Edited by: TJVNews.com
The two top Democrats in New York’s legislature withdrew their support for Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday amid mounting allegations of sexual harassment and undercounting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins became the first senior Democrat in the state to say the three-term governor should resign. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie stopped short of demanding that Cuomo quit, but said in a statement that “it is time for the Governor to seriously consider whether he can effectively meet the needs of the people of New York.”
On Saturday, two more women who worked for Cuomo publicly accused him of inappropriate behavior, on the heels of other allegations in recent weeks.
“Every day there is another account that is drawing away from the business of government,” Stewart-Cousins said in a statement. “New York is still in the midst of this pandemic and is still facing the societal, health and economic impacts of it. We need to govern without daily distraction. For the good of the state Governor Cuomo must resign.”
Her public push for his resignation came shortly after a Sunday press conference where Cuomo said it would be “anti-democratic” for him to step down.
“There is no way I resign,” Cuomo told reporters.
“They don’t override the people’s will, they don’t get to override elections,” he said. “I was elected by the people of New York state. I wasn’t elected by politicians.”
In a brief phone conversation Sunday prior to the press conference, Cuomo told Stewart-Cousins he wouldn’t quit and they would have to impeach him if they wanted him out of office, according to a person who was briefed by someone on the call. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the call was intended to be private.
Cuomo said the next six months will determine how successfully New York emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. “I’m not going to be distracted because there is too much to do for the people,” he said, noting that the state must pass a budget within three weeks and administer 15 million more COVID-19 vaccines.
Support for Cuomo has eroded with surprising speed as he’s faced twin scandals, one over his treatment of women in the workplace, and a second over his administration’s months-long refusal to release complete statistics on COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.
Some lawmakers have been infuriated by revelations that Cuomo’s administration delayed releasing some data about deaths of nursing home patients in hospitals, at least partly because of concerns it could be used against them by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Several women have publicly told of feeling sexually harassed, or at least made to feel demeaned and uncomfortable. The state’s attorney general is investigating. Cuomo has urged people to wait for that investigation to conclude before they judge him.
Others who have called for Cuomo’s resignation include U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice, a Long Island Democrat.
Former adviser Lindsey Boylan, 36, said Cuomo made inappropriate comments on her appearance, joked about playing strip poker and once kissed her on the lips at the end of a meeting. Former aide, 25-year-old Charlotte Bennett, said Cuomo asked if she ever had sex with older men and made other comments she interpreted as gauging her interest in an affair.
Another former aide, Ana Liss, told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Saturday that when she worked as a policy aide to the governor between 2013 and 2015, Cuomo called her “sweetheart,” kissed her hand and asked personal questions including whether she had a boyfriend.
Asked about Liss’ story at his news conference Sunday, Cuomo said such talk was “my way of doing friendly banter.”
Echoing comments he made in a news conference last week, Cuomo acknowledged he’d made jokes and asked personal questions in an attempt to be collegial and frequently greeted people with hugs and kisses.
“I never meant to make anyone feel any uncomfortable,” he said. Cuomo has denied touching anyone inappropriately.
While Cuomo has been apologetic in recent days over his behavior, at least tacitly acknowledging that some of the things women have said are true, he’s also singled out a few accusations as flatly false.
On Sunday he disputed a story told by about him by Karen Hinton, a former press aide to Cuomo when he served as the federal housing secretary under President Bill Clinton.
In a story published Saturday in The Washington Post, Hinton detailed an uncomfortable hotel room interaction she had with Cuomo when the two met in California years ago as they were trying to patch things up after an estrangement.
Hinton said that as she got up to leave, Cuomo gave her a hug that was “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate.”
She described the encounter not as sexual harassment but as a “power play” for “manipulation and control.” She was no longer an aide to Cuomo at the time.
Asked Sunday about Hinton’s account Cuomo said it was “not true” and noted that the two had been longtime political adversaries.
Celebrity chef, Food Channel regular and former gal pal to New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, Sandra Lee reacted to the harassment accusations against her ex-paramour by former female aides with the shocked words: “Oh my God.”
The Post reported that Lee, 54, made the remark but declined to comment further when asked last week in the aftermath of accusations by these aides and other young women against Cuomo for harassment.
According to a report on the cheatsheet.com web site, Sandra Lee and Andrew Cuomo ended their decade long relationship in September 2019, just a few months before Cuomo was thrust into the national spotlight. As governor of New York State, Cuomo was tasked with steering the state through the Coronavirus crisis, and people across the world watched his daily news conferences. He even had the time to pen a book about his experiences navigating the coronavirus as a leader and even won a daytime Emmy award for his daily presentations to the voting public.
