Andrew Cuomo

New York Inspector General Resigns amid Talk of Potential Ethics Probe

September 18, 2021 by Nick Gilbertson Leave a Comment

New York State Inspector General Letizia Tagliafierro has resigned amid a revived probe into the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which pertains to a previous investigation into an illegal leak that was centered around Joe Percoco, a former aide of shamed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

A spokesperson for the OIG confirmed the resignation to the New York Post. “Yes, she has resigned. We have no further comment,” the spokesperson explained. Tagliafierro notified her office of her resignation in an email that was obtained by City and State New York. The email explained that she enjoyed her time as inspector general but failed to detail why she is leaving.

Until Gov. Kathy Hochul appoints a new inspector general. Executive Deputy Inspector General Robyn Adair will serve as the interim inspector general.

Tagliafierro was originally appointed as attorney general in 2019. Before then, she served as deputy secretary for intergovernmental affairs, special council for public safety, and special counsel to the governor. Moreover, the former inspector general was the executive director of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) from 2013-2015. The commission operates as the state’s watchdog panel.

In 2019, an OIG investigation was launched into JCOPE after a whistleblower complained of an alleged leak from a JCOPE meeting. The meeting centered around a potential probe into Cuomo’s former disgraced aide Joe Percoco. Cuomo was reportedly briefed with the information that came from the leak and reportedly knew how certain commissioners voted regarding a potential probe. The whistleblower’s complaint resulted in an investigation into the leak.

As she previously served as executive director for JCOPE, former Inspector General Tagliafierro recused herself from the investigation, and the probe was conducted by former Deputy Director Spencer Freedman. The OIG investigation found that the office could not substantiate the whistleblower’s claims.

When details of the investigation came to light, it was discovered that the OIG neither interviewed Cuomo nor Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who received a phone call from an irate Cuomo immediately after the vote.

Speaker of the New York State Assembly Carl Heastie, left, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo listen to speakers at the National Action Network House of Justice, in New York, Monday, Jan. 15, 2018 (AP Photo/Richard Drew).

JCOPE voted to make a referral to Attorney General Letitia James regarding the launch of a criminal investigation into the matter. The secondary motion to carry out the investigation did not pass.

When Are Daily Briefings Appropriate?

August 26, 2021 by Dominic Pino Leave a Comment

President Joe Biden leaves after attending a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., August 22, 2021. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

Despite the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences rescinding Andrew Cuomo’s Emmy award, we won’t forget the inordinate praise he received for his daily COVID briefings. They awarded him an Emmy for “his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.”

A wistful retrospective from the Associated Press in June 2020 titled “100 Days of Cuomo” described the New York governor’s briefings as “appointment viewing around the nation.” It said that Cuomo “provided glimpses of his humanity through 110 briefings with reporters.” It praised his performances in glowing terms: “On any given day, he would fret over the safety of his 88-year-old mother, expound on the grittiness of New Yorkers, get misty-eyed over the gift of a single mask, defend charges he locked down the state too late, chide young people for not wearing masks, or grieve over daily death tolls that climbed as high as 800.”

An October 2020 Forbes article used Cuomo’s example as a lesson in crisis communication. “The communication lessons that Cuomo learned . . . will help any leader or aspiring leader navigate teams through a crisis,” it said. It praised the consistency of his briefings, which were at 11:30 a.m. every day. It also praised his effort in crafting the presentations and his authentic emotion.

That was for the pandemic, a crisis that, as Charlie pointed out today, politicians have limited ability to do anything about. The virus is invisible, it came from another country, it requires voluntary action throughout the whole population, and above all, its spread is governed by biology, not politics. Further, the virus is and has always been a respiratory illness with a certain set of symptoms and a certain set of available policy responses (masks, social distancing, travel restrictions, and now vaccines). Things change, and we have learned new information over the course of the pandemic, but the basic facts of the virus do not change day-to-day.

Contrast this with the situation in Afghanistan, where things change by the hour. Reporters on the ground are constantly giving updates, which unavoidably might contradict each other, and Americans are left wondering what is really going on. It’s a situation involving a discrete policy decision made by President Biden, the decision to withdraw by August 31, and it involves the military, over which Biden is commander in chief. American lives are at risk at the hands of a number of different terrorist groups, and Afghan allies are under threat of near-certain execution by the Taliban.

