Ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s low-key effort to orchestrate a return to public life suffered a significant setback with the release of a damning agreement between the federal Justice Department and the administration of Governor Kathy Hochul. The statement, approved by the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, alleges that Cuomo sexually harassed 13 state employees, ran an office that tolerated a hostile work environment, and retaliated against workers who complained about it, all in violation of federal civil-rights laws.
It’s an ugly and confusing claim in a surprisingly thin report that barely deserves to be called an investigation. The Feds appear to have done little research beyond the 2021 investigation by an outside legal team engaged by state attorney general Letitia James, the same report that led to Cuomo’s resignation. But that report found that Cuomo harassed 11 women (nine of whom were state employees), not 13. So who are these “new” victims? When and how did their alleged mistreatment happen?
We may never know. The 14-page agreement mostly talks about remedial measures the governor’s office has taken to better handle harassment claims. But specific dates and circumstances of actual incidents or allegations are missing. It’s not clear that the Feds ever interviewed any accusers or contacted any of the accused. It’s cold comfort that the final paragraph of the agreement specifies that it “shall not constitute an adjudication or finding on the merits of the case, nor be construed as an admission of liability.”
The report leaves Cuomo stranded a little further out in the political wilderness. “This is nothing more than a political settlement with no investigation,” said Cuomo’s attorney, Rita Glavin. “Over the last two-plus years, no one contacted the Governor or anyone else in our world. According to press reports, the accusers weren’t contacted either,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzpoardi said on social media.
So Cuomo denies ever harassing anyone, but he has no public forum in which to make his case and has to live with headlines that no politician seeking redemption wants to see. Virtually all were a variation on what the New York Times ran: “Cuomo Created ‘Sexually Hostile’ Workplace, Says Justice Department.”
Stripped of power, Cuomo can’t compel the Justice Dept. to retract, amend or release details of its investigation. He can’t force journalists to probe the claims of women that he says leveled made-up charges. He can’t even get simple legal courtesies; Cuomo recently had to sue the Attorney General’s Office for more of the interviews and other raw material that went into the damning 2021 report.
The deafening silence of the political class — as of this writing, not one elected official has stepped forward to defend Cuomo — demonstrates how hard it will be for the ex-governor to get back in the game. Many potential allies remember his penchant for bullying, bypassing, and belittling other officials. Those wounds haven’t healed. And Cuomo and his top aides, always known for blunt talk, are still not shy about criticizing powerful people, including their successors at the top of state government.
“I’ve been watching the Hochul administration for the last two years, and it’s nice to be nice, but it’s better to be effective,” Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, told me last year. “I mean, the budget’s late again. We’re nowhere on Penn Station. The Air Train is dead. And look, if there’s a better way, I’m happy to be corrected.”
Cuomo has even taken public shots at President Biden. “I think there should be a Democratic primary,” Cuomo told comedian Bill Maher last fall. “I don’t know that candidate Biden is the strongest candidate that we can put up, and frankly, I doubt it.”
Publicly criticizing Hochul and Biden probably didn’t lead directly to the release of the damning report on Cuomo, but it surely didn’t help.
All of which leaves one avenue back into public life: For Cuomo to become relevant again, he will have to stand for election. Aside from the campaign trail, there’s no public forum in which he can make the case that he was wrongly hounded from office. The New York State Assembly, which had the power to impeach Cuomo — and was ready to do so — ordered an investigation by the body’s judiciary committee, which found “overwhelming evidence that the former governor engaged in sexual harassment.” But the Assembly never launched an actual impeachment, which would also have provided Cuomo with an opportunity to argue for his innocence.
David Soares, the district attorney of Albany County, declined to prosecute Cuomo for the alleged forcible touching of Brittany Commisso, a former aide. “While we found the complainant in this case cooperative and credible, after review of all the available evidence, we have concluded that we cannot meet our burden at trial,” he said. The case was dismissed, meaning Cuomo can truthfully claim that, whatever else went on during his tenure, he was never charged with a crime.
Cuomo’s supporters also point out that he was denied due process because his institutional adversaries — primarily, the Assembly’s Democratic majority and James in the attorney general’s office — threw around broad, charges of abuse that were never put to the kind of formal, evidence-based test that an impeachment or criminal case would have required.
All of which brings us to the big, unanswered question: Are voters ready to return Cuomo to power? Cuomo, who hosts a podcast, has reportedly been floating the idea of running for New York City mayor. Journalists got wind of a mysterious telephone poll — whose source has never been confirmed — asking city residents if they would consider voting for Cuomo in the 2025 race for mayor. Weeks later, a poll by Slingshot Strategies asked whom voters would prefer in a hypothetical special election if Mayor Eric Adams, for some reason, were to resign. Cuomo led a field of candidates with 22 percent of the vote, far higher than Public Advocate Jumaane Williams or Governor Hochul.
Cuomo clearly doesn’t mind the speculation — “It’s flattering,” he said on Fox5 News — and he has millions in leftover campaign funds that could be deployed if he decides to run again. My guess is that he is doing what ambitious, practical politicians do: watching for a political opportunity that makes sense. As I’ve written, Adams’s legal problems appear to be serious but not deadly, making a resignation unlikely. But Cuomo, a lifelong political operator, will be monitoring just in case.
A more likely scenario might be a run for Congress, thanks to a court-ordered redrawing of New York’s congressional boundaries scheduled for this year. Cuomo has lived in Westchester, had a pied-à-terre in Manhattan, and reportedly is bunking with his brother, Chris Cuomo, in the Hamptons. Under New York law, he could easily meet the residence requirement to run from any of those places. NY-1, which includes the upscale Hamptons and working class towns like Riverhead, Smithtown, and Melville, would be a logical launch pad for a Cuomo comeback.
New York voters are fickle: In August of 2021, seven out of ten voters said Cuomo should resign, but only seven months later, after resigning, he was polling at 35 percent — nearly tied with Hochul — when pollsters asked who they wanted for governor.
It’s also true that for many New Yorkers, the accusations of abuse — regardless of whether they resulted in criminal charges — are disqualifying and tied to the larger history of bullying behavior that left Cuomo with so few allies in the political class. As Rebecca Traister put it, “The brutality that Andrew Cuomo has brought to politics — connected as it has long been to his authority and his ability to take whatever he wants from his staff and his state — has, like his sexualized advances, been drained of a lot of its appeal.”
A run for office would allow Cuomo to address lingering questions about harassment claims and the fairness of investigations in union halls, living rooms, subway stops and street corners rather than the kangaroo court of social media. He might meet the same fate as his predecessor and nemesis Eliot Spitzer, who quit as governor in a prostitution scandal and was rejected by voters when he ran for city comptroller in 2013. Or he might discover that, despite all the negative press and one-sided reports, some subset of New Yorkers are ready for Cuomo 2.0.
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