Cuomo and Lee started their relationship in 2005, according to the cheastsheet.com web site, shortly after Cuomo’s divorce from Kerry Kennedy was finalized. Betrothed to the seventh child of Robert Kennedy, Jr and his wife Ethel, Cuomo was married to Kennedy for 15 years and they share three daughters together. According to a report in the New York Times, Cuomo and Lee first met at a cocktail party in the Hamptons. They were introduced by a mutual friend, and Lee was, reportedly, taken with Cuomo immediately. Their relationship began shortly after that, but it took more than a year for Lee to meet Cuomo’s three daughters.
Turning to the subject of the nursing home scandal that has rocked the nation, according to a report by Andrew Kerr of the Daily Caller News Foundation, Cuomo and his top lieutenants cited a report altered by his top aides to paint a false narrative of his handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in nursing homes in comparison to other states.
The New York State Department of Health knew that nearly 10,000 nursing home residents had died of COVID-19 by early July, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Despite this, top Cuomo aides convinced the health department to report just 6,432 nursing home deaths in a July 6 report that claimed the Cuomo administration’s infamous March 25 order did not lead to more fatalities.
The July 6 report used the reduced figure, which omitted nursing home residents who died of the virus at a hospital, to conclude that only 21% of New York COVID-19 deaths were in nursing homes. The figure was repeatedly cited by Cuomo all while he was claiming to be a servant only to the facts.
No other state that reports nursing homes COVID-19 deaths omits residents who died in hospitals from their reporting. But Cuomo and other New York officials still used the 21% figure to claim New York was handling the situation better than 45 other states.
“You look at the nursing home deaths in this state,” Cuomo told reporters in October. “Do you know what number we are by percentage before you made that statement? We’re No. 46 out of 50 states, and we had the worst problem, and we’re 46th in terms of percentage of deaths in nursing homes.”
New York State Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker also cited the 21% figure during a July 6 press conference announcing the findings of the report.
“We have had 21, 22 percent of our deaths are in the nursing homes, which is essentially the lowest in the nation,” Zucker said.
“New York state ranked 46 in the nation, meaning that 45 states had a greater percentage of fatalities,” Zucker said of the state’s nursing home deaths.
Zucker also accused some critics of Cuomo’s March 25 order, which required nursing homes to accept coronavirus-positive patients, of either lacking the ability to think critically or of operating with “malice.”
“Sometimes what happens is that a narrative gets perpetuated when it’s not based on facts,” he said. “And that narrative, that story, gets swept away as the truth simply by virtue of repetition whether because of lack of critical thinking or malice. Either way, it does not do us as a society any good.”
Sitting beside Zucker at the press conference was Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling, a Cuomo donor and nursing home operator who reportedly lobbied Cuomo to sign legislation in April that shielded nursing home executives from coronavirus-related lawsuits.
“New York has done exceptionally well,” Dowling said during the press conference. “Percentage of deaths in nursing homes — percentage of total — in New York was 21%. Just look at other states.”
“Rhode Island it was 77%. Minnesota, 77%. Pennsylvania, 68%. Kentucky, 61%,” Dowling said. “So it’s interesting when you see all the narrative focusing on, oh, look what happened in New York … but when you look at it percentage-wise, New York was number 46 in the United States. That’s an important fact to keep in mind.”
A special counsel to Cuomo, Beth Garvey, issued a statement Friday saying that the decision to omit nursing home residents who died from COVID-19 in hospitals from the July 6 report “didn’t change the outcome” of the report and that Cuomo’s March 25 order requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus-positive patients did not inflate the death toll.
But the oft-cited 21% figure cited by Cuomo and his top lieutenants jumps up to 33% when taking into account the over 4,000 previously unreported nursing home residents who died of COVID-19 in hospitals that Cuomo administration revealed in early February, according to the Empire Center.
“By this measure, the revised toll pushed New York from 21 percent to 33 percent, and its ranking among states from 48th to 33rd,” the Empire center reported.
Another false statistic cited by Cuomo that was derived from the undercounted nursing home death toll was his claim that New York’s COVID-19 morality rate in nursing homes ranked 35 among all states.
“Just on the top line, we are number 35 in the nation in percentage of deaths in nursing homes,” Cuomo said during a July 24 press conference. “Go talk to 34 other states first, go talk to the Republican states now. Florida, Texas, Arizona. Ask them what is happening in nursing homes. It’s all politics.”
(sources: AP & NYT & the Daily Caller)
