The findings, released after an eight-month inquiry into former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, reinforced a damning investigation by the New York attorney general.
An eight-month investigation by the New York State Assembly found “overwhelming evidence” that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo engaged in sexual harassment while in office, corroborating a damning investigation by the state attorney general that Mr. Cuomo has repeatedly tried to discredit.
The investigation also found that Mr. Cuomo abused his power to help produce what would become a $5.1 million pandemic memoir, providing new details about just how much of the governor’s staff was used to help him write, publish and promote his book.
The Assembly inquiry was meant to create a road map for potential impeachment proceedings against Mr. Cuomo, a three-term governor whose unrelenting style of leadership engendered varying amounts of fear, respect and animus. But that prospect was rendered moot after he resigned in disgrace in August, a week after the release of the attorney general’s report, which concluded that he had sexually harassed 11 women.
After Mr. Cuomo stepped down, Carl E. Heastie, the Assembly speaker and a longtime ally of the ex-governor’s, moved to suspend the Assembly investigation, contending that lawmakers lacked the constitutional authority to impeach an official no longer in office.
But Mr. Heastie reversed course after facing an immediate bipartisan backlash from lawmakers who argued that the Assembly should, at minimum, finish the taxpayer-funded investigation and make public its findings.
The result was a 46-page report released on Monday that went beyond the sexual harassment accusations, further damaging Mr. Cuomo’s legacy and his continued attempts — fueled by $18 million in unspent campaign funds — to preserve it.
Read the New York State Assembly Report on Andrew Cuomo’s Impeachment Investigation
A 46-page report on Andrew M. Cuomo released on Monday by the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee found “overwhelming evidence that the former governor engaged in sexual harassment.” It also found that Mr. Cuomo used state workers to produce his memoir, a likely violation of state ethics laws.
Read DocumentInvestigators hired by the Assembly Judiciary Committee concluded that Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, used state workers and other public resources to write, publish and promote his memoir about his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a likely violation of state ethics laws.
The inquiry also found that Mr. Cuomo “was not fully transparent regarding the number of nursing home residents who died as a result of Covid-19.” The Cuomo administration became engulfed in scandal last year following reports that the state was undercounting coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, after the governor issued a directive requiring facilities to accept Covid-19 patients.
The findings of the investigation had led one committee member to say last week that it would be “reasonable” to infer a connection between Mr. Cuomo’s $5.1 million book deal and his administration’s decision to manipulate nursing home death data.
The report makes multiple references to investigators sharing some of the evidence with law enforcement officials, suggesting that there may be further legal repercussions for Mr. Cuomo, whose family — his father, Mario M. Cuomo, was also elected to three terms as governor — ruled New York for two decades.
Mr. Cuomo has maintained that the attorney general, Letitia James, who is now running for governor, had compromised her inquiry with her own political ambitions. He extended that posture on Monday to include the Assembly investigation.
“The Assembly’s report simply parrots the attorney general’s flawed report, failing to engage with the many errors and omissions in the A.G.’s report and her one-sided, biased investigation,” said Rita Glavin, Mr. Cuomo’s lawyer.
“And, like the A.G., the Assembly refused to provide the former governor with access to all the evidence, again denying the governor due process and a meaningful ability to respond,” she continued. “This is disappointing, but hardly surprising.”
Though Mr. Cuomo’s team has repeatedly sought to discredit the allegations, the attacks may be even less effective when directed at the Assembly, whose Democratic leadership had served as a kind of firewall for Mr. Cuomo. The Assembly did not take Ms. James’s conclusions at face value; investigators interviewed 200 witnesses and reviewed roughly 600,000 documents, including recordings, messages and transcripts, some of which were obtained through subpoenas.
The Assembly opened its investigation in March as Mr. Cuomo faced a drumbeat of sexual harassment allegations and calls for his resignation. Investigators from Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, the law firm the Assembly retained to conduct the inquiry, had broad leeway to scrutinize not just the sexual harassment claims, but potential misconduct and abuses of power by Mr. Cuomo and his top staff.
They examined the administration’s handling of nursing home data, the book deal, coronavirus tests administered on a priority basis for Mr. Cuomo’s family and associates early in the pandemic, when such tests were hard to come by, and a potential cover-up of safety issues on the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.
The inquiry unearthed new details on a range of topics, including the sexual harassment allegations against the governor, many of which were explored and corroborated in the report by Ms. James’s office.
