Hochul Is Using Public Money to Defend Cuomo
New York’s governor has retained a firm to challenge her own attorney general’s report on her disgraced predecessor’s predations.
Self-sabotage: New York Governor Kathy Hochul is frittering away taxpayer money.
(Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Readers of this magazine who live in New York are likely so incensed at Kathy Hochul for blowing up congestion pricing earlier this summer—somehow managing to unite the Democratic Socialists of America and the business community in their ire—that it’s hard to imagine what could possibly match such a fantastic display of self-inflicted damage.
Hold on to your shorts.
New York’s taxpayers are already $8.2 million in the hole for disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo’s legal bills, which doesn’t even include the cost of defending his associates, who are also being sued for covering up his abuse of public employees. But that’s not even the most offensive part. The latest twist comes to us courtesy of his successor, the woman who would not be governor but for the 168-page report on Cuomo’s extensive misconduct that was released by the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James. That report is now being called into question by lawyers at the firm Morgan Lewis, which has been retained by Hochul’s executive chamber for an initial $2.5 million to defend the state against the spate of lawsuits that have been filed by Cuomo’s victims. Yes, the governor is using public money to pay a private law firm to potentially challenge her own attorney general’s report, all on behalf of Andrew Cuomo and against his victims, whom the report confirms he harassed.
What is even happening here?
First, the why: James declined to defend the state against Cuomo’s victims. This makes sense for various legal and ethical reasons, but it’s also not that hard to imagine James throwing up into a bucket at the very thought. However, Cuomo is indemnified by the state, since the harassment happened in his official capacity as governor, and therefore he’s entitled to a taxpayer-funded defense.
Charlotte Bennett—the twentysomething staffer whom Cuomo harassed in ways both pathetic (“I need a hug!”) and creepy (“Got any other piercings?”)—is suing him for gross (in more ways than one) violations of the New York State Human Rights Law, which Cuomo himself signed into law. In April, her lawyers moved for summary judgment, largely based on the attorney general’s report, in effect saying that the defendant’s illegal behavior was already so well documented that everyone should just settle this thing and move on.
But not so fast! In a counterbrief, Hochul’s lawyers argued a few slightly insane things, chief among them that since the executive chamber did not participate in the attorney general’s investigation (of which it was the subject) or have a hand in reviewing its findings, the report is therefore not a sufficiently valid basis for Bennett’s motion. Programming note: Cuomo made a legal referral to the AG’s office for this investigation, and although he does not accept its findings, he legitimized the investigation by authorizing it. The brief further tries to undermine the report by suggesting that the AG and the governor’s office were “adverse,” which of course they were, by definition. This is like taking a test, getting a bad result, and then denying that you willingly sat for it in the first place. See also: “Election, refusing to accept the results of.”
The brief also dismisses the report as the work of “Independent Investigators” that the AG merely “published,” as if the state’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer has her own imprint at Random House. The whole reason that James deputized outside counsel to investigate Cuomo’s misconduct was to avoid perceived conflicts, since Cuomo had endorsed her and they’d essentially campaigned as a ticket. It was also an attempt to ensure that a sensitive investigation into the most powerful officer in the state would be conducted by attorneys with the proper expertise and high professional integrity—that it would be the unimpeachable work not of a politician but of experienced practitioners with no ties to the political establishment, which might hope to influence the outcome.
More broadly, though, the brief introduces the notion that the executive chamber exists as an entity apart from the state, and so the AG’s report is not necessarily representative of its position. How does that square with the fact that the executive chamber requests opinions from the Department of Law all the time because it’s an official agency of the state, even though the attorney general is independently elected? It would seem to suggest that unless the governor herself investigates, no investigation is valid. By this warped logic, if Morgan Lewis says Cuomo didn’t do any of the things he clearly did, this should count more than the AG’s findings. The reason James conducted an investigation in the first place is that Cuomo’s staff failed to follow the law and their own policy for reporting sexual harassment, facts that Hochul’s office accepted as part of a settlement with the US Department of Justice, which did its own investigation.
Hochul has no legal obligation to defend the former governor; she could easily have settled the various lawsuits against him, likely for less than the millions of dollars taxpayers have already forked over. Compounding Cuomo’s attacks on the AG’s credibility and subjecting his victims to seemingly endless nonsense is a choice.
