Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo is working relentlessly to regain the public’s respect — even as he refuses to admit, let alone apologize for, even his most horrific sins.
In a radio interview last week, for example, he spent an hour making excuses for his numerous abuses as governor, denying allegations against him and claiming he has no “regrets.”
He dismissed state Attorney General Letitia James’ findings that backed sexual-harassment charges against him from 11 separate women as just “a political report.”
Those revelations forced him to quit to avoid impeachment — simply because the Democrats who control the Legislature couldn’t ignore them as they had his other misdeeds.
No. 1 on that is surely his order, early in the pandemic, sending COVID-positive patients to live among seniors at nursing homes, the very people most vulnerable to COVID.
That move, an Empire Center study later found, led to at least “several hundred” and “possibly more than 1,000” fatalities.
Yet that news came far too late because Team Cuomo went to great lengths to conceal the care-home death toll.
Meanwhile, news of the outrageous order itself (broken by The Post’s Bernadette Hogan) forced Cuomo to rescind the directive.
Even then, he played it sanctimonious: “We’re just not going to send a person who is [COVID-]positive to a nursing home after a hospital visit. Period,” he said, six weeks after he’d mandated just that.
In explaining both the order and the coverup, Cuomo has pointed fingers at then-President Donald Trump, politics, his Health Department, nursing homes, their staffs, and (as he put it in the interview) “the best medical professionals on the globe” who feared an “overload” at hospitals for the disaster.
He himself, of course, was totally blameless.
No mention, for example, of the vast donations he’s received for decades from the state’s hospital industry.
Adding to the obscenity here, the coverup of the death toll came while Cuomo was negotiating what wound up as a $5 million deal to write a book about his supposedly sterling COVID leadership and as he eyed a White House run.
And he rammed the book deal straight past the state’s ethics panel (getting a staff memo as OK, rather than a proper board vote).
Then he violated the terms of that “permission” by illegally using aides — i.e., state workers — to help draft the tome.
New York, by the way, wound up with both one of the nation’s heaviest lockdowns and more COVID deaths per capita than all but 14 other states.
Some “leadership.”
Incidentally, a major theme in Cuomo’s quest for renewed relevance has been blasting fellow Democrats as soft on crime.
The problem is, as gov., he signed into law the insane 2019 “criminal justice reforms” (including the no-bail law) that sparked the statewide rise in crime.
In the city, those reforms fueled a 32% spike in major felonies — 48% for murders alone — from 2018 to 2022.
Which leaves him pretending the “reforms” were fine. What’s needed, he claimed in that interview, are “police who are not afraid to do their job.”
Pathetic.
Asked about running for office again, Cuomo says “All options are open,” meaning he’s desperate for the chance.
The best thing he could do for New York is to admit the options are closed and just go away. For good.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
