The Morning Dispatch: Cuomo Under Siege

Happy Wednesday! Unless you made idolizing Gov. Andrew Cuomo a key part of your political identity last year—then you’re probably not feeling so great today.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “sexually harassed a number of State employees through unwelcome and unwanted touching, as well as by making numerous offensive and sexually suggestive comments,” a 165-page report released by Attorney General Letitia James’ office on Tuesday found. Cuomo denied the allegations and insisted he will not resign, but a growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers—including President Joe Biden—are calling on him to step down. Democrats in the New York Assembly, meanwhile, are moving toward impeaching him.

• One day after the White House said the Centers for Disease Control was “unable to find legal authority” to implement even a “more targeted” eviction moratorium, the CDC announced the implementation of a more targeted eviction moratorium. The new order—which applies to areas experiencing “substantial” or “high” levels of community COVID transmission—is now set to expire on October 3.

• Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday that beginning September 13, New York City will become the first major U.S. city to require people to present proof of at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose to attend indoor restaurants, gyms, and other businesses and entertainment venues. De Blasio has thus far declined to reimplement a mask mandate in the city, saying he does not want to remove an incentive to get more people vaccinated.

• The CDC issued a new order supporting the continuation of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allows U.S. officials at the southern border to expel migrants to their home countries without allowing them to apply for humanitarian refuge, in order to prevent overcrowding and COVID outbreaks in short-term Border Patrol facilities.

• There were a pair of special primary elections in Ohio Tuesday night. On the Democratic side, establishment favorite Shontel Brown beat out former state Sen. Nina Turner—a prominent Bernie Sanders surrogate—in Ohio’s deep-blue 11th congressional district. On the Republican side, former coal lobbyist Mike Carey rode Donald Trump’s endorsement to an easy victory in Ohio’s 15th congressional district.

Andrew Cuomo’s #MeToo Moment

In 2018, as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings were upended by charges of sexual misconduct, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made it known he was furious with Senate Republicans.

“After the #MeToo movement, they did absolutely nothing when it came to sexual harassment. They have always diminished the charges of women—always, consistently. And they’re doing it again right now,” he said at the time. “To cheapen or ridicule the pain a woman suffers from a sexual attack is disgusting—sexist and disgusting. To second-guess how a woman should have acted after a sexual attack is sexist and disgusting.”

Cuomo, apparently, held himself to a different standard. The New York attorney general’s office on Tuesday published its long-awaited report digging into the veracity of the numerous sexual harassment allegations leveled against him earlier this year. Investigators found that the governor committed unlawful sexual harassment through unwelcome and nonconsensual touching and offensive, sexually suggestive comments toward female employees.

In total, the report details the allegations of 11 women, each of whom investigators found to be credible.

“These 11 women were in a hostile and toxic work environment,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said yesterday. “What this investigation revealed was a disturbing pattern of conduct by the governor of the great state of New York and those who did not put in place any protocols or procedures to protect these young women who believed in public service. I believe women. And I believe these 11 women.”

One of the women, a former executive assistant to Cuomo who asked to remain anonymous, accused the governor of reaching under her blouse and grabbing her breast during a close hug. Another aide, Charlotte Bennett, detailed a history of inappropriate comments from the governor about her love life—exchanges that Cuomo’s Executive Chamber refused to investigate when she reported them last summer. A third, Lindsey Boylan, said the governor physically touched her on various parts of her body, including her waist, knees, and back, and kissed her on the cheeks and lips.

But Cuomo, who tweeted in 2018 that it “shouldn’t be a controversial proposition” to say a woman’s testimony is worth as much as a man’s, has cast doubt on the veracity of his accusers.

“I have heard Charlotte and her lawyer, and I understand what they are saying,” Cuomo said yesterday. “But they read into comments that I made and draw inferences that I never meant. They ascribe motives I never had. And simply put, they heard things that I just didn’t say.”

As investigators note in the report, Cuomo has repeatedly denied many of the allegations against him—even those that were independently corroborated at the time. In addition, the Executive Chamber actively attempted to retaliate against Boylan when she accused the governor of sexual harassment, leaking her confidential records and spreading disparaging information about her publicly.

“Where the Governor made specific denials of conduct that the complainants recalled clearly … we found his denials to lack credibility and to be inconsistent with the weight of the evidence obtained during our investigation,” the authors of the report wrote. “We also found the Governor’s denials and explanations around specific allegations to be contrived.”

Many Democratic officials—including New York’s two senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand—began calling for Cuomo’s resignation back in March. But the governor plowed ahead, and the news cycle moved on. The release of Tuesday’s report revived those calls—and brought new critics out of the woodwork: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Reps. Hakeem Jeffries, Tom Suozzi, and Gregory Meeks of New York; NYC’s Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams; and the New York Times editorial board.

