Assembly Finds 'Overwhelming Evidence' COVID murderer Cuomo Engaged in Sexual Harassment

[Blue State Grandkids]

Told ya we'd get your ass, motherfucker. You killed grandma and
grandpa.

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 Mr. Cuomo’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.

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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 DOCUMENT
Investigators 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 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 investigation involved interviews with 200 witnesses and the
review of 600,000 documents, including recordings, messages and
transcripts, some of which were obtained through subpoenas.

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.”

Understand the Cuomo Impeachment Report
Card 1 of 4
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:

Sexual harassment. The inquiry found “overwhelming evidence” Mr.
Cuomo engaged in sexual harassment, reinforcing a damning report
by the state attorney general. Multiple women have accused Mr.
Cuomo of harassment that included groping, unwanted kisses and
lewd remarks.

Nursing home deaths. Mr. Cuomo’s administration “materially
misrepresented” the extent of deaths that occurred in nursing
homes in the early months of the pandemic, according to the
report. The official tally might have undercounted the true toll
by as much as 50 percent.

Book deal. The report also found that Mr. Cuomo used state
workers to produce his pandemic memoir, and one assemblyman said
that it would be “reasonable” to infer a connection between the
$5.1 million book deal and the manipulation of nursing home
death data.

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.

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
task force member 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/nyregion/cuomo-ny-assembly-
investigation.html