outmaneuvered and now they are embarrassed.

So, to right their wrong without every having to admit the wrong, the New York press corps runs with Cuomo's harassment scandal. The Michigan media picks up on the airplane. In this way, a pound of flesh can be had without the messiness of having to acknowledge they were duped.

That's not all the news coming from LeDuff's 3 June 2020 column, where we'll catch up with the rest in a second entry featuring the column.

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Saturday, June 05, 2021

5 June 2021: Analysis - A Lawyer Describes What's at Stake in a COVID Nursing Home Death Liability Suit

Counsel's Corner: Lawsuit filed downstate for wrongful COVID-19 death in nursing home

WENY news interviewed attorney Christina Sonsire on the lawsuit Vivian Rivera-Zayas filed on 3 June 2021 against the nursing home where her mother died. The case will test the legal waters for determining how successful other families of COVID victims may be in holding them accountable for the deaths of their family members during the period in which Governor Cuomo gifted the facility operators with legal immunity.

Here's a video clip of the discussion:

Here's a summary of what the video clip covers:

In this week's edition of Counsel's Corner, Attorney Christina Sonsire, who is also a Partner at the Ziff Law Firm, breaks down the complexities of this case.

She also explains why this could open up the door for other families to sue facilities over COVID-19 related deaths.

Sonsire explains, early-on in the pandemic (around April 2020) Governor Cuomo successfully inserted a provision into the 2020 budget which essentially protected nursing homes, hospitals and other medical providers from suit of medical malpractice or negligence during the pandemic.

Towards the end of the summer, the New York Legislature decided this measure was completely unfair to plaintiffs. The government body then passed its own provision to reinstate the basic medical malpractice standards.

When it comes to the pending lawsuit, there are still questions surrounding the timeline of those provisions.

Since her mother's death from COVID in early 2020, Rivera-Zayas has become a leading advocate supporting the families of COVID nursing home victims. Here's related coverage from the timeline, which provides more background into Rivera-Zayas' story:

Follow the links at the bottom of the 3 June 2021 entry for more information about the history of Governor Cuomo's gift of legal immunity for New York hospitals and nursing home operators.

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Friday, June 04, 2021

4 June 2021: Abuse Victims Group Claims NY Speaker Heastie Protecting Cuomo

Abuse victims: Speaker Heastie stalling anti-harass laws, protecting Cuomo

The Sexual Harassment Working Group believes NY Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is abusing his position to block consideration of new anti-sexual harassment laws and is "providing cover" to protect Governor Andrew Cuomo over his alleged sexual harassment of several women.

The Sexual Harassment Working Group sent a scathing letter to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Lavine (D-Nassau) overseeing the Cuomo impeachment inquiry, complaining about foot-dragging on a package of bills that already passed passed the Democrat-run Senate.

Members of the group are former legislative staffers sexually harassed or who witnessed abuse by late Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez and other lawmakers.

“We are very familiar with the patterns of this chamber to block, delay, and run out the clock on survivors and the legislation that would protect them as a means of providing cover for serial abusers,” the Sexual Harassment Working Group wrote Thursday.

The group also criticized the Assembly Judiciary Committee’s impeachment inquiry of Cuomo, which includes examining harassment accusations female staffers leveled against the governor.

“And even now, the chamber appears to be providing that same cover for Governor Cuomo, the Assembly is running an ill-conceived, parallel investigation into nearly a dozen reports of sexual misconduct against Governor Cuomo … By failing to pass this package of bills … the Assembly is continuing a 20-year practice of protecting abusers and the institutions that shelter them,” the group said.

The report identifies the measures they accuse NY Speaker Heastie of blocking:

On the top of the list of bills the Assembly is accused of slow-walking is the Adult Survivors Act — which the state Senate unanimously passed earlier Thursday — which would give victims who were abused when they 18 or older recourse to file civil lawsuits against their abusers. It would create a one-year look back window for survivors to file civil suits — akin to the Child Victims Act.

Another proposed law authored by state Sen. Andrew Gounardes (D-Brooklyn) would prohibit the retaliatory disclosure of employee personnel files — in direct response to the Cuomo administration’s release of Cuomo accuser Lindsey Boylan’s personnel records. It passed the Senate unanimously.

Other measures that passed the Senate last week but still are bottled up in Assembly committee include: extending the statute of limitations to file for employment discrimination from three years to six years: ban “no rehire” clauses in settlement agreements for workers that filed a harassment claim against an employer; extending anti-discrimination protections to legislative and judicial employees under the state Human Rights law; and bar financial penalties against harassment victims who speak out after signing non-disclosure agreements;

Since these measures all passed in New York's Senate, the lack of similar movement in the Assembly points to an absence of support by Speaker Heastie and members of the Democratic party in the Assembly, because Heastie typically only advances legislation when at least 76 members of the Democratic party will vote in favor of it. With 150 seats in Assembly, that policy means only what Democrats want becomes law.

