The People v. Andrew Cuomo
Andrew Cuomo returned to Albany on Friday for what you could argue was a happy occasion: his scheduled arraignment on a forcible touching charge that was subsequently dismissed, removing the most immediate legal threat to the embattled former governor.
Maybe “returned” is too strong a word. The Democrat appeared virtually and did not speak during the eight-minute proceeding, which unfolded without much drama before Albany City Court Judge Holly Trexler, as I reported for The Wall Street Journal. Prosecutors in Albany County made the decision on Monday that they wouldn’t move forward with the case. District Attorney P. David Soares said Tuesday that while he believed Brittany Commisso — the former executive assistant who said Cuomo groped her breast during a 2020 encounter at the Executive Mansion — “after review of all the available evidence we have concluded that we cannot meet our burden at trial.”
Cuomo has denied Commisso’s account, and said he never touched anybody inappropriately. She was one of 11 women whose experiences were chronicled in an August report by Attorney General Letitia James, who said the former governor’s conduct “corrodes the very fabric and character of our state government.” Cuomo said her report was politically motivated, but it accelerated calls for his impeachment and forced him to announce his resignation a week later.
But none of that conduct was criminal, at least in the eyes of prosecutors. Soares’s announcement came after the district attorneys in Westchester and Nassau Counties said they would not charge the former governor for unsolicited touches and kisses described in the James report. Indeed, almost four out of every 10 forcible touching charges filed in New York are dropped or dismissed, Grace Ashford reported last month.
Soares didn’t decide to file the charge; that was Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, in an uncoordinated move that Soares said contributed to the dismissal of the case. “Anything in a criminal case that creates confusion about the case benefits the defendant,” E. Stewart Jones, the prominent Troy defense counsel, told me in November.
Commisso was certainly upset. “My disappointing experience of re-victimization with the failure to prosecute a serial sexual abuser, no matter what degree the crime committed, yet again sadly highlights the reason victims are afraid to come forward, especially against people in power," she said in a statement to the Albany Times Union. “Our criminal justice system needs to do better.”
“You can be critical and you can have your opinion as to the decisions that I make, but you should fear a prosecutor who is basing their decisions not on the rule of law but on satisfying those passions,” Soares said Friday on public radio. “There’s only one person with a burden of proof, and that’s me.”
Also last week, prosecutors in Manhattan said they had folded up an investigation into the Cuomo administration’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes. The big probe into that matter is being conducted by federal prosecutors based in Brooklyn, who convened a grand jury that was active as of this summer. The current status of that matter is unknown. The feds are also examining the production of Cuomo’s pandemic memoir, which is also under review by James’s office.
It’s unclear, then, whether Andrew Cuomo will have another day in court. His remaining aides sounded a bolder tone.
“We have said from the beginning that this entire situation was a political manipulation and would be disproven when a non-corrupted legal review was conducted,” spokesman Rich Azzopardi said. “For the last several weeks, we have remained silent while the process played itself out -- do not confuse our respect for the justice system with acquiescence. Stay tuned."
COMING UP: Expect New York’s Omicron surge to dominate the news for another week. Luckily, as I reported with Julie Wernau, most cases in our highly-vaccinated state are milder than previous waves.
THE QUESTION: Who was the last New York governor to be arraigned?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: David Paterson was the last governor to deliver a State of the State address in the Assembly chamber, as Gov. Kathy Hochul did on Wednesday. It was David Paterson in 2010, when there was no money, he had little support and he started by echoing Richard III in declaring a “winter of reckoning.” I was there and it was a weird vibe.
The first State of the State in the chamber was delivered by Al Smith, as Bill Mahoney delightfully recounted here. Some of you suggested that George Pataki should get the superlative, because other governors called their speech a message to the Legislature. I’m not buying it, in part because of clips sent by other readers showing speeches by Mario Cuomo and Nelson Rockefeller labeled and reported as states of the state.