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

https://nypost.com/2021/08/04/facebook-exec-helped-cuomo-smear-sex-harassment-accuser-ag/

by snomad • 5 years ago

438 255 5 years ago

pjc502• 5 years ago

Do we have another source for this that's slightly less political than the NY post? Possibly a primary one for the AG report in question?

zo12• 5 years ago

The AG report is in the link:

https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.08.03_nyag_-_inve...

ianhawes• 5 years ago

Thank you for actually linking this. I hadn’t read parts of it before today and to be honest, like most things, the prepared evidence is more damning than any summary in the media. I strongly feel that Cuomo should be impeached after reading about his behavior.

stefan_2• 5 years ago

Mr. Azzopardi also sent the Confidential Files to Ed McKinley of the Times Union924 and David Caruso of the Associated Press, among others, on the same day.925 Earlier on December 13, Mr. Azzopardi had sent the Confidential Files to former Executive Chamber staff, Josh Vlasto, Mr. Bamberger, Ms. Lever, and Steve Cohen. At the direction of Ms. DeRosa or Mr. Azzopardi, Mr. Bamberger and Ms. Lever coordinated with some of the reporters who received the documents to let them know that the Executive Chamber would be sending them.

That took me all of 5 minutes to find and I guess being lazy in complaining about lazy reporting is the ultimate irony?

pessimizer• 5 years ago

lazy reporting

Politically partisan reporting, not lazy reporting.

cascom• 5 years ago

These days I’m not sure there is such a thing (or at least it’s a short list)

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

KoftaBob• 5 years ago

Which is why the solution is not to rely on the hope that news sources minimize their bias.

Instead, it seems the best way to get actionable news without the addition of bias from the source, is to get it from the primary source itself.

I've been thinking about building something to accomplish this for a while, a news aggregator that pulls news exclusively from primary sources.

If you think about it, the primary/original source for news in these major categories usually falls in these buckets:

- Business/Financial News: primary sources are company press releases, government regulatory bodies, etc - Political/Local News: generally originates from the websites of government agencies, or that of a particular politician's.

There are of course several other categories of news, but I'd argue these two make up the bulk of what can be considered "actionable news"

busterarm3• 5 years ago

You've got Cuomo getting an assist in smearing his accusers from both CNN and Facebook, two companies with some of the widest media reach on the frigging planet, and you're complaining about the bias of the NY Post in reporting it?

cwizou• 5 years ago

Sorry for the offtopic, but having a working CNN anchor drafting statements and advising someone very much in the news without taking a leave of absence of his job, that's certainly an insanely low bar on journalistic ethics : https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/biden-calls-andrew-cuomo-resig...

There are always double standards for journalistic ethics for primetime anchors, it's certainly not a CNN nor even a US only thing, but this one is a bit too egregious to spin, surely ?

I would love to hear the discussions going on on the international side of CNN (which I would argue has fairly high standards to reporting)...

pupdogg• 5 years ago

You'll have to venture into space to explore other inhabitable planets to find such publication!

losvedir• 5 years ago

Had to scroll down quite a ways but I'm glad someone asked. I assume people here wouldn't be taking, e.g. this story[0] at face value. When that one came out I figured it was "big if real", but I decided it wasn't real and from then on realized the NYPost is not to be trusted.

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/08/29/political-insider-explains-vot...

raxxorrax3• 5 years ago

Like the NYT that printed excuses for him? I think partisanship is a reality in the US everyone has to accept, but this would sound extremely different if it was about Kavanaugh. Maybe a Supreme Court Justice is more important than a NY gouverneur, but I don't really trust any newspaper in the US to be "less political".

Funnily now people call for keeping politics out of it. In politics. This isn't about general media anymore.

kwere• 5 years ago

Why Is Cuomo still able to keep Office despite being the incarnation of corrupt politician? Who are his supporters/backers ?

