Questions on Cuomo’s COVID memoir need answers

As New York marks the third anniversary of the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, questions about how state leaders handled the crisis keep piling up. The latest disturbing revelation concerns the memoir that Andrew Cuomo published in October 2020.

Previous investigations have found that Cuomo and his staff were working on the book as early as mid-June of that year — which was problematic enough, given that he had promised not to use government resources for a personal project, not to mention that the pandemic was very much not over.

That timeline has now been rewritten by newly surfaced internal emails. They show that work on what appears to be a gubernatorial memoir began as early as late March and resulted in a draft “preface” by April 18.

That period was the most harrowing phase of New York’s first wave — when normal life ground to a halt, hospitals overflowed with infected patients and the toll peaked at more than 1,000 deaths per day.

The emails provide more evidence that Cuomo made use of his government staff — for a book deal that would ultimately pay him $5.1 million. Although the preface was written in Cuomo’s voice, and included reflections on his political philosophy, it was drafted by one of his state-employed speechwriters, Jamie Malanowski.

The emails show that a second speechwriter, Tom Topousis, prepared a “daily diary” of key events in the pandemic response, foreshadowing the diary-like format of Cuomo’s memoir.

Both the preface and the diary drew from an 8,200-word timeline which was compiled by the governor’s staff at the request of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, in a 12-hour flurry on March 30.

When these emails were first published by the Empire Center on Jan. 27, DeRosa and a spokesman for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, denied any link with Cuomo’s book. Left unexplained was why else a draft “preface” might have been written.

These records did not appear during the impeachment probe by the Assembly Judiciary Committee. They were uncovered through a Freedom of Information Law request by Peter Arbeeny, whose father died in April 2020 after contracting COVID in a nursing home. (The Arbeeny family has publicly made donations to the writer’s employer, the Empire Center.)

Like many other New Yorkers, the Arbeenys are looking for answers about the state’s pandemic response:

What decisions were behind the Cuomo administration’s March 2020 order that transferred thousands of infected patients from hospitals to nursing homes, which the Arbeenys believe contributed to their father’s death?

Was the governor’s judgment on that issue and others distorted by the promise of a lucrative book contract?

What made Cuomo think to use government aides for this side gig — when many of them were already working overtime on a public emergency?

Cuomo’s defense — that his taxpayer-funded researchers and ghost writers volunteered their time — doesn’t cut it. First, some of the staff involved have said their work was not voluntary and happened during work hours. Second, the governor had no business using state employees for multi-million-dollar book project, period — especially after the state’s ethics watchdog had warned him, in writing, not to do so.

And perhaps the most urgent question of all: Why is it private citizens who are continuing to dig into these issues rather than state authorities?

Although the book deal was the subject of two probes, neither succeeded in holding the ex-governor fully accountable. A report on the Assembly’s impeachment investigation faulted Cuomo for using state resources for his book — as well as sexually harassing female staffers and covering up the nursing homes death toll (a coverup that a lawsuit by the Empire Center helped to end). But the Assembly dropped its impeachment effort after Cuomo resigned.

The now-defunct Joint Commission on Public Ethics found that Cuomo used public resources in violation of the guidelines they had attached to their approval of the book deal in July 2020. The panel tried to force him to forfeit all proceeds, but a court threw out that order, allowing Cuomo to keep the money.

Since then, Gov. Hochul, the Legislature and the rest of official Albany have shown little stomach for revisiting the scandals behind Cuomo’s political implosion — and that’s a tragic mistake.

If the state has any hope of being better prepared for future pandemics, it urgently needs to excavate everything that went wrong with COVID.

Deep flaws in the state’s public health infrastructure have unfortunately become hopelessly tangled with Cuomo’s personal failings. We can’t properly understand any of it until we investigate all of it.