NYS Attorney General Finds Governor Andrew Cuomo Abused and Harassed Multiple Women. Cuomo Must Resign-and Does, August 10, 2021

 

Dani Lever (right) helped Gov. Andrew Cuomo leak confidential files about a woman who accused
him of sexual harassment, according to the attorney general’s bombshell investigation.

State Assembly Report Finds Cuomo Used State Resources to Enrich Himself

UPDATE: CUOMO RESIGNS AUGUST 10, 2021

Andrew Cuomo joins long list of big New York political scandals

Former NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo

Previously:

Top Cuomo aide DeRosa emerges as enforcer, enabler in AG’s sex harass report

Cuomo top aide Melissa DeRosa resigns as governor faces potential impeachment

NY Governor Andrew Cuomo must resign or be impeached. His brother Chris Cuomo should be fired from CNN. We do not believe that giving Gov. Cuomo "a second chance" or a minute more in office will do anything but create more harm and endanger the lives of many. He must go. Now.

Chris Cuomo of CNN appears in report on Governor Cuomo’s behavior.

REPORT OF INVESTIGATION INTO ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT BY GOVERNOR ANDREW M. CUOMO 

Andrew Cuomo’s utterly disastrous response to the AG report findings

Cuomo violated federal, state laws as he sexually harassed multiple women, NY attorney general says

'A distraction': Democratic chairs in Cayuga, other NY counties want Cuomo to resign

National Public Voice posts previously published on Andrew Cuomo

Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, Advocatz.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Facebook executive helped Cuomo smear sex-harassment accuser: AG report

Autumn Johnson

August 5th, 2021

Facebook Executive Dani Lever reportedly helped Gov. Andrew Cuomo fight sexual assault allegations by leaking confidential messages about an accuser.

Lever worked on Cuomo’s press team from 2014 to 2020, then leaving to join Facebook as communications manager.

The New York Attorney General’s bombshell report revealed that Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo communications director, sent Lindsey Boylan's confidential personnel files to several journalists in what investigators called an attempt to “discredit and disparage” her. 

The report concluded that Cuomo sexually harassed multiple women in violation of state and federal law and indicated that Lever helped Cuomo’s team disseminate the files.

“Ms. Lever coordinated with some of the reporters who received the documents to let them know that the Executive Chamber would be sending them,” the report reads. 

The report adds that Lever was part of a “team of advisors from within and outside the Chamber [who] had ongoing and regular discussions about how to respond to the allegations publicly,” including Cuomo’s brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo.

“None of them was officially retained in any capacity by the Executive Chamber or any of the individuals involved,” the report notes of Lever, Chris Cuomo, and other outside advisors. “Nonetheless, they were regularly provided with confidential and often privileged information about state operations and helped make decisions that impacted State business and employees — all without any formal role, duty, or obligation to the State.”

“Ms. Lever coordinated with some of the reporters who received the documents to let them know that the Executive Chamber would be sending them,” the report reads. 

The report adds that Lever was part of a “team of advisors from within and outside the Chamber [who] had ongoing and regular discussions about how to respond to the allegations publicly,” including Cuomo’s brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo.

“None of them was officially retained in any capacity by the Executive Chamber or any of the individuals involved,” the report notes of Lever, Chris Cuomo, and other outside advisors. “Nonetheless, they were regularly provided with confidential and often privileged information about state operations and helped make decisions that impacted State business and employees — all without any formal role, duty, or obligation to the State.”

Lever’s name is mentioned 25 times in the report.

Ironically, Lever initially declined to sign on to a letter that included complaints against Boylan as well as her interactions with co-workers. Lever said the letter amounted to “victim shaming,” but later signed a different statement in support of Cuomo that denied Boylan’s allegations.

Cuomo is no stranger to heinous acts, committing seniors who tested positive for COVID-19 to nursing homes, resulting in the deaths of thousands.

Cuomo attorneys push back on Boylan retaliation claims following sex harass report

Joe Nocera: How To Grade a Teacher

Joe Nocera

JUNE 16, 2015

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This is the second column I’ve written about Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Education. Ball believes the training that teachers get while they are in school needs to be drastically improved. Last year, I wrote about her effort to develop a professional training curriculum that would allow beginning teachers to be far better grounded in their craft than they are now.

Recently, I learned about another effort she has led, which I also think deserves wider attention. It tackles one of the most divisive topics in K-12 education: how to evaluate teachers so that the best can be rewarded and the worst fired.

In New York — a state where the issue has been especially contentious — Gov. Andrew Cuomo earlier this year pushed through legislation that calls for student test scores to count for as much as 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, up from the current 20 percent. The teachers’ unions were incensed, believing that test scores are a simplistic and unfair means of assessing teachers. So were many parents, who joined a boycott movement that resulted in an estimated 165,000 students opting out of this year’s standardized tests.

A teacher evaluation system “is only good if the teachers respect it and trust it,” says Vicki Phillips, a director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Teachers are convinced that evaluation systems that overly rely on test scores are punitive, which the political rhetoric often underscores. For instance, Cuomo’s stated reason for changing the state’s teacher evaluation was that some 96 percent of teachers got top grades under the old process. He scoffed at those results as “baloney.” That’s hardly going to get teachers to buy into your new evaluation system.