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4 June 2021: Advocates for Disabled Living in Group Homes Demand More Resources

Advocates: Protect people in group homes amid COVID

Governor Cuomo's COVID policies for group homes, which represent a smaller scale version of the administration's COVID nursing home deaths scandals, has been percolating in the background during the last few months. Now, advocates for the disabled are raising the profile of that story in a bid to gain more state resources from New York's legislature.

New York failed to provide desperately needed protective gear, testing and help with staffing for group homes serving residents with developmental and intellectual disabilities at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders of those homes and family members told lawmakers at a legislative hearing Thursday.

Staffing levels in New York’s system supporting individuals with disabilities have dwindled since the COVID-19 pandemic, which advocates say threatens the quality of care for some of the state’s most vulnerable residents.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers faced calls Thursday to boost pay for group home workers, require routine COVID-19 testing and ensure people with disabilities are a priority in response plans.

Among advocates concerns is that group homes, unlike nursing homes, aren’t required to regularly test staff for COVID-19 or launch rounds of testing after a resident or staffer test positive.

“It’s very troubling that people in group homes aren’t given the same protection as people in nursing homes and other congregate settings,” said Julie Keegan, a director with Disability Rights New York. “People in group homes often have higher rates of comorbidities that put them at higher risk of death. There is no rational basis for this discriminatory practice.”

At least 577 people have died due to confirmed COVID-19 infection at group residences overseen by the state’s Office for People With Developmental Disabilities, according to the agency’s latest data.

That tally doesn’t include the number of residents who died at hospitals, or deaths of residents who likely died of COVID-19.

Related background information from the timeline:

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Thursday, June 03, 2021

3 June 2021: Michigan Official Confirms Count of COVID Nursing Home Deaths in State Is Incomplete

Michigan health chief: COVID death count in long-term facilities may be ‘low’

Michigan's top public health official is acknowledging the state's offiical count of the total number of COVID deaths at nursing homes is incomplete.

Health and Human Services Director Elizabeth Hertel told lawmakers that 38 of 311 long-term care facilities statewide have not reported COVID-19 deaths as required, while the state didn’t require deaths to be reported at facilities that serve 12 or fewer residents.

Her testimony before the House Oversight Committee followed months of scrutiny from Republicans over Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s handling of COVID cases at senior facilities.

But Hertel stood by the state’s total of deaths in nursing homes, which are licensed by the state and have drawn controversy because of Whitmer’s decision early in the pandemic to use some as “hubs” for recovering COVID patients.

“What the nursing homes are reporting are accurate,” Hertel said, adding they had no “reason or incentive to hide (deaths).”

That statement doesn't tell the whole story however. Much like how New York's Governor Cuomo purposefully hid the full extent of COVID deaths among nursing home residents in his state, Michigan's official count of nursing home resident COVID deaths does not include many of those residents who became ill from COVID and were transferred to hospital before dying. A recent independent analysis of a sample of the state's death certificate data indicates Michigan's COVID death toll for its nursing home residents could be 40% higher than its official figures indicate.

Steve Delie, an attorney for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, filed a lawsuit to secure the COVID-19 records from the state on behalf of a Michigan-based podcast, No BS News Hour.

He told lawmakers Thursday that the records he received in the suit made it clear the state wasn’t counting all long-term care deaths, including those at smaller facilities. He asked the committee to get a list of all deaths and compare it with the list of all long-term care facilities.

“The people of the state of Michigan deserve to know who died and where,” Delie said.

Michigan's undercount of the full extent of COVID deaths among the state's nursing home residents appears to be the result of inadequate data collection standards and lax policy enforcement for reporting these deaths by the state's public health officials. That makes Michigan's situation very different from New York, where the state's Department of Health collected the data, which was subsequently covered up by Cuomo administration officials to hide the full extent of COVID deaths among New York nursing home residents. By contrast, Michigan's officials have fully reported data they are now acknowledging is incomplete.

An audit of death records in Michigan will be needed to establish how many of the state's nursing home residents died from COVID-19.

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3 June 2021: Editorial - Cuomo Must Release Details of Book Deal

EDITORIAL: Cuomo must release details of book deal

Governor Cuomo played a cynical game for months related to the details of his $5.1 million pandemic "leadership" book deal, promising he would release them when he filed his tax returns.

Tax day has come and gone, and while he provided some additional information, there's a lot we still don't know about it. Many of those questions could be answered by Governor Cuomo releasing his publishing contract to the public. This editorial calls for Cuomo to provide full transparency into the terms he negotiated with his publisher.

