New York Governor Andrew Cuomo not only thinks he can help himself to a woman employee when he wants, he also thinks he can provide special services to his family when he wants.
The latest on the disgraced chief executive is that he made sure his family members were tested immediately for the coronavirus during a supposed shortage of the tests.
Everyday New Yorkers waited as the Cuomo clan jumped to the head of the line. One of them was Cuomo’s younger brother, Chris, a talking head on CNN who spent four years denouncing President Trump and his backers for their moral failings.
The secret testing is now a part of the legislature’s impeachment inquiry, Albany’s Times Union reported.
The VIP Scheme
The self-dealing in which the Cuomos are implicated is rather reminiscent of the special privileges to which leftist public officials and their chosen ones often treat themselves, with numerous Democrats getting caught ignoring mask mandates that they expect others to follow.
The Cuomo clan received “prioritized coronavirus testing,” the Times Union reported:
Members of Cuomo’s family including his brother, his mother and at least one of his sisters were also tested by top health department officials — some several times, the sources said.
The medical officials enlisted to do the testing, which often took place at private residences, included Dr. Eleanor Adams, an epidemiologist who graduated from Harvard Medical School and in August became a special adviser to Zucker. Adams conducted testing on Cuomo’s brother Chris at his residence on Long Island, according to the two people.
As well, Chris Cuomo’s test “took place in the early stages of the pandemic, at a time when many members of the public struggled to obtain coronavirus tests,” the newspaper reported. He announced he had the virus on March 31.
Yet the Cuomos and their chosen few didn’t just receive special tests, the Washington Post reported:
As part of the program, a state lab immediately processed the results of those who were tested … even as average New Yorkers were struggling to get tested in the early days of the pandemic because of a scarcity of resources. Initially, the lab was capable of running only several hundred tests a day for a state with 19 million residents.
Not surprisingly, Cuomo’s PR people were silent because “we should avoid insincere efforts to rewrite the past.”
Right.
The Post, which observed that conferring such special privileges is against the law, reported that Adams “was enlisted to test multiple other Cuomo family members, according to two people familiar with the program.”
The coronavirus test specimens were then rushed — at times driven by state police troopers — to the Wadsworth Center, a state public health lab in Albany, where they were processed immediately, the people said. At times, employees in the state health laboratory were kept past their shifts until late into the night to process results of those close to Cuomo, two people said.
The specimens were shrouded in secrecy, marked only by initials or numbers. Results were then provided to the family members, the people with knowledge of the matter said.
Yet the governor said New York’s testing capacity was “very limited.”
The Cuomos Lied on Television
Bad as it was for Cuomo to put his family first, of greater concern is the involvement of CNN’s Chris Cuomo.
CNN released this statement:
We generally do not get involved in the medical decisions of our employees. However, it is not surprising that in the earliest days of a once-in-a-century global pandemic, when Chris was showing symptoms and was concerned about possible spread, he turned to anyone he could for advice and assistance, as any human being would.
Not good enough, commentator Glenn Greenwald wrote, for myriad reasons.
CNN permitted Chris Cuomo to repeatedly interview his brother and promote him “as a presidential contender while the Governor was corruptly and possibly criminally covering up COVID deaths,” he wrote. “It was corrupt. And it aggressively deceived CNN’s audience.”
But now that scandal — a journalist shilling for politician brother — is worse:
Chris Cuomo is directly involved in a serious abuse of power scandal by his brother: in fact, he’s the prime beneficiary of that scandal. He sought special medical favors from his brother, depriving other sick people more in need of it than he, by exploiting the fact that his brother is Governor….
What’s even more remarkable is that on May 6 — just weeks after Gov. Cuomo provided special COVID testing and treatment for him — Chris Cuomo “interviewed” his brother and began the interviewing by noting that New York State lacks the resources to provide COVID testing to the public at large. So not only did they conceal that they had both just used state resources to get Chris that scarce testing, but they both acknowledged that there was a resource shortage to serve the general public, even as Gov. Cuomo was lavishing those resources on his own family.
Yet CNN refused to comment, Greenwald wrote, out of concern for the privacy of Cuomo’s medical decisions. But the issue isn’t privacy because no one cares to hear about Cuomo’s conversations with his doctor. The issue is Cuomo’s of power:
Using state resources for his own benefit and jumping in front of a line that almost certainly deprived people more in need of getting COVID tests at a time when they were scarce.
Cuomo’s job at CNN is likely secure.
Last year, he threatened a cyclist outside his home for asking why Cuomo was not inside, given his brother’s mandated quarantine on virus patients. Before that, he angrily threatened to beat a man who called him Fredo.