Which brings me back to Michigan. In 2011, the State Legislature there changed the tenure law, making it easier to fire incompetent teachers. But it also set up the Michigan Council for Educator Effectiveness, which was charged with coming up with its first-ever statewide evaluation system. Ball was named chairwoman of the council. Two years later, it came back with its recommendations.

The first thing I noticed about the council’s recommendations is that they completely avoid the divisive political language that has alienated teachers. Instead of casting teacher evaluation as primarily being about getting rid of bad teachers, they put the emphasis on teacher improvement. An evaluation system that stresses improvement instead of punishment has a much better chance of being embraced by teachers.

Such an emphasis isn’t just good politics. It’s also an important way to help make schools better. “Very few teachers can’t improve,” Ball told me recently. And most teachers want to improve — but have no means of getting useful feedback. The council’s idea was that the evaluations could be used not just to rid the system of incompetent teachers — though it would certainly do that — but also to give all the other teachers critical feedback. It also envisions transforming professional development, which is now mostly a wasteland, into a mechanism to put that feedback into practice.

There are two fundamental pieces to the Michigan council’s plan. The first piece is teacher observation. In most schools, it’s the principal who observes the teacher, often haphazardly, and rates him or her based on personal biases, which may or may not be sound. Ball and her colleagues would instead rely on observers who have been trained in using certain tools that have been proved effective. These observations would be the basis for the teacher’s feedback — feedback meant to encourage and help, rather than threaten.

The second piece is what the council calls evaluating “student growth.” Here the point would be not to measure student achievement in absolute terms — Does Johnny read at a fourth-grade level? — but rather to measure whether Johnny had made a year’s worth of improvement from the level he was reading at when he was in the third grade. This would be a more accurate representation of the difference the teacher made, and would take into account the wide range of learning levels teachers often have to contend with.

Some of this growth evaluation would undoubtedly be done through tests. But not all of it, or even most of it. “You have to look at objectives for students for the year and see if they made progress,” says Ball. There are ways to do that that don’t require standardized testing.

I wish I could tell you that this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. Legislation that embodied the work of the council failed to pass the Michigan Legislature in the last session. More recently, the chairman of a related Senate committee, Phil Pavlov, has essentially tossed the council’s work aside in favor of “local control.”

That is Michigan’s loss. But perhaps other states and school districts can look at the work of the Michigan council and learn from it. In which case, it could still be America’s gain.

Michael Goodwin: Everyone knew about Silver, but no one cleaned it up

So when is Andrew Cuomo being charged?

Betsy Combier

NY State Governor Andrew Cuomo With Sheldon Silver (right)

LINK

Back in 2004, when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver blocked passage of the state budget with a series of bizarre objections, a frustrated Gov. George Pataki confronted him: “Who is your client?’’ the governor demanded.
The showdown made headlines because of the clear insinuation that Silver, a Democrat, was using his official power to serve a private customer and enrich himself. That it took nearly 11 long years for prosecutors finally to make a case along those very lines reveals both the complexity of Silver’s alleged scams and Albany’s rotten pay-to-play culture.
The Empire State’s capital is corrupt to the core, and has been for a very long time. Virtually nothing happens there that isn’t driven by self-dealing. It is a cesspool unworthy of respect or trust and now stands naked in disgrace.
The roster of convicted crooks is approaching 40 public officials, but Silver’s case is unique. As speaker for 20 years, he was at the center of every piece of legislation written and every taxpayer dollar collected and spent. He ruled the Assembly like a private fiefdom, and, governors notwithstanding, he was called the most powerful man in the state for good reason.
Nothing moved without his say-so, and according to the federal charges, he turned that power into personal wealth. He “monetized public office,” Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said, adding that Silver “amassed a tremendous personal fortune” of at least $3.8 million through kickbacks and bribery.
One series of charges says he traded $500,000 in taxpayer money for more than $3 million in private gain. He allegedly took cash from a state slush fund and gave it to a doctor, who referred asbestos cases to a law firm that illegally split its share of medical settlements with Silver.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (center) is driven by federal agents to federal court on Jan. 22.Photo: AP