Here in New York, the law bends over backwards for the government and against the people. That fact is no more evident than in the media’s efforts to obtain details about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s book deal.

The governor’s office is refusing to release public records relating to Cuomo’s financial deal for his book, “American Crisis,” spotlighting his management of the coronavirus pandemic....

The first reason given for denying the records was that records by state ethics panels are secret. The other was that the records were compiled for law enforcement purposes.

Regarding the first excuse, the Cuomo administration is selective in what it releases from ethics panels, as it has released such information in the past.

Regarding the second, the records weren’t collected for law enforcement purposes, and the records sought weren’t even sought from any law enforcement agency that’s conducting an investigation.

Both denials exploit loopholes in the state FOIL law that have long been used to hide malfeasance and wrongdoing.

And even if you believe these are legitimate reasons for keeping these records secret, which they’re not, there is no requirement that the governor’s office withhold them. Unless specifically prohibited from disclosure, the governor’s office is free to release the documents if it wants.

The logical assumption from the Cuomo administration's position is the public information would either contradict their statements about the Governor's book deal or would negatively impact Governor Cuomo.

Here is related coverage from the timeline:

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3 June 2021: A Legal Test of New York's Reformed COVID Immunity Law for Nursing Homes

‘They lied to us’: Pending lawsuit in COVID-19 nursing home death in N.Y. could open the doors for families to sue facilities

On 2 April 2021, Governor Cuomo gifted legal immunity from COVID deaths to a powerful hospital and nursing home lobbying group, which he slipped into an emergency budget bill. That law soon face a legal test.

For three long months, as her mother recovered from knee surgery in a Long Island nursing home, Vivian Rivera-Zayas says she was repeatedly assured the 78-year-old woman was doing just fine.

And then she died from coronavirus.

The senior citizen’s shocking death left her devastated daughter with unanswered questions that she hopes to resolve with a potentially ground-breaking lawsuit alleging the nursing home was negligent because it placed her mother on a floor with people who were afflicted with COVID-19.

“How is it possible that my mother died of COVID-19?” Rivera-Zayas asked in an interview with the Daily News. “She was admitted to the nursing home for rehabilitation. They lied to us, because they didn’t tell us there was COVID-19 in the nursing home.”

Her legal action — one of the first of its kind filed in New York state— will provide an important legal test of the controversial immunity provision pushed through early last year by Gov. Cuomo to protect nursing homes, hospitals and other health care facilities during the pandemic.

“The case that we’re in court with now is important,” said attorney Brett Leitner, who represents Rivera-Zayas. “Hopefully, we can hold these nursing homes and hospitals accountable.”

Although New York's law related to the COVID immunity of nursing homes and hospitals was repealed a year later, the question of whether that reform may be applied retroactively remains unanswered.

Here is related coverage from the timeline outlining these aspects of Governor Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals:

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Wednesday, June 02, 2021

2 June 2021: Cuomo Administration To Spend Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Defending Itself

$2.5M taxpayer contract for Cuomo nursing home probe

The Cuomo administration will spend $2,500,000 ($2.5 million) of New York taxpayer dollars to defend itself from a federal investigation of its COVID nursing home deaths scandals.

Taxpayers will spend up to $2.5 million defending Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office in a federal investigation examining its alleged suppression of figures showing the true number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19.

That’s according to OpenBookNY.com, a website maintained by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office, which discloses information about state contracts. The website states that the Executive Chamber’s $2.5 million contract for legal services with the law firm Morvillo Abramowitz was “approved and filed” on April 27.

A copy of the contract, provided by DiNapoli's office, says the firm will charge up to $937.50 an hour for work performed by law firm partner Elkan Abramowitz. The contract says the rates are "significantly discounted" from standard hourly rates: By 25 percent for Abramowitz and 15 percent for other attorneys.

Abramowitz' firm is just one of four law firms that have been retained by the Cuomo administration. It is the first however for which the cost of defending Governor Cuomo's from facing consequences in his multiple scandals has been made public.

By contrast, the New York Assembly's impeachment probe has allocated $250,000 to investigate every single one of Governor Cuomo's multiple scandals - not just the administration's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. The order of magnitude difference is one reason the Assembly's impeachment probe has become widely considered to be a sham.

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2 June 2021: CNN's Cuomo Exposes Systemic Ethical Failures at Network

CNN under ethics scrutiny following Cuomo revelations

The amazing revelation in this report is that CNN has virtually non-existent policies for addressing any of its journalists' conflicts of interests or ethical missteps. Instead, its managers and editors substitute arbitrary enforcement of vague guidelines, which lets them do whatever they want.

CNN is coming under internal and external criticism over its approach to conflicts of interest for journalists after host Chris Cuomo escaped disciplinary action despite advising his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), on how to handle sexual misconduct allegations.