JumpCrisscross3• 5 years ago

Why Is Cuomo still able to keep Office

It’s been hours since the Attorney General’s report was was released. This is asking “why are people allowed to lie unassisted” picoseconds after a car crash.

tomp• 5 years ago

No, he was accused long ago, 6 months or longer. Many other men were cancelled on much flimsier accusations. But he’s a Democratic politician in NY, so he’s a favoured demographic by most media…

ceejayoz3• 5 years ago

NY Dems are hoping to push him out without a messy impeachment. He has few allies left, but he can make a fuss on the way.

JumpCrisscross3• 5 years ago

NY Dems are hoping to push him out without a messy impeachment

The only way to do that is to credibly threaten impeachment. That’s the work that is being done.

random_upvoter• 5 years ago

I find it odd that a formal impeachment would be necessary. If NY Democrats just refuse any further cooperation with Cuomo then surely he has no option left but to resign?

atatatat• 5 years ago

Watch House of Cards.

MR4D• 5 years ago

Wow, that’s a mike-drop kind of comment - dead on!

Politics is a weird thing, and to those who question situations like this really should watch that show. Aside than learning about the Constitution in school, you’ll learn more about real world politics from that show than you can imagine.

game_the0ry2• 5 years ago

I live in NYC - Cuomo is still somewhat popular here, particularly (and perhaps counterintuitively) among older women. At least among the older women I know, his transgressions are processed in the same way that Trump's were when the "grab 'em by the p-ssy" tape leaked.

Cuomo is skilled in playing "leader" on tv:

* the daily covid press briefings - these were especially powerful among Americans looking for some kind of steady leadership they could latch on to and feel safe and were especially amped up by the media (remember "Cuomo-sexual"?)

* in his response yesterday to AG's allegations, he showed multiple pics of him hugging and touching people he greeted, as a way of minimizing the pic that showed him touching one of his accuser's face

* multiple staged videos on tv of him assessing and riding the subways, cleaning the subways, attending gay pride parade, etc all to create a fake image of him as a "man of the people"

^^ that stuff still works on the over 55 demographics that watch CNN, so they still support him. IIRC, he had like ~50% approval rating like a couple weeks ago.

puszczyk• 5 years ago

I don’t know why the answer is unpopular. I not an American and don’t follow the NY politics. I don’t know too much about the scandal. But the ^^^ description sounds like a playbook followed by many politicians in many places , and the one that seems to work quite often.

iammisc5• 5 years ago

This is why the focus is on sex assault and not nursing home deaths. Like it or not, there's a segment of the population that celebrates men who grab life by certain parts. they're typically elderly.

And the elderly are a more active voter bloc.

The reason they stoped investigating the nursing home deaths is because titillating older women with a handsome elderly man is more likely to lead to political success than talking about how he killed older ladies.

pjc502• 5 years ago

He keeps the office until the next election regardless of what he does. Kind of a problem with elected positions. It used to be possible to shame people into resigning but that no longer works.

astura3• 5 years ago

No, he will be impeached if he does no resign - that's the consensus amongst legislators in Albany from what I've read.

thereddaikon• 5 years ago

Politics is by its very nature nasty and corrupt. New York politics is no different. In fact its kind of notorious for it. Cuomo is a powerful and politically connected family. The current governor's dad was once governor of NY as well. And his brother is a high profile news anchor.

It shouldn't be that way. Families shouldn't have that much power. But they do. And it takes a fair bit to bring them down.

okamiueru• 5 years ago

I disagree that politics by its nature is corrupt. I can see how, in some countries, it is hard to think otherwise, but I find the statement itself to be false.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

Cuomo was elected by public vote.

Governor positions aren’t placed via connections or corruption or family power. The citizens have to vote them in.

These most recent issues weren’t known prior to the last election cycle. Given these recent revelations I don’t see the voters going for him again, if he were to run at all.

Spooky232• 5 years ago

He’s an old school political boss. Nobody loves the guy, but he usually has an air of competence backed by the combination of carrot and stick that governors wield.

