If Cuomo Was Hoping to Rehab His Political Career, New DOJ Report on Sexual Harassment Spells Bad News

There are few figures in modern American politics more arrogant than former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. This is a man who, you might remember, created one of the biggest debacles in his efforts to keep seniors in his state safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also was investigated by state attorney general Letitia James for not only that malfeasance but for sexually harassing 11 female employees. His chutzpah was evident throughout; he truly believed that he was too big to fail.

But as we saw, that wasn't the case. While a report on the investigation about the COVID nursing home deaths was never released, the one I mentioned above about the vicious harassment (and the extensive cover-up, with the help of his staffers) managed to run him out of the Governor's mansion.

Most politicians would keep their head down after such an ignominious fall. Not Cuomo. His ego just won't allow it, and he's made sure to pop back into the spotlight in recent years. In early 2022, Rick Moran, my colleague at sister site PJ Media, wrote that after the damning report came out, the former governor was crowing that the lack of charges from several NY DAs meant he was "vindicated"--and was already making noises that he was mulling a return to public office:

In the last several weeks, five New York district attorneys announced they were not going to prosecute former governor Andrew Cuomo on sexual misconduct charges.[...]
Several of those prosecutors went out of their way to say that not pursuing charges against Cuomo should not take away from the credibility of the women who accused him.[...]
The Hill:
Cuomo, however, sees the decisions from the district attorneys as absolving him from allegations, despite the state attorney general releasing a report last year that concluded the then-governor had sexually harassed 11 women — the report that led to his resignation in August.
“It turns out in a remarkably short period of time that it did become all bogus. 11 became zero,” Cuomo told Bloomberg in a telephone interview on Friday.
“If you do an honest summary, which is what I get from people on the street, I have been vindicated,” he added.

Then in October 2023, Cuomo took to Bill Maher's HBO talk show, "Real Time," and avered that President Joe Biden running for re-election in 2024 would be a disaster for the Democrat Party. He stated that he was thinking of running as a challenger against Biden--and that's not all he brought up about Biden. RedState's Sister Toldjah wrote:

....[I]t was Cuomo baring his own fangs that by far got the most attention, specifically what he had to say about President Joe Biden, for whom Cuomo did no favors whatsoever when he brought up Biden's own "#MeToo" scandals from 2020, highlighting them for the world to be reminded of ahead of 2024:
"I think what Biden's calculus was — he was accused [by] Tara Reade, fingers in the vagina… other women came out — ‘He smelled my hair,’ etc. He wanted to quickly distance himself from this," Cuomo said. "He could have said, 'You know what? I went through this. Let's take a deep breath and actually get the facts before we ask a governor to resign.'"

Someone's holding a grudge, apparently. But Cuomo didn't stop there, as S.T. noted, flatly dismissing Democrats' strategy for the election:

I don't know that candidate Biden is the strongest candidate that we can put up, and frankly, I doubt it," Cuomo continued. "I think the Democratic Party has to engage with real people and real voters on a different level. They're too much ‘Trump is no good and Trump is a bum.’ You can't run on banking that the other guy is gonna lose. You have to have an affirmative strategy to win, and the truth is there has been a paralysis of government, right? There's social division, political polarization equals government paralysis, and that is on the ground. And they have to see that, and they have to answer that.

As recently as November, Cuomo was eyeing NYC Mayor Eric Adams' job, according to people close to the former Luv Gov.

Now, a new report by the Justice Department (DOJ) could spell bad news for any hopes he may have had to resurrect his political career:

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women who worked for the state over the course of an eight-year period, the Department of Justice announced Friday as part of a civil rights settlement with his successor.
The agreement concluded the governor’s office under Cuomo violated federal Title VII rules against discrimination and retaliation between 2013 and 2021.
Cuomo and his staff engaged in “a pattern or practice of discrimination against female employees based on sex” and found they retaliated against the women, Justice Department officials found.
The justice department found Cuomo “repeatedly subjected” women in his office to non-consensual sexual contact, ogling and gender-based nicknames. Top Cuomo staff “were aware of the conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed,” the DOJ concluded.
“The conduct in the Executive Chamber under the former governor, the state’s most powerful elected official, was especially egregious because of the stark power differential involved and the victims’ lack of avenues to report and redress harassment,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general in the agency’s civil rights division, said in a statement.
Federal officials Friday also announced they reached a settlement with Cuomo’s successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, to expand her office’s human resources department, create new policies and procedures for reporting and develop “robust training” for anti-retaliation programs.

Notice that the DOJ's report lists 13 women, not the 11 in the original report. I'll return to that point later.

And what was Cuomo's reaction to the DOJ's release of the report? A statement by Cuomo attorney Rita Glavin claims he didn't harass anyone:

The DOJ ‘investigation’ was based entirely on the NYS Attorney General’s deeply flawed, inaccurate, biased and misleading report. At no point did DOJ even contact Governor Cuomo concerning these matters. This is nothing more than a political settlement with no investigation.

There was also this statement from a spokesman:

Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi in a statement also knocked the initial investigation by James’ office, blamed “Chuck Schumer’s handpicked U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District” and called the agreement “not worth the paper it’s printed on.”

All of the waving away, claiming that this is just a rehash of James' report, isn't going to work here. There's the little problem, as I said, of there being two more victims including in the Justice Department's investigation. This is not good.

The New York Times, in covering the new report, said that it is seen as a confirmation of the previously released NY AG's report.

What's the bottom line here? Sure, no charges are going to be filed against Cuomo because of the report, but this release being reported on prominently by outlets like Politico and the NYT don't just happen. You have to consider seriously whether his remarks about Biden and 2024 rubbed some in the upper echelon of the Democrat Party the wrong way. Looks like Democrats are trying to tell Cuomo, when it comes to dipping his toe back into politics, to ... ahem, fuggedaboutit.