News NY Governor Andrew Cuomo resigns

[Nah]

So for those that haven't been following along, over the past year or so New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been accused of 3 different things: sexual harassment, fudging numbers or covering up nursing home deaths due to covid-19, and using government resources and taxpayer money to write a personal book of his on his time handling covid in New York state. The one that has gotten the most media attention is the sexual harassment claims, and last week, the NY attorney general's office submitted a report after investigating the matter and concluded that he did commit sexual harassment. Calls for his resignation, impeachment, or for him to be criminally charged have been going on for months.

Today he resigned in a public broadcast. As he has since the very beginning, he still denies the allegations and says he hasn't done anything wrong, stating that his resignation is so the state government can focus on governing instead of being distracted by his scandals.

He is set to leave office in two weeks, and the Lt.Governor will fill in until at least next year's elections.

 

[Ivysaur]

Good riddance. I thought he'd force the Assembly to impeach him, but I guess he did have a speck of decency left in his body (otherwise I guess he'd have chosen to register as a Republican straight away).

Now it'll be interesting to see the new Governor, the first woman to get that job in NY. She certainly has a chance to differentiate herself from her predecessor.

 

[VisionofMilotic]

In addition to covering up the deaths of thousands of victims in nursing homes, the harassment accusations and a sexual abuse allegation by Britanny Commisso, there's another possible article of impeachment and criminal issue for Cuomo. In 2014 Cuomo stopped the probe the Moreland Commission, which was supposed to be investigating corruption in New York. That is not new information, but some new details have emerged about this in the last few hours. He made a phone call to the White House, fuming about the district attorney, Preet Bharara, who was working with commissioners to preserve evidence from the inquiry. The White House senior advisor who took the call disconnected the phone and reported Cuomo to the White House counsel, because the conversation was totally inappropriate and she interpreted him as wanting retaliation against Bharara, which would constitute obstruction of justice.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/andrew-cuomos-war-against-a-federal-prosecutor

If Cuomo was trying to interfere with the prosecutor then this is a whole different ethics violation.

 

[Nah]

Good riddance. I thought he'd force the Assembly to impeach him, but I guess he did have a speck of decency left in his body (otherwise I guess he'd have chosen to register as a Republican straight away).

Now it'll be interesting to see the new Governor, the first woman to get that job in NY. She certainly has a chance to differentiate herself from her predecessor.

idk if him choosing to resign really has anything to do with him having any shred of decency left given that he still adamantly denies all the allegations. tbh I think it's just more that resignation was the (relatively) easy way out for him. He probably finally accepted that his chances of re-election were nearly non-existent (him both surviving impeachment and winning the gubernatorial next year would be improbable). So if he can't be governor any longer, resigning lets him keep whatever perks he might have lost from being removed via impeachment while also trying to prevent his reputation/legacy from being stained further by going "see, I took responsibility by stepping down!".

Either way, the news is not as exciting as it could be. He committed a crime and should be brought to court, and convicted of it, but the chances of that happening are low, as is often the case with rich and powerful figures in this country. Even if both those things do happen, it will have the same problem that Chauvin's conviction had: he was just designated to be the sacrifice to give the illusion of change when nothing has changed or will change.

As for the Lt.Governor, I suppose I'm mildly interested to see how things go with her too. Will she actually be able to separate herself from Cuomo, or will she end up like how things went with Kim Guidano here in NJ, who failed to separate herself from Chris Christie and so made an easy opponent for Phil Murphy in 2017?

 

[Ivysaur]

As for the Lt.Governor, I suppose I'm mildly interested to see how things go with her too. Will she actually be able to separate herself from Cuomo, or will she end up like how things went with Kim Guidano here in NJ, who failed to separate herself from Chris Christie and so made an easy opponent for Phil Murphy in 2017?

Her advantage is that she's a democrat in a super-blue state where the GOP has a barely functioning organisation, and that she'll have a year to serve as the incumbent. In NJ, the Lt. Governor had to fight against the state's natural partisanship *and* Christie's terrible second term during a Trump-backlash year, with no gubernatorial experience of her own to point to. Hochul is running with the wind in her favour by default- she'd need to seriously screw things up this upcoming year for Cuomo's scandal to matter.