In the eleven days since the fall of Kabul on August 15, President Biden has spoken directly to the American people about Afghanistan four times (on August 16, August 20, August 22, and August 24). Only two of those were solely about Afghanistan (his August 22 remarks were also about tropical storm Henri, and his August 24 remarks were also about his domestic agenda).

If there were ever a time that regular, daily briefings from the chief executive would be welcome, it would be now. If they were appropriate for Cuomo to inform and comfort an unsure people about the pandemic, they are certainly appropriate for Biden now. Biden is directly responsible for this withdrawal, and the American people deserve to hear straight from him on its status.

Andrew Cuomo Losing His Emmy Is Good News for All

August 25, 2021 by Ingrid Chung Leave a Comment

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo arrives to depart in his helicopter after announcing his resignation, in New York City, N.Y., August 10, 2021. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)

Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York, is an Emmy-award-winning politician no more.

The International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences released a statement yesterday announcing that “in light of the New York attorney general’s report, and Andrew Cuomo’s subsequent resignation as governor, it is rescinding his special 2020 International Emmy Award.” Just last November, when Cuomo was still hailed as the white knight of New York battling COVID-19, he received this international Emmy award “in recognition of his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” At the time, the news was baffling and a source of amusement to many. It is hardly customary for Emmys to be awarded to individuals unaffiliated with show business, let alone to a politician. Despite being praised by some, Cuomo’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic had been much criticized by others. For instance, his decision to prohibit nursing homes from denying admission to COVID patients and from requiring hospitalized patients to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission has been tied to New York’s disproportionately high death rates. Unsurprisingly, many conservatives resented the idea of Cuomo getting any award at all.

There is no telling how devasted Cuomo is by the loss of his Emmy. But one would not expect Cuomo, who is currently under investigation by the Albany County sheriff’s office as per a criminal complaint filed against him, to have much of a reaction — after all, this may be the least of his troubles, which he well deserves — and not just for his COVID response. The attorney general’s report to which International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences statement refers was an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment by Cuomo. It stated that Cuomo harassed multiple female state employees “by engaging in unwanted groping, kissing, and hugging, and making inappropriate comments.”

The report confirms the substantiated sexual-harassment allegations against Cuomo that started surfacing last December. At that time, Democrats who had previously heralded the former governor as the saintly symbol of resistance against the wrath of COVID-19 and gushingly lauded his disastrous response to the pandemic began to turn against him. Conservatives, on the other hand, have been gloating on the sidelines and reveling in the irony of these developments. Beyond smug amusement, however, conservatives might be glad to see Cuomo’s former liberal supporters retract their support and praise for him — not only for the irony of it all, but also for what it might indicate about the survival of common values in an increasingly polarized America. Double standards are abundant in modern politics, as commentators prioritize the advancing of their respective narratives over objectivity in evaluation of political events.

It is reassuring to know that the Left and the Right are still able to come together in unified condemnation of a man who had abused his position and the power that came with it to take advantage of women, who, by virtue of professional subordination, were placed in a particularly vulnerable position. Power and political affiliation, as it turns out, are not impenetrable shields behind which the guilty can hide.

Of course, conservatives may hope that other fundamentally important principles, such as free speech, can also be defended with equal ardor on both sides. But for now, this is good news.

Andrew Cuomo Lets a Democrat’s Terrorist Father Out of Jail

August 25, 2021 by Dan McLaughlin Leave a Comment

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference in New York City, May 10, 2021. (Mary Altaffer/Pool via Reuters)

Andrew Cuomo managed one last outrage on his way out the door before his resignation became effective at midnight on Monday: He granted clemency to David Gilbert, along with three other murderers.

Gilbert and Kathy Boudin were the getaway drivers for the 1981 Brink’s armored-car heist that killed Brink’s guard Peter Paige and police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady, who collectively left behind three widows and six fatherless children, the youngest six months of age. (Three others were wounded.) Gilbert claims that he never intended for anyone to get hurt, and this claim is echoed today by the influential son he had with Kathy Boudin, San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, who said yesterday that Gilbert “never intended harm.”

