Friend,

In case you missed it, the New York Daily News ran an op-ed this morning posing the very question we’ve been raising for months: ‘In facilitating the removal of Cuomo, did Tish James use the law enforcement authority vested in her office to advance her own electoral ambitions? Because to have done so would be a radical misuse of the attorney general’s powers.’

This is one of many questions about James’ August 3rd report that she has refused to answer as she continues to politicize and weaponize her sham report for her own political gain.

More and more New Yorkers are paying attention and we are confident the truth will out.  

Thank you for your continued friendship,

Team Cuomo

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NYS AG Letitia James vs. due process: The Cuomo investigation and report have been profoundly unfair

By MICHAEL TRACEY

In a press release last month officially announcing her campaign for governor, Letitia James boasted that as attorney general, she “stood up to the most powerful man in New York — Andrew Cuomo — when he sexually harassed women.”

While ostensibly presented as an example of her bona fides for the state’s top job, the boast actually doubles as an admission. James appears to be acknowledging that the investigation earlier this year into Cuomo’s alleged sexual improprieties was not merely, as advertised, an impartial fact-finding mission to secure justice on behalf of benighted “victims.”

Instead — as could have been surmised by anyone who cared to retain their critical thinking skills — James’ political fortunes were inseparably tied to the investigation from the get-go.

The admission should cast in a new light many aspects of the entire chain of events that led to Cuomo’s ouster. Such as when, upon release of her investigation’s concluding report in August, James took the unprecedented step of going before the TV cameras to declare Cuomo guilty of violating multiple state and federal laws — while at the same time denying any obligation to prove those alleged violations in court.

This would be wildly reckless behavior for any prosecutor, never mind the attorney general of New York. Yet the media hardly made a peep, so single-mindedly scintillated as they were by the prospect of Cuomo’s demise in a sex-related scandal.

To abridge the most basic tenets of due process in this manner should’ve been unthinkable for someone in James’ position. But it becomes explicable if placed in political context.

Cuomo had given every indication that he intended to seek a fourth term in office, and would have been exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to defeat in a primary. For the ascendant progressive wing of the party in New York, the investigation achieved what likely could have never been achieved electorally: getting rid of the entrenched incumbent with whom they’d been at odds for years.

In facilitating the removal of Cuomo, then, did James use the law enforcement authority vested in her office to advance her own electoral ambitions? Because to have done so would be a radical misuse of the attorney general’s powers. And at the very least, James does not seem bashful about giving the strong impression of having done just that.

James’ campaign announcement on Oct. 29 came the day after a misdemeanor criminal complaint against Cuomo was leaked to the media. James wasted no time proclaiming the complaint served to “validate” the report she’d overseen.

Subsequent events demonstrated quite the opposite. Albany DA David Soares, the very person whose office would in theory be prosecuting Cuomo, clarified that the complaint had been filed without his knowledge. Soares then released a letter on Nov. 5 decrying the charge as “potentially defective,” and even referred to the existence of evidence that he said could be “exculpatory” for Cuomo.

James’ premature embrace of what may well be a “defective” criminal charge is consistent with a pattern of sloppiness. At times, she and her staff have insisted that the Cuomo investigation was run entirely independently — solely the purview of two lawyers selected by James, Joon Kim and Anne Clark, who had no stake in the report’s conclusions.

At other times, James has gone out of her way to take direct ownership of the report. She’s even spoken of personally assessing the reliability of complainants — i.e., a core investigative task. There could hardly be a more glaring conflict of interest than using prosecutorial powers to vanquish one’s political opponent.

Numerous other components of this saga are also long overdue for serious scrutiny. Take Charlotte Bennett, a key accuser, whose claim that she was illicitly “groomed” by Cuomo was accepted as unalterable truth by the media and the AG.  Perhaps they would’ve had grounds for skepticism if they bothered to do cursory research into Bennett’s background. In 2017, a lawsuit was filed against her alma mater, Hamilton College, alleging that a person who appears to be Bennett fabricated — and then was forced to withdraw — a sexual misconduct allegation against a fellow student. But not before she’d allegedly mounted a PR offensive to get that student ousted from campus.

The lawsuit was settled confidentially; the claims may or may not be true. Either way, it’s negligence that Bennett was never made to address the matter in multiple media appearances, even though this would obviously bear on the credibility of her allegations against Cuomo. Neither Bennett nor her lawyer has responded to my questions since I first reported her apparent role in the incident discussed in the lawsuit months ago.

I was never a fan of Cuomo. But from the outset of this ordeal, a taboo against “attacking victims” has been cynically deployed to foreclose legitimate journalistic inquiry — which is particularly egregious when those same “victims” are being held up by an aspiring governor to deflect criticism of her own highly questionable conduct.

Tracey is a journalist.

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