Current and former employees have criticized the host of “Cuomo Prime Time” for the transgression, but a retired CNN ethics executive says the lack of clear cut policies are largely to blame.

“You won't see any rules that are etched in stone so that a violation could be a firing offense,” said Steve Holmes, who retired from CNN in 2019 after working at the network for more than a decade.

“And I think you see sort of the results. I mean the Chris Cuomo thing, they can't say that he's violated any written policies because there aren't any, period,” said Holmes, who reported to the executive vice president of news standards and practices when he was at CNN.

What Holmes is describing is an environment in which a toxic culture with a high tolerance for corruption can thrive. Holmes indicates CNN's managers and editors are effectively complicit in Chris Cuomo's ethical lapses.

Holmes, who was an editor at The Washington Post and part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at The New York Times before joining CNN, said the inaction on Cuomo sends the wrong message.

“For them to sort of just shrug their shoulders and slough it off is just to me like, ‘Hold on people, don't you see how this looks?’” Holmes said.

“They could do that and take the criticism that it’s too lenient,” he said. “But what do they do when they don't do anything? What kind of signals does it send that you don't do anything?”

CNN's absence of written ethical standards is unique, according to an industry interest group:

Matthew Hall, national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, said, “Each outlet should have a policy, explain the policy to staff, expect the staff to follow the policy and then actually enforce the policy.”

Without such a written policy, CNN's journalists have little to no recourse to challenge ethical misconduct by their peers, their editors, and their organization's management:

CNN’s ostensible reasoning for having ethical guidelines, as opposed to hard and fast rules, Holmes said, was because it allowed them to handle problems on a case-by-case basis. Holmes said that also allowed CNN to deal with people who violated the guidelines depending upon how they felt about them.

That's the exact recipe needed to allow a toxic culture of fear and corruption to become institutionalized.

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2 June 2021: Governor Cuomo Asks for Big Dollar Political Donations

Embattled Gov. Andrew Cuomo to hold pricey re-election fundraiser

Governor Andrew Cuomo will hold a fundraiser for wealthy campaign donors at the end of June 2020.

Embattled Gov. Andrew Cuomo, facing multiple investigations, is holding a June 29 campaign fundraiser as he eyes re-election to a fourth term next year.

The asking price for the “summer reception”: $10,000 per person and $15,000 for two.

The New York City-based event will be held at 6 p.m., according to the e-invitation sent out by Cuomo campaign finance director Gita Tiku.

It’s believed to be Cuomo’s first high-dollar fundraiser since he was hit with state and federal investigations over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and treatment of female staffers.

The report quotes an anonymous source who received an invitation.

“It’s not surprising,” said a source on the Cuomo campaign’s fundraising mailing list, saying there’s a possibility that the governor could tap campaign funds to cover his legal costs.

The Albany insider said lobbyists and other donors with business before the state government may “hedge their bets and ante up” in case Cuomo is cleared of wrongdoing and runs for a fourth term.

Questions for potential donors: What is it you think you're buying by making large donations to Governor Cuomo's campaign at this time? Aren't there smarter things you could be doing with your money?

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2 June 2021: Cuomo Using Probes to Avoid Disclosing Pandemic Book Deal Documents

Cuomo refuses to release records related to his 'American Crisis' book

This report describes the response Albany Times-Union received from Governor Cuomo's office when they sought public records related to Andrew Cuomo's pandemic "leadership" book deal on Friday, 28 May 2021.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's office is refusing to release a multitude of public records related to his $5.1 million book deal, with his attorneys invoking one law that keeps records of the state's ethics panel secret and another designed to keep law enforcement records hidden if releasing them could interfere with an investigation.

The first explanation is notable because Cuomo's office recently released the very type of records it's now asserting must be suppressed.

The latter reason is striking because the Executive Chamber is not a law enforcement agency and the records being sought, including time and attendance records of his top aides, were not compiled "for law enforcement purposes" as the statute is written.

Last Friday evening, ahead of the Memorial Day weekend, Cuomo’s office denied three Freedom of Information Law requests submitted by the Times Union. There is nothing in state law that prevents Cuomo's office from releasing the records, and a state ethics commissioner on Monday called Cuomo’s legal argument for suppressing one type of records “absurd.”

The newspaper's requests sought the timesheets showing the governmental work hours for Cuomo aides who did extensive work on his book; records Cuomo’s office had provided to state ethics officials seeking approval to publish "American Crisis;" and copies of any investigative letters that ethics regulators may have sent to Cuomo’s office in recent weeks.

In his pandemic "leadership" book, Cuomo proclaimed the importance of transparency. His administration's inconsistent actions now to avoid disclosing public records to related to the book's production using "absurd" pretenses confirm Andrew Cuomo's hypocrisy.

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