When the allegations first reached a breaking point several months ago, President Biden told ABC News he’d wait for the results of James’s investigation before calling on Cuomo—a longtime political ally of his—to step down. If the allegations were confirmed, Biden added, Cuomo should resign. 

“I stand by that statement,” the president said yesterday when pressed on his earlier remarks. Asked if that means he’s now formally calling on Cuomo to resign, Biden responded with one word: “Yes.” He declined, however, to explicitly call for Cuomo’s impeachment.

Throughout the investigation, Cuomo has resisted calls to leave office, relying on a team of advisers—including his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo—for counsel about how to respond to the allegations publicly. Yesterday’s report from the New York attorney general includes a draft statement that Chris Cuomo emailed to his brother back in February on how to address the accusations—one which almost directly mirrored the statement Andrew Cuomo released later that day.

“At work sometimes I think I am being playful and make jokes that I think are funny,” Gov. Cuomo said at the time. “I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended.”

Cuomo doubled down on this defense on Tuesday, releasing a 15-minute video response to the investigation, as well as an 85-page report. One of his main contentions: He is overly handsy with everyone—not just young women. The other: What about these other guys? Fifteen pages of his own report are devoted to pictures of other politicians—including Presidents Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush—hugging others or kissing them on the cheek.

“I do kiss people on the forehead. I do kiss people on the cheek. I do kiss people on the hand. I do embrace people. I do hug people—men and women,” Cuomo said. “I now understand that there are generational or cultural perspectives that, frankly, I hadn’t fully appreciated.”

Even as he has diminished or dismissed the complaints against him, however, Cuomo has failed to rebut the central conclusion of the report—that his conduct toward female staffers and the behavior of his office in responding to their allegations violated the sexual harassment training he himself mandated in 2018.

Cuomo may continue to resist calls for his resignation, but other consequences may soon be headed his way. Democrats in the New York state legislature, who began an impeachment probe last March after the allegations were made public, began moving toward expediting the process on Tuesday.

Biden Flip-Flops on Eviction Ban

Answering questions from reporters on Tuesday afternoon about his administration’s impending implementation of a new eviction moratorium, President Biden rather cavalierly announced he was planning to, most likely, violate his oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution of the United States.

“The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass constitutional muster,” he said. “I don’t know. There are a few scholars who say it will and others who say it’s not likely to.”

Senior Biden economic adviser Gene Sperling was even clearer in a Monday press conference. “To date, the CDC Director and her team have been unable to find legal authority, even for a more targeted eviction moratorium that would focus just on counties with higher rates of COVID spread,” he said.

But on Tuesday afternoon, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky signed an order implementing a “more targeted” version of the moratorium—applying “only” to the 80 percent of U.S. counties currently experiencing “substantial” or “high” levels of community COVID-19 transmission—until October 3. “This moratorium is the right thing to do to keep people in their homes and out of congregate settings where COVID-19 spreads,” Walensky said. “Mass evictions and the attendant public health consequences would be very difficult to reverse.”

“The CDC simply does not have this authority,” Ilya Shapiro, director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, told The Dispatch. “You could say that lots of things might lessen a pandemic. It doesn’t mean the CDC has the authority, therefore, to implement them.”

A late June ruling revealed that five of the nine Supreme Court justices agree. But one, Brett Kavanaugh, voted against striking down the ban “because the CDC plans to end the moratorium in only a few weeks.”

“Those few weeks will allow for additional and more orderly distribution of the congressionally appropriated rental assistance funds,” Kavanaugh wrote in his concurrence. “In my view, clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation) would be necessary for the CDC to extend the moratorium past July 31.”

The White House—well aware of Kavanaugh’s position—issued a statement last Thursday (two days before the eviction ban was set to expire) calling on Congress to pass legislation extending the moratorium. “Given the recent spread of the Delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the CDC to further extend this eviction moratorium to protect renters at this moment of heightened vulnerability,” the White House said. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”

Unsurprisingly, Congress did nothing. Speaker Pelosi failed to drum up enough support for the measure in the Democratic-majority House, and—after a weekend of high-profile protests outside the Capitol led by once homeless Missouri Rep. Cori Bush—played an Uno reverse card and called on the White House to do something. “Action is needed, and it must come from the Administration,” a joint statement from House Democratic leadership read.

“I don’t buy that the CDC can’t extend the eviction moratorium – something it has already done in the past!” Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters—chair of the House Financial Services Committee—tweeted. “Who is going to stop them? Who is going to penalize them? There is no official ruling saying that they cannot extend this moratorium. C’mon CDC – have a heart! Just do it!”

Progressives took a victory lap Tuesday night, but Shapiro predicts it will be short-lived. “I expect that there’s going to be some landlord that’s affected who’s going to file for an emergency stay,” he said. “We could have an order from the Supreme Court within a week or two.”