New York is a pretty complex state. When you hear somebody blabbering about “dems” and “blue”, you know they are clueless. It’s a conservative democratic state with a bunch of internal tensions that drive a lot of different dynamics.

Another thing is that the competition is pretty lame. If he survives this scandal, he will win re-election.

astura3• 5 years ago

the competition is pretty lame

The person elected governor before Cuomo (Eliot Spitzer) resigned due to a sex scandal. (prostitution in this case)

papito• 5 years ago

The bar for a fireable offense has been set extremely high in the last few years. That said, the Democratic party is largely still center-left, well-functioning, and with a working moral compass (for a political party), unlike that other authoritarian cult.

Cuomo will be forced to either resign or be impeached.

ncallaway• 5 years ago

From everything I’ve read it sounds like the NY legislature plans to move expeditiously toward an impeachment, so I’m not sure he is able to keep the office.

danaris• 5 years ago

NYS politics are a mess—not quite the level of habitual corruption stereotypically associated with Chicago, but it wasn't far off from that within my memory.

The only governor we've had in the past 40 years who wasn't visibly corrupt was Eliot Spitzer—who allowed a sex scandal with no political/corruption elements (that I ever heard of) to push him out of office.

Cuomo was actually looking pretty good for a while, relatively speaking. He was still very much a NY politician, but he was getting some stuff done, and with Silver and Bruno no longer keeping a stranglehold over the state legislature, we actually had budgets coming in on time (for many years, it was guaranteed that the state budget would be months late, at best, due to the deliberate gridlock in Albany).

It is, of course, supremely unsurprising that Cuomo has been doing this sort of thing all along. It's exactly the sort of mid-20th-century "politician's perk" that anyone who's paying attention would absolutely expect him to be making sure he gets. Unfortunately, because he's built up a decent amount of political capital due to the aforementioned "getting stuff done", combined with the fact that it is something that far too many still consider "normal", and his almost fanatical stubbornness, it's also supremely unsurprising that he's not resigning. I expect to see a messy, drawn-out impeachment fight, at best.

At this point, we can just hope that we might get a replacement who's actually interesting in improving New York, rather than one who mostly cares about improving his own image and network. But I won't hold my breath.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

He was elected through the public vote. Politicians aren’t removed from office the instant they’re associated with negative press. There will certainly be an impeachment process that can possibly remove him in the middle of an election cycle, but it takes time.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

There will certainly be an impeachment process

The impeachment process against Cuomo has been underway for a while, and it has shifted into a higher gear with this report.

mc326• 5 years ago

And where are all the Kavanaugh detractors making noise about Cuomo?

I'm also interested in seeing Anderson Cooper trot out the accusers and interview them about Cuomo.

alistairSH• 5 years ago

FWIW, every liberal I know wants Cuomo out of office. I don't know any Cuomo supporters outside of the NY Democratic political machine.

tomschlick6• 5 years ago

They will do the same thing they did when it was discovered that Virginia's Governor dressed up in blackface, and his LT Governor was accused of sexual assault..... nothing at all. It was an election year and they needed the votes.

arp2425• 5 years ago

You mean like Biden? Pelosi? Both NY Democratic senators?

You really can't pin hypocrisy on the Democratic party here. You saw the same with Al Franken (where, in hindsight, they were probably too quick to judge).

mandevil2• 5 years ago

I'm going to presume that you are not American. In the systems used by almost all other democracies around the world (either Westminster or Party List), where his office was dependent on maintaining support from Parliament, he probably would be gone by now. The US presidential/bicameral system (replicated in all of its flaws in almost every state) where the President/Governor is directly elected by the people does not have an effective means of removing someone, as we all learned by watching two impeachments of the previous President.

The executive can resign if they choose, but forcing a independently elected official out of office basically takes a lot of work and effort. He would need to be impeached by majority vote in the lower house, then convicted by a 2/3 vote in the upper house (plus, in an unusual NY quirk, the highest court, the Court of Appeals, joins the upper house as jurors) after a trial, where the governor has his own lawyers making his case for the defense, there are sworn witnesses and testimony, etc.

