Andrew Cuomo Has Always Been Corrupt
This article originally appeared at the Washington Examiner.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has come under fire following an investigation into his conduct by New York Attorney General Letitia James, which found 11 counts of sexual harassment. Following the release of this report, prominent democratic politicians from the speaker of the New York State Assembly all the way up to President Joe Biden have called for his resignation. Yet while people across the country are surprised, this is not the first time the governor has shown us who he really is.
The New York government has long been corrupt. And while Cuomo has vowed to rid Albany of the moral and political rot that has plagued New York for so long, he has been contributing to it.
We know that two of New York’s “three men in a room,” former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, were hammered with corruption charges, forced to resign, and then replaced with other corrupt officials. While this is very telling of the way New York has worked under Cuomo, some direct examples paint the bigger picture.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the Buffalo Billion scandal. The Buffalo Billion was a program created by the governor to breathe life into the struggling Buffalo region through a $1 billion investment in education, technology, and other industrial ventures — but the program was corrupted by Cuomo’s inner circle, and the governor himself, from the start.
Shortly after the launch of the program, key Cuomo allies were arrested. Alain Kaloyeros, the former president of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute and a “special adviser” to the governor, and Joseph Percoco, the governor’s executive deputy secretary, were taken in for rigging the bidding process to favor hand-picked corporations. The worst of it, however, is that the rigging process was also tied to the governor’s campaign donations. While the governor may deny taking part in this bid rigging scandal, it’s hard to believe when the scandal was tied to his donations.
This is not the only instance in which the governor’s campaign was involved in criminal activity. In 2015, federal prosecutors honed in on Steve Pigeon from the WNY Progressive Caucus for funneling illegal foreign donations into the governor’s campaign.
This scandal has plagued nearly his whole tenure as governor, but it isn’t his only one. Let’s not forget about the nursing home scandal. Near the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, following a surge in cases that almost certainly stemmed from New York and New York City officials not taking the virus seriously, Cuomo issued a controversial directive to admit COVID-19-positive patients into New York nursing homes — obviously, this was a grave mistake.
Following the directive, over 9,000 COVID-19-positive patients were admitted to nursing homes across New York, and as a result, an estimated 15,000 senior citizens lost their lives. As if this tragedy wasn’t grim enough, the governor attempted to cover up the many thousands of deaths his directive caused. Upon closer examination by the New York Post, it appears that the reason the governor stalled the death toll numbers was so that he could secure his book deal on COVID-19 “leadership.”
Following the release of the sexual harassment allegations, almost as if to demonstrate his decades of moral and political corruption in one 20-minute TV segment, Cuomo made a shocking “statement” on the topic. As expected, he first flatly denied allegations of wrongdoing. He continued on, however, to attempt to normalize his behavior.
While showing viewers a slideshow of him inappropriately touching and kissing people over the years, he said, “I do kiss people on the forehead. I do kiss people on the cheek. I do kiss people on the hand. I do embrace people. I do hug people, men and women.”
He later goes on to explain, “Indeed, there are hundreds, if not thousands of photos of me using the exact same gesture. I do it with everyone: black and white, young and old, straight and LGBTQ, powerful people, friends, strangers, people who I meet on the street.”
There are many more examples of Cuomo's failed, corrupt tenure, from plastering his family name on the new Tappan Zee Bridge to sabotaging anyone who gets in the way of his politics, but the problem he faces now is not something he can brush off. The time for his resignation was years ago during the Buffalo Billion arrests. As with the scandals before this latest one, he will try to brush it under the rug, silence his accusers, and normalize his behavior, but the time has come for decent people of both parties to unite and say that “enough is enough” to the long-corrupt Cuomo.