Other charges involve a separate law firm, which paid Silver $700,000 over a period of years for helping developers lower their property taxes. That, says Bharara, meant Silver “was on retainer” to the developers.
Not once, prosecutors say, did Silver actually do any legal work. He was paid only for using his public power to help the law firms and their clients.
It’s only a slight stretch to say that Silver did most of his alleged thieving in plain sight. Most of the outside money, if not its sources, was publicly disclosed. The taint was screechingly obvious, yet nobody did anything about it.
Pataki’s 2004 challenge about a private client was prophetically on target, but no prosecutor had the guts to follow the money. Perhaps a belief that he was immune led Silver to get greedy — and sloppy. His outside income grew by leaps and bounds, reaching nearly $1 million in some recent years.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo certainly had an instinct for the truth and a great chance to reveal it. His Moreland Commission was focused on Silver’s ties to law firms when the governor abruptly shut it down in a deal with Silver and others. Bharara picked up where the panel left off, but remains furious at Cuomo and continues to probe his actions.
At the very least, the governor owes New Yorkers a serious explanation. I was a persistent advocate of the Moreland panel, and when he appointed one in June 2013, Cuomo told me in an interview he was “as serious as a heart attack” about rooting out corruption.
He boasted that he stocked the panel with “top-shelf law enforcement people” so that any dirt could lead to swift criminal charges. He promised it would trace campaign donations, legislation and pork-barrel spending to connect the dots to corrupt quid pro quos.
“It’s going to be a real follow-the-money investigation,” he said then. “We want to see who gives you money, the legislation you introduce and your member items.”
He was onto something big, but pulled the plug prematurely when lawmakers, who had fought the panel’s subpoenas, agreed to toothless ethics rules. It was the biggest mistake of Cuomo’s first term, and now his second term begins with a scandal.
Neither he nor we should think the last shoe has dropped. The 35-page federal complaint has several loose ends, including any connections to Silver’s repeated squashing of tort-law reforms, and cooperating witnesses may have the goods on other crooked officials.
Then, too, Silver is hardly a tough street brawler willing to shuffle quietly off to prison. He’s a 70-year-old pol who, if he sees no way out of his jam, will sing like a canary.
That would certainly please Bharara, who acts like a man with an appetite for more red meat.
“Our unfinished fight against public corruption continues,” he vowed yesterday. “You should stay tuned.”
He can count on that.

Bill Hammond: Cuomo's Controlling Instincts

Cuomo’s controlling instincts

In probing corruption and pushing gambling, Cuomo imposes his will

Comments (2)

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

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Governor Andrew Cuomo

Gov. Cuomo takes great pride — largely justified — in having squeezed functionality from New York’s notoriously dysfunctional state government.

His forceful, results-oriented leadership style has achieved impressive results, including three on-time budgets, much-needed spending discipline, the legalization of gay marriage and some of the country’s strongest gun control laws.

But looking too closely at how Cuomo imposes his will on others can sometimes make you queasy.

One case in point: the revelation that the governor has been interfering in the operations of his supposedly independent Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption.

Another: his out-of-line attempts to manipulate this fall’s referendum on casino gambling.

In both cases, Cuomo has let his controlling instincts go too far.

Multiple sources tell the Daily News’ Kenneth Lovett that Cuomo and his staff have quietly pressured his own anti-corruption panel into dropping certain lines of inquiry — including canceling a planned subpoena of the Real Estate Board of New York.

The REBNY query was expected to shed light on an infamous backroom deal that awarded massive tax breaks to five luxury highrises in Manhattan. The board and its members had lobbied hard for the breaks for billionaires while doling out million in contributions to various lawmakers — making it just the sort of situation a serious probe of Albany sleaze should examine.

But among those who potentially stood to be embarrassed was Cuomo himself — who had received a healthy share of the campaign cash and signed the tax breaks into law as part of a larger housing bill.

That being the case, he and his people should have stayed miles away.

Remember that Cuomo had repeatedly threatened to appoint this commission if the Legislature failed to act on certain reforms — a level of political hardball he justified as necessary to force change.

This year, he followed through — appointing the panel in July along with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

Back then, Cuomo called it “an independent commission that is free to investigate whatever they feel needs to be investigated on the merits.”

But legislators derided the probe as a political witch hunt, predicting it would be aimed exclusively at them.

Cuomo’s actions have confirmed their fears — and cost the commission a big piece of credibility.

To regain what’s left of the high ground, Cuomo must go back to his original promise of independence — and back off from any further back-channel communication with the commission.

He should also give the panel a fixed, public budget to make clear that its staffers’ salaries are not dependent on his continuing good will.

Members of the commission and their staff must reestablish credibility by cutting off all further contact with the governor’s office — beyond what’s required by law and also made available to the public.

Cuomo’s effort to manipulate commission members is bad enough. His attempt to manipulate the voters into approving a massive expansion of gambling is arguably worse.

Cuomo is pushing for November passage of a constitutional amendment authorizing up to seven casinos — in the dubious belief that they will boost the upstate economy rather than simply drain the pockets of gamblers.

First, he silenced the potential opposition by cutting deals with upstate Indian tribes.

Then, he passed a law declaring that the state would add thousands more video-lottery parlors — which are casinos by another name — if the amendment is defeated. His message to the voters: I’m going to expand gambling no matter how you vote.

Last but not least, he prevailed on the Board of Elections to approve wording for the ballot proposal that declares the casinos will be all about “promoting job growth, increasing aid to schools and permitting local governments to lower property taxes.”

The board somehow neglected to mention lining the pockets of casino owners and impoverishing compulsive gamblers.

The early signs are that this Cuomoesque manipulation could work.

When Siena pollsters asked voters a straight question about Las Vegas-style casinos, they were split down the middle, 49% to 49%.

But when pollsters read the slanted ballot language, 55% said yes and 42% said no.

Sure, the governor may win both of these fights — but what will he lose in the process?

whammond@nydailynews.com