Impeachment has never removed a president. It has only ever removed one governor of New York. Cuomo has made enough enemies- and done enough heinous stuff- that he might lose, but it will be time consuming and painful, baring a resignation.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

The US presidential/bicameral system (replicated in all of its flaws in almost every state) where the President/Governor is directly elected by the people

The US President is not directly elected by the people, even though the people by whom he is elected are not the legislature and he does not need to maintain their support.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Why Is Cuomo still able to keep Office despite being the incarnation of corrupt politician?

If corruption didn't work for politicians, the “corrupt politician” image wouldn't be a thing.

But Cuomo is done, its just a matter of time. Unlike what has happened with the national GOP and Trump, NY Dems are done with Cuomo; his impeachment and removal are essentially certain even with his party hold majorities in both houses of the legislature, and it looks like there is a decent chance of him facing criminal charges as well, with DAs in multiple NY counties conducting investigations.

muglug3• 5 years ago

This is a dumb headline. She wasn’t working in her capacity as a FB exec. She was working as a loyal former aide.

cle2• 5 years ago

That's a plausible hypothesis, but from the information given I can't really conclude that (nor the converse). It's worth investigating her role further to find out.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 5 years ago

She may have been doing cuomo work on the clock but i generally agreew with your statement

At first stance it looked rsther bad but having read the article its much more flimsy.

However the optics of this happening are bad for fb and i dont think its unreasonable for fb to act against her.

busterarm3• 5 years ago

And for that same reason, Facebook's shareholders should be demanding her head on a platter. It's still extremely newsworthy.

muglug3• 5 years ago

Unless she used her official FB email to send these docs I don't see why it would be much of a scandal. Probably won't help her career progression at FB, though.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 5 years ago

A downside to the cuomo allegations is that cuomo was the only sane voice left protecting nyc, from further mismanagement by diblasio and pals.

The city mayor is so unpopular that The only thing stopping a recall is that he's going to be leaving office soon.

Cuomo has got to go for sure, hes now too weak to keep diblasio & pals in check

xadhominemx2• 5 years ago

Within nyc, De Blasio is not that much more unpopular than Cuomo, and now that the AG report has dropped I would not be surprised at all if De Blasio is significantly less unpopular in updated polling.

gowld5• 5 years ago

DiBlasio is leaving. The primary already completed..Eric Adams will become mayor.

busymom0• 5 years ago

Imo, all this Cuomo stuff is a huge distraction from the much bigger elephant in the room which people in power don't want to address.

Back in March 2020, the American Health Care Association told Cuomo, Wolf, Murphy, Whitmer etc to stop ordering infected patients into nursing homes. The governors ignored the AHCA and removed their own family from nursing homes while forcing others:

https://archive.is/bP8hz

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1191811

After this, it turned out Cuomo was also fabricating and lying about the actual nursing home death numbers by 10000.

Remember the trans Health Secretary Rachel Levine from PA (now US Assistant Health Secretary) who took out her own mother from nursing home while pushing covid patients into them:

https://nypost.com/2020/05/13/pennsylvania-health-official-m...

Despite all this, nobody has been held accountable and last month, the DOJ dropped the investigation:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-04/cuomo-alo...

wutbrodo• 5 years ago

The worst part is, bits of this were known from the beginning of the pandemic, but that didn't stop him from becoming a national hero on the left, despite a pandemic performance that ranged from unlucky at best to inept/corrupt at worst. It's only once Trump was out of office that a big chunk of the population (partially) woke up from this weird delirium in which literally everything bad is Trump's fault and literally everyone who isn't him is a saint.

In light of deep stupidity like this, it baffles me that people bother using models of electorate behavior more sophisticated than emotionally-incontinent monkeys banging on typewriters. There's more consistency and intelligence evident in the way six year olds pick their favorite power rangers.

gowld5• 5 years ago

Are you saying that nursing home patients should be moved to live on the street? Where else could they go?

neartheplain3• 5 years ago

Hospitals.

