Anyone seen Gov. Cuomo lately?
On Wednesday, he canceled a scheduled drop-in at the Bronx County Democratic dinner. On Thursday and Friday, he listed zero public appearances on his schedule. In fact it’s clear ‘til Monday.
As GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob Astorino tweeted, “Whoever kidnapped Kathy Hochul” — the governor’s equally invisible running mate — “now appears to have Andrew Cuomo, too.”
Why the sudden shyness? Well, Wednesday was when The New York Times dropped a front-page bombshell alleging the governor and his aides interfered with his anti-corruption Moreland Commission by killing probes of Cuomo cronies.
Apparently, the governor isn’t ready to start answering the many questions the story has raised. In the meantime, he’s opened a new line of defense: It would be a “conflict of interest” for a commission he appointed to investigate him.
That would be news to his dad. As the New York Law Journal notes, an earlier Moreland Commission appointed by Gov. Mario Cuomo not only investigated the governor, it called him as a witness and subjected him to grueling questioning.
And when the younger Gov. Cuomo announced his Moreland Commission a year ago, his assurance of independence was categorical: “Anything they want to look at, they can look at — me, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, the comptroller, any senator, any assemblyman.”
The governor’s dilemma is that he cannot make the defenses he’s now advancing — that the commission was not free and independent — without confirming that he was lying when he publicly promised all New York it was.