Under pressure to resign from top Democrats over sex-harrassment allegations from six woman, as well as his lies about China Virus fatalities in nursing homes, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo might face more trouble than anyone thinks.
Either Cuomo or his aides leaked personnel documents to the media to smear his first accuser, Lindsey Boylan. Who, the New Yorker asked on Tuesday, “ordered a smear campaign?”
Someone, the magazine reported, broke the law. But the larger point is that the retaliatory strike fits the angry governor’s modus operandi. Anyone who crosses him must be destroyed.
The incessant sex harassment, the retaliation against imagined enemies, and Cuomo’s unhinged tirades raise the obvious question: Does Cuomo need a check up from the neck up?
The Leak
Boylan’s allegations in a Twitter thread in December didn’t get much traction in the media until she wrote about them in detail on Medium.com in late February.
But just after Boylan nuked Cuomo on December 13, the New Yorker reported, stories based upon her personnel jacket appeared. Angry, unhappy underlings had complained about her.
“Within hours of Boylan’s tweet … several news outlets reported that they had ‘obtained’ state-government documents relating to Boylan’s job performance in the Cuomo administration,” the magazine’s Eric Lach reported:
The documents — described by the Associated Press as “personnel memos,” by the Post as “personnel documents,” and by the Times Union as “personnel records” — said that several women had complained to a state-government human-resources office that Boylan had “behaved in a way towards them that was harassing, belittling, and had yelled and been generally unprofessional.” According to the Post’s account, “three black employees went to state human resources officials accusing Boylan, who is white, of being a ‘bully’ who ‘treats them like children.’” According to the Associated Press, the documents said that Boylan resigned after being “counseled” about the complaints in a meeting with a top administration lawyer. Reporters who wanted to dig into Boylan’s accusations against Cuomo now had to contend with the possibility that there were people out there who might have accusations to make against Boylan. At best, the documents seemed to raise questions about Boylan’s reliability. At worst, they painted her as a racist.
Cuomo’s MO
But Lach also noted that Cuomo has a reputation for breaking legs — figuratively speaking.
“For decades, the Governor has had a reputation for scorched-earth tactics, and for retaliating against those who corner him, threaten him, or simply displease him,” Lach wrote:
As Boylan weighed whether to come forward last year, her lawyer told me, she “believed that she would be retaliated against for going public with her mistreatment.” One former senior official in the Cuomo administration whom I spoke to said it was impossible to imagine that Cuomo himself hadn’t approved the leak of the Boylan documents. “There’s no question he would know about it, and direct it,” the former official said. “That’s how he would think.”
Another of Cuomo’s accusers, Karen Hinton, told Lach that the governor tried to get her fired from the staff of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015. Cuomo, true to this anger problem, was upset about something Hinton told the New York Times. If de Blasio didn’t pink slip Hinton, the governor would blame him “personally” for the fatalities during a Legionnaires Disease outbreak.
Cuomo even lashed out at an engineer for the state transportation department, Michael Fayette. He made the mistake of giving “a few quotes about his department’s operations during Hurricane Irene to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise,” Lach reported:
His statements were innocuous — “We were up for it,” he told the paper — but they hadn’t been cleared by the higher-ups in Albany. The press found out that Fayette’s superiors were moving to terminate him, and started asking how it was possible for someone to be fired over such a harmless episode. In response, a top Cuomo aide gave a radio interview during which he read aloud misconduct allegations contained in Fayette’s personnel files, including that he’d had an improper relationship with a subordinate.
Fayette retired before Cuomo could lower the boom.
When he was secretary of housing and urban development for President Bill Clinton, Cuomo “fell into a long-running feud” with his agency’s inspector general, Susan Gaffney, Lach reported. He even called her at home to berate and harass her. Gaffney’s crime? She accused him of sexual discrimination. Cuomo’s legmen accused her of “downloading pornography in her office and retaliation for our efforts to get to the bottom of it.”
A government agency can “share redacted employment records, including in instances when members of the media ask for such public information and when it is for the purpose of correcting inaccurate or misleading statements,” a Cuomo clean-up artist told Lach.
Cuomo’s Anger Problem
Lach’s report, and the revelations about sex harassment and nursing fatalities, are a small part of a larger story.
The recent revelations — serial sex harassment and possibly assault; grooming young women; leaking personnel records; brutal, sometimes personal retaliation for imagined wrongs; terrifying high-decibel rages against captive underlings; an out-of-control anger problem — reveal a disturbing personality.
Frighteningly, as Boylan tweeted, President Joe Biden was considering the man with that record for attorney general. Imagine the damage a man with Cuomo’s obsessions and power could have done.
Cuomo’s allies want him to resign. They might also suggest a good psychiatrist.