In most people’s imagination, the “affected landlords” are likely large banks or real estate corporations—but that is hardly the case across the board. A May 2021 Washington Post article from Eli Saslow cited U.S. Census data showing that 8 million rental properties were an average of $5,600 behind on rent—and that about half of those 8 million are owned by “small landlords” who “manage their own rentals and depend on them for basic income.”

“According to government estimates,” Saslow wrote, “a third of small landlords are at risk of bankruptcy or foreclosure as the pandemic continues into its second year.” 

Despite the moratorium first being introduced by the Trump administration last September, Republicans in Congress are almost universally opposed to its extension now. “I think it’s really bad policy at a time when the recovery is robust, that the economy is very liquid, and that landlords and investors have lived with this uncertainty for an awfully long time,” Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told The Dispatch. “I think it’s just exactly the wrong signal to send to them, and to the marketplace.” Other conservatives have argued that the moratoriums only serve to make existing housing shortages worse by disincentivizing new construction.

Congress approved approximately $46 billion in rental assistance in recent COVID relief packages, providing qualified renters and landlords with access to funds intended to pay down their debt. But only a small fraction of those funds have actually been disbursed in states across the country, in part because many tenants are unaware they are eligible to apply for them. Biden cited this reality as a rationale for extending the moratorium—even if the Supreme Court knocks it down.

“At a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion [sic] out to people who are, in fact, behind in the rent and don’t have the money,” Biden said yesterday. Sperling—who is tasked with overseeing the implementation of the American Rescue Plan—was asked this week how many people the administration believes would actually be evicted were the moratorium to lapse, and didn’t provide an exact figure. Ultimately asked if he foresaw “millions of people” losing their homes, he said no.

If the Supreme Court does not knock the new moratorium down before it expires in 60 days, we’re likely to see a similar kerfuffle around October 3; the past year and a half has shifted how many lawmakers think about this issue. Asked by The Dispatch yesterday what real-world conditions he’d like to see before being comfortable letting the moratorium expire, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden demurred. 

“If I had my way, we’d have some protection for people until they no longer need the protection.”

Worth Your Time

• Eli Saslow’s Washington Post piece on the eviction moratorium is well worth your time. He focuses on one small landlord-tenant relationship in Schenectady, New York, capturing the difficulties the past year has thrust on both of them. “The house had been sold four times out of foreclosure, condemned by the city, and scheduled for demolition when Budhoo first saw it after immigrating to New York from Guyana in the early 2000s,” Saslow writes. “He’d worked at a nearby pick-and-pack warehouse for $8 an hour and saved up a small down payment toward a $79,000 purchase price. He’d rewired the electricity, gutted the plumbing, installed granite countertops, and begun renting it out for up to $950 per month. Gradually those profits had paid for more distressed properties, for his daughter’s college degree, and for a small home of his own where her diploma now hung above the entryway. He’d spent two decades growing his business on the first of each month until the pandemic hit Upstate New York.”

Toeing the Company Line

• Sarah and Co. concluded their 2024 GOP primary series in yesterday’s Sweep, previewing potential celebrity candidates who could shake up the field: Tucker Carlson, Dave Portnoy, and Donald Trump Jr. Sarah then wraps everything up with her top 10, taking into account both their likelihood of running and potential formidability, and a look at one of Tuesday’s special elections in Ohio. 

• In yesterday’s Uphill, Ryan and Harvest walk readers through the status of debt ceiling negotiations before turning to—you guessed it—infrastructure. “Experts and lawmakers told The Dispatch that Congress will raise the debt ceiling this fall,” they write. “It’s a question of when exactly, how they’ll pass it, and who will vote in support of the move.”

• David’s latest French Press (🔒) makes the case for impeaching Gov. Andrew Cuomo after Tuesday’s report. “Impeachment isn’t just deserved on the merits; it would also represent an important step towards reclaiming America’s institutional integrity and partisan responsibility,” he writes. “This is not just a matter of justice for the women he allegedly harassed; it’s a matter of important national hygiene.”

• Chris Stirewalt is back on The Remnant, joining Jonah for a wide-ranging conversation about a desire for boring politics, our current “wilderness of grifts,” attempts to paint President Biden as a modern-day FDR, and much more. 

• At the site today, Emma Rogers takes a deep dive into Lebanon, where—one year after a major explosion in Beirut killed hundreds—the nation continues to be gripped by economic and political malaise.

Let Us Know

Is there ever a justifiable reason for a president to take an action he or she knows is unconstitutional?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), Tripp Grebe (@tripper_grebe), Emma Rogers (@emw_96), Price St. Clair (@PriceStClair1), Jonathan Chew (@JonathanChew19), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).