The US military docked a hospital ship in New York Harbor during the peak of the initial outbreak. That ship remained almost entirely unused [0] while COVID-positive adults were being discharged from hospitals straight back to nursing homes, where they died and/or infected others. The emergency hospital established in New York's Javits Convention Center went similarly underutilized [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_ships_designated_for_...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/why-nycs-largest-emergency-h...

xyzzyz2• 5 years ago

There were plenty of empty beds in NYC hospitals. The hospital ship they brought was pretty much entirely unused.

bobmaxup2• 5 years ago

It is a hospital's job to keep beds open. They would shuffle people into nursing homes (or the street) without any direction to do otherwise.

cle2• 5 years ago

This should highlight why some companies have such strict policies about what you can do outside of work. Like it or not, every extracurricular activity is a potential PR risk, especially in the last few years where reputations and trust can be quickly destroyed based on circumstantial evidence.

jesboat• 5 years ago

Facebook also has such policies. This would be a pretty clear violation, on multiple ways. If the story holds up (I'm aware of no reason why it wouldn't), there will be enormous internal pressure to remove her, and I'd be pretty shocked if they don't fire her reasonably quickly.

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

> Dani Lever — who had worked in Cuomo’s press operation since 2014 but left in August 2020 to join Facebook as a communications manager

This is the sort of hire that drives me nuts. I'm sure this person is a fully capable communications manager, but what Facebook really purchased was political access. Is it no surprise then that long after beginning work she was doing favors for her former employer? Maintaining a connection to powerful politicians might well have been in her job description.

> Prior to joining Cuomo’s office in 2014, Lever worked as a press assistant for President Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign and worked in press relations at the Clinton Foundation, among other roles, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Which is more valuable to Facebook: her skills as a "communication manager" or the fact that she probably has the personal numbers for half of Washington?

After some quickly googling: she appears to be the daughter of a prominent NYC attorney, which might have something to do with her previous work, as a student, for NY's attorney general. And for NYC's comptroller general. I would have killed for such jobs during law school. She seems to have bounced between them while an undergrad.

"Lever, who grew up in Quaker Ridge, graduated from [redacted] and the University of Wisconsin-Madison also worked for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, President Obama's 2012 campaign, and Clinton Foundation. She is the daughter of Joel and Debbie Lever of Bradford Road."

https://scarsdale10583.com/about-joomla/the-project/5776-sca...

I love that "Bradford Road" reference. That is New England code for an old and well connected family. (The implications of her highschool are just inappropriate and so I redact it.)

gadders• 5 years ago

Regulatory capture, innit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

jpxw• 5 years ago

Nick Clegg is another notable political hire by Facebook. It seems like a tactic of theirs.

muglug3• 5 years ago

Nick Clegg was once the deputy prime minister of Great Britain. The two hires are in no way comparable.

PragmaticPulp3• 5 years ago

I know several people who have transitioned from working in politics to working in private sector.

The reason is usually much less nefarious: Private sector pays a lot more than political jobs. This is especially true for FAANG positions.

Facebook is large enough to afford professional lobbyists and consulting firms if they need political access. They don’t need to give executive level positions to former employees of a governor’s communications team to get access.

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

> professional lobbyists and consulting firms

Those cost and are not very effective. Lobbyists create paper trails and must follow rules. A more efficient strategy is to hire the friends and family members of influential people.

spaetzleesser• 5 years ago

“Facebook is large enough to afford professional lobbyists and consulting firms if they need political access. They don’t need to give executive level positions to former employees of a governor’s communications team to get access.”

This is no different. Basically they are hiring lobbyists on staff instead of dealing with a lobbying firm.

gowld5• 5 years ago

What is the job of "communications manager" if not to maintain human networking?

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

To spellcheck outgoing messaging. To organize press events. To ensure a cohesive message is presented that is accurate to the intentions of the company. To stop execs from saying horrible things (Blizzard-Activision). There is plenty of communications work that doesn't require influence.

