Former Cuomo primary rival likens him to Richard Nixon
A former Democratic primary rival to Gov. Andrew Cuomo likened his fall from grace to disgraced ex-President Richard Nixon.
“Like Richard Nixon, he resigned whining. What we should learn from Andrew Cuomo’s tenure is that no one should ever be given such power to play with people’s lives,” Zephyr Teachout, an insurgent who lost to Cuomo in the 2014 Democratic primary, said Thursday in a withering column in TheNation.com.
Cuomo announced his resignation on Tuesday after a devastating investigative report conducted by state Attorney General Letitia James’ Office concluded the Democratic governor sexually harassed 11 women, including staffers and former staffers, which he has denied.
“For the 11 years Andrew Cuomo was governor of New York, he acted like a caricature of someone drunk with power, a boy-king gifted the position by his father’s name, greedy for acclaim and control. He grabbed everything for himself, literally and figuratively,” Teachout said.
“He harassed and assaulted state employees and other women because he thought he could — and that no one would dare speak up,” she said. “He retaliated against the smallest slight.”
She continued that he “used state workers to grab himself a multimillion-dollar book deal.”
“He lied about people’s deaths, trampling on the sacred with an entitled shrug. And he lied for the simplest and grossest of reasons: because telling the truth about nursing home deaths would take the shine off his glory, and cost him his book deal and his victory lap,” Teachout said.
There are ongoing federal and state investigations over Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes during the worst of the COVID-19 outbreak and whether he improperly used government resources to prepare his pandemic memoir.
