Cuomo's Strange Defenders

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For the time being, try to forget the name “Cuomo.” Try to imagine what your reaction would be if the following happened in the abstract:

A politician running for elected office decides to launch a series of conspicuously vague “harassment” accusations on Twitter, but rather than critically scrutinizing the political motivations which may have given rise to such a tactic, the politician is portrayed merely as a generic “accuser” who just benignly materialized out of thin air.

That politician then communicates (and, seemingly, coordinates) with another “accuser,” whose central accusation is that she was “groomed” not as a helpless child, but as an adult political operative in her mid 20s. Nonetheless, this second “accusation” gives the impression that “accusers” were beginning to snowball, and “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” etc. The new “accuser” also happens to be a professional activist. (SEE BELOW FOR MORE…)

Soon thereafter, yet another “accuser” emerges, furthering the impression that a critical mass has been reached. But something’s odd. This new accuser’s accusation is that a photo she’d proudly displayed in her own office for years was retroactive evidence of abusive conduct.

These individuals’ accusations were sufficient to create such a condemnatory climate that the accused acceded to an “independent” investigation of himself, overseen by the state’s chief law enforcement official.

The state’s chief law enforcement official, announcing her findings, accuses the subject of the investigation of violating multiple state and federal laws, but — in a move that upends every previously-existing assumption about due process — then announces she will take no commensurate prosecutorial action, thus providing no venue for any formal cross-examination or rebuttal. Though operating under the auspices of law, she instead is content to just declare that the law had been violated, and issue a kind of newly-invented political indictment.

Virtually no one in the media/political class sees anything disconcerting about any of this, and the accused’s support appears to evaporate in a matter of days. The consensus is that he must go, so he goes. Career over!

In the 165-page report issued last week by New York State Attorney General Letitia James, there is a curious incongruity that few seem to have noticed in their furor to denounce Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (How many journalists bothered to read the report before commenting, one wonders?) While press accounts have near-uniformly declared the allegations set forth to be supremely “damning,” a closer examination of the report itself, as well as the peculiar surrounding details, leaves room for a bit more ambiguity.

The report concludes that “under the totality of the circumstances,” Cuomo’s conduct “created a hostile work environment” and therefore constituted a violation—or multiple violations—of the law. “Even the Governor’s less overtly sexual comments that were nonetheless gender-based” contributed to this allegedly unlawful dynamic, the report opines.

“Opines” is an operative word here. Despite accusations leveled by James at her TV press conference that Cuomo “violated federal and state law,” no charges of any kind were brought against the governor, which makes this episode an extreme rarity in the annals of American due process. “For a prosecutor to say the things she did ... would be a violation of the code of ethics,” Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University, told me. “In New York state, I can’t think of another situation where an attorney general went so far,” he added. “A lot of her statements were quite inflammatory, and highly prejudicial.”

Among the “less overtly sexual” behavior cited in the report as being unlawfully “gender-based” was Cuomo’s apparent habit of “allowing senior staff members to sit on his lap at official functions” and “lying down with his head on the lap of staff members who are women.” This, the report alleges on page 148, was a key component of the overall “hostile work environment.”

But parsed out elsewhere in the report—evidently causing it to be missed by frenetic pundits—is the revelation that “none” of the staff involved in the lap-sitting activity “reported feeling uncomfortable with this behavior.”

In fact, the report’s authors concede, “a number of witnesses we spoke to informed us that all of this behavior led to a sense among staff members in the Executive Chamber that personal attention from the Governor, even if flirtatious … was not only normal, but to be valued.” This would seem to be exculpatory information of a kind—but a search across Google and Twitter suggests it’s been omitted almost entirely from the ensuing press coverage. Instead, these exculpatory testaments were somehow reconfigured by the report’s authors as evidence of Cuomo’s guilt. In the rush to axe Cuomo, media accounts appear to have wholly glossed over this discrepancy.

I find Tucker Carlson a strange anomaly. Fox News allows his anti-war sentiments, but MSNBC hasn't had an anti-war voice in almost 20 years. He was respectful ti Tulsi Gabbard, when MSNBC and CNN smeared her at every turn.

Personally, I have my own issues with Tucker, particularly his seeming admiration for authoritarian countries such as Hungary

For Cuomo having friends like Tucker....who needs enemies