While the Assembly report described sexual harassment accusations from 12 women — including one who had previously gone public, but was not included in Ms. James’s report — it focused on two of them.
They are an unidentified state trooper and Brittany Commisso, the former executive assistant to Mr. Cuomo who accused him of groping her, and whose allegations formed the basis of a criminal complaint filed against him by the Albany County sheriff’s office.
At issue in that case has been the date on which the encounter allegedly occurred. The attorney general’s report placed it in mid-November, while the sheriff’s office and investigators for the Assembly identified the likely date as Dec. 7, using entry-card swipes and text messages as evidence to support that timeline.
The report vigorously affirmed Ms. Commisso’s account, while offering no conclusive evidence that Mr. Cuomo groped her. Instead it laid out a series of facts it was able to corroborate, including a text message sent before the alleged incident, card swipes confirming Ms. Commisso’s actions and the white shirt Ms. Commisso recalled Mr. Cuomo wearing that day.
The report stated that it had found no “material inconsistencies” in Ms. Commisso’s account or the accounts of those who corroborated it, saying that while investigators had found minor discrepancies, they “are common among witnesses and are often referred to as the hallmark of truth.”
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the former governor, said that “the fact that an employee entered and exited the Executive Mansion as part of her job was never in dispute.”
Another key aspect of the inquiry involves the state’s actions on nursing homes.
The report did not seek to determine whether the directive from Mr. Cuomo requiring the facilities to accept Covid-19 patients caused the outbreaks that made nursing homes so deadly in the spring, and it found no indication it had.
Understand the Cuomo Impeachment Report
A broad inquiry. The New York State Assembly released the findings of its eight-month impeachment investigation into former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s behavior while in office and potential abuses of power by Mr. Cuomo and his top staff. Here’s what the report found:
Instead, it focused on the way in which the administration sought to deflect from its policy by selectively reporting numbers that minimized the damage.
Investigators found that the underreporting was the subject of multiple discussions in the Capitol, including one in which a member of the New York State task force on Covid-19 asked an administration official, “Do you want me to admit that we have been reporting deaths incorrectly?”
Mr. Cuomo was directly involved in revising and editing a report dated July 6, 2020, that downplayed the impact of the disease in nursing homes “on multiple occasions,” the Assembly report says.
That same day, a Monday, the governor had a meeting with the publisher Penguin Random House about a potential book, reaching a multimillion-dollar deal by Friday, July 10.
Also on July 10, Mr. Cuomo requested authorization to write the book from the state Joint Commission on Public Ethics, asserting that “no state property, personnel, or other resources” would be used in its creation. Commission staff approved the request one week later.
But in seeming contrast to that request, the report details multiple instances of staff involvement in the writing, editing and promotion of Mr. Cuomo’s book. One senior staff member sent or received 300 emails regarding the book in the second half of last year; another sent or received more than 1,000.
The report documents how some staffers appear to have taken vacation or personal time to work on the book project, but concludes that it was also attended to “during the course of normal work routines.”
One official complained to a colleague that work on the book had compromised that official’s ability to focus on the coronavirus crisis.
Investigators concluded that Mr. Cuomo had “utilized the time of multiple state employees, as well as his own, to further his personal gain during a global pandemic.”
Last week the state ethics commission retroactively revoked its authorization of the deal, potentially forcing Mr. Cuomo to relinquish the money he earned from the project.
Mr. Cuomo has vociferously denied using state resources on the book and indicated that he would fight the board’s decision in court.
“Staff who volunteered took time off, evidencing that they were volunteering and not on state time,” Mr. Azzopardi said in a statement. “Any suggestion to the contrary is Assembly hype.”
Another of Mr. Cuomo’s achievements targeted by the inquiry was the bridge renamed for his father. As early as 2018, reports that dozens of steel bolts had broken during construction raised serious questions about the structural integrity of the bridge, and spurred an attorney general investigation.
Assembly investigators abandoned that line of inquiry, saying that the New York State Thruway Authority repeatedly assured the executive chamber and public that the bridge was safe.
"in" - Google News
November 22, 2021 at 10:15PM
https://ift.tt/3oOXCxp
Assembly Finds ‘Overwhelming Evidence’ Cuomo Engaged in Sexual Harassment - The New York Times
"in" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2MLa3Y1
https://ift.tt/2YrnuUx
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Assembly Finds ‘Overwhelming Evidence’ Cuomo Engaged in Sexual Harassment - The New York Times"
Post a Comment