Governor Cuomo probably couldn’t get his hands on the nails of Attorney General Letitia James (even New York’s crazy politics has limits), but he’d certainly like to try it. The governor is a frightening and vengeful man.
A big political shot or an anonymous government worker, it doesn’t matter: cross Cuomo or get in your way and prepare for the weather.
On Thursday, James plucked the crust from a wounded Cuomo administration, which set out with exhaustive data the lethal toll the coronavirus suffered on New York City nursing homes last year. In doing so, he overthrew the governor’s efforts to cover up a startling example of mismanagement.
History suggests that Cuomo will get even for this betrayal or try a vein.
And, aside from the considerable merits of the James report, it is a betrayal. The AG would have continued to be the public defender of New York City if it had not been for Cuomo’s final attendance at the 2018 election that elevated her to her current position.
So how sharp is the snake tooth to have an ungrateful child and all that jazz?
Once installed, James proved as petty and partisan as his patron, polishing his progressive credit by incessantly making former President Donald Trump, suing the National Rifle Association, and so on.
Thus, it is with some irony, but not surprising, that his damn nursing home report follows in form and operation the devastating attack by then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo against the then-governor. Eliot Spitzer in 2007. It would take a scandal for women hired to oust Spitzer from office, but his slide began with Cuomo’s malicious warning.
Spitzer, a former attorney general who was no stranger to vituperative retaliation, had gone to war with the state Senate immediately after becoming governor, unduly, if not illegally, by imposing state police on the then leader. of the majority, Joseph Bruno, for alleged misuse of the aircraft state.
Or at least that’s what Cuomo charged in a 53-page report: a blue exam that politically destroyed an unsuspecting Spitzer.
Something similar to what Tish James did on Thursday to his boss. Evidently, he was paying attention to the broader picture during his rise from New York City council to the legal director of New York State.
Spitzer’s real sin, of course, was to hold a position that Cuomo legitimately considered his own. It remains to be seen if James has similar ambitions, but who will say no? And surely the governor can’t complain if that’s the case: is rotation the fair play? (Or maybe the monster that killed Dr. Frankenstein?)
Revenge, of course, is another matter. No lightweight is too petty to escape Cuomo’s warning.
Just last month came the case of Lindsey Boylan, a former administration official who accused the governor of sexual harassment and soon found out that her state personnel file had been “obtained” by the Associated Press.
Leaving aside the merits of Boylan’s positions (she is running for the presidency of the Manhattan district and presumably needs name recognition), news organizations do not “get” those records. They have them delivered.
Boylan’s experience parallels that of Mike Fayette, a 2012 civil engineer forced into his state job for speaking without permission to a tiny newspaper in the Adirondack area. State Director of Operations Howard Glaser went on the radio to read Fayette’s personnel file.
Again, big or small: no one is beyond Cuomo’s gaze.
Especially Bill de Blasio.
The bitter government-mayor rivalries are traditional (Nelson Rockefeller vs. John Lindsay was epic), but the torment Cuomo has visited on Blasio’s border with the pathological. Make him sadistic.
It is true that the mad, senseless, and monumentally lazy mayor provoked much fire from Cuomo; however, from day one, if the mayor said “up,” the governor barked “down!”
Since the pandemic, if de Blasio said “open,” Cuomo said “closed” and vice versa. The outrageously chaotic New York launch of the coronavirus vaccine is a product of this childish fight, but there is hardly a single aspect of the city-state relationship (housing, education, public transportation, etc.) that does not exist. suffered too.
It’s hard to imagine James trying to deny Cuomo a fourth term next year or, more to the point, hoping to avoid retribution for Thursday’s report. He knows the record as well as anyone else.
But whatever her plans, she has just handed the governor a full ration of her own policy, and good for it. If anyone has made it happen, it’s Andrew Cuomo.
Twitter: @ rlmac2