This was always nonsense. The Brink’s robbery was not just a crime; it was carried out by members of a pair of left-wing domestic-terrorist groups, the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army. The people Gilbert and Boudin were driving came armed with M-16s, shotguns, and body armor. Their weapons were powerful enough to blow a huge hole in the reinforced windshield of the armored car:

The killers, who also included Tupac Shakur’s stepfather, waited in ambush for the armored car and gunned down the two Nyack police officers at a roadblock. Gilbert and Boudin were selected as the drivers rather than the robbers simply because they were white, and the gang assumed that they’d be less likely to be stopped by police looking for black suspects. At trial, far from showing remorse, Gilbert and his co-defendants “spent the trial claiming they were political prisoners and freedom fighters and disrupted what they deemed illegitimate proceedings by raising their fists and shouting, ‘Free the land!’” The fact that Gilbert was unarmed does not change the essential fact that he participated in an act of political terrorism.

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This was not a nonviolent group in general:

The left-wing terror group orchestrated a series of bombings in the 1970s. The group was allegedly behind the 1970 firebombing of the home of a New York Supreme Court justice who was set to preside over a trial of members of the Black Panthers. Three Weather Underground members died later that year while making bombs that they hoped to detonate at a social event held at Fort Dix, an Army base in New Jersey. Kathy Boudin was helping make the bombs but escaped unharmed after the explosion.

The Weather Underground bombed the Capitol in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972 (on Ho Chi Minh’s birthday), and the State Department headquarters in 1975. Gilbert was, quite rightly, sentenced to 75 years to life.

Somehow, though, these domestic terrorists have managed to get the radical-chic treatment from supposedly respectable Democratic politicians and academia. One of Gilbert’s co-defendants, Judith Clark, was set free by Cuomo in 2019. Kathy Boudin was released in 2003 after two decades in prison and was hired to teach at Columbia University. Bernardine Dohrn, formerly of the FBI’s Most Wanted List, served another seven months in 1982 for refusing to cooperate with the Brink’s grand jury. When she got out, she settled down with her husband, Bill Ayers, another unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. “I don’t regret setting bombs, I feel we didn’t do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in an interview published the morning of September 11, 2001. Ayers and Dohrn took custody of Chesa Boudin, then a toddler, and raised him in their home. Dohrn got a gig at Northwestern Law; Ayers became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He later received thousands of dollars in education-grant money routed to him by his friend Barack Obama. Obama launched his first political fundraiser in the house where Ayers and Dohrn were raising Chesa Boudin but claimed that he had no idea who they were.

Why do Democrats and liberal academia keep doing this sort of thing? Bill Clinton, for example, pardoned Puerto Rican terrorists. Sixties radicals, even those with undeniable blood on their hands, have all too often been treated sentimentally not only by progressive activists but by mainstream Democrats of Cuomo’s ilk.

There is no traditional counterpart to this on the right, no comparable history of pardoning abortion-clinic bombers, giving professorships to white-nationalist militia leaders, or having cocktail-party shindigs with arsonists. Donald Trump’s worst pardons were typically government officials or soldiers. Even efforts by some on the MAGA right to make a cause celebre of the Capitol rioters or Kyle Rittenhouse have not gained the kind of support from conservative institutions or mainstream Republican politicians that leftist terrorists and rioters have enjoyed for decades.

Letting Gilbert out of jail is one last scandal. It is not at all out of character for Cuomo or his party.

Still Not Apologizing

August 23, 2021 by Alexandra DeSanctis Leave a Comment

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference on gun violence in New York City, July 6, 2021. (Jeenah Moon/Reuters)

Two weeks ago, when Andrew Cuomo announced that he’d resign his post as governor of New York, I noted that he had still failed to apologize for or even acknowledge his misdeeds. Though through the course of his long-lived scandal he repeated a few times that he was taking “full responsibility” for his actions, he never did any such thing, instead offering excuses and rationalizations to justify himself.

Today, on his last day in office, Cuomo continued that drumbeat, calling his resignation “unfair and unjust,” adding,

when government politicizes allegations and the headlines condemn without facts, you undermine the justice system. And that doesn’t serve women and it doesn’t serve men. Of course everyone has a right to come forward, and we applaud their bravery and courage in doing so but allegations must still be scrutinized and verified.

A far cry from the governor who signed legislation making it nearly impossible for anyone accused of sexual harassment or assault to have due process under the law. It’s astonishing that Cuomo chose to step down from his post before he’d actually admit to having done anything significantly wrong.