JasonFruit• 5 years ago

These political hires remind me why I always question the "former" in "former CIA". Just like Lever seems to have carried loyalty to and willingness to work on behalf of her former boss into her new job, a lot of these "former CIA" types seem to do a lot of things that are beneficial to theirs.

lancesells3• 5 years ago

I did a quick search for some of the big companies to see who is on their board with a political past.

Apple - Al Gore (Vice President of the US) - Ron Sugar (Northrup Grunman)

Google - Roger Ferguson (Federal Reserve of US)

Facebook - Robert Kimmett (Department of Treasury)

Facebook Oversight - Helle Thorning-Smith (PM of Denmark) - Nick Clegg (Deputy PM of UK)

Salesforce - Colin Powell (Secretary of State in the US) - John Roos (Ambassador to Japan from the US)

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

Those are past connections to companies. How many hires are sons/daughters of people still on boards or regulatory bodies. Active family connections are much more difficult to regulate or even document.

fortran77• 5 years ago

And look at the board that was in place for Theranos....

BLKNSLVR2• 5 years ago

Afterpay has a growing list of hires that are obviously for political and regulatory fire supression[0].

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-04/afterpay-square-mille...

blantonl• 5 years ago

Don't forget collections of low and mid-level staffers who really get work done who maintain connections back to the military/political industrial complex who collectively become invaluable to organizations.

didgeoridoo• 5 years ago

Dropbox - Condi Rice (Bush Sec. State)

psychlops3• 5 years ago

It's a two way street....

Biden's Counselor - Jeff Zients from Facebook's Board

Biden's General Counsel - Jessica Hertz from Facebook

White House Office of Legislative Affairs - Louisa Terrell - Public Policy director at Facebook

arp2425• 5 years ago

I mean, people got to earn a living somehow after they leave politics, right? Would you ban certain positions? Or just give former politicians a salary for the remainder of their lives and forbid them from working? Or how else would you solve this?

Of course it all smells more than a little fishy, but I'm not really seeing any realistic way to solve it.

abvdasker• 5 years ago

It's a feature, not a bug.

cannabis_sam• 5 years ago

This is why politics and voting are completely pointless at this point… We currently live in a world where people who amassed wealth before we were even born, have bought off every politician, locked down our government and closed off every single avenue to real change.

Welcome to our neo-feudal reality!

danans• 5 years ago

This is why politics and voting are completely pointless at this point…

That's patently false. The government, and in particular the executive branch, holds immense and immediate powers whose implementation materially changes when a change of officeholder takes place, even sometimes within the same party.

It's not clear that Biden's platform would have been as worker focused were it not for Sanders' run or as America-first were it not for Trump.

Also consider that within an 10 year span legislation as opposed to each other as Obamacare and the Trump tax cut took place.

Voting matters a great deal.

BLKNSLVR2• 5 years ago

The corruption of revolving doors pays for the grandkids college.

"While he was Minister for Trade and Investment, Robb approved Chinese company Shandong Landbridge Group to lease Port Darwin for 99 years. As soon as he left politics, Robb was hired by Shandong Landbridge on a $880,000 per year salary. In 2019, Robb left the position, shortly before a new foreign-interference law took effect."[0]

Good work if you can get it and still sleep at night.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Robb

maxst• 5 years ago

“The New York electorate seems to be inured to corruption, they seem to believe it’s normal and expected behavior"

"According to a poll released last week by Quinnipiac University, 45 percent of New Yorkers consider corruption to be a “very serious” problem, but 48 percent of voters said it’s as bad as anywhere else"

"You'll be hard pressed to find New Yorkers who don't think government corruption is a problem in New York State,” poll analyst Mary Snow said. “Yet, it's not the defining issue in the race.”[0]

[0] https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/201...

kappi• 5 years ago

Sheryl Sandberg was also hired for political access. "Maintaining a connection to powerful politicians" is also her job description.How much she is paid for that!

jaywalk2• 5 years ago

The implications of her highschool are just inappropriate and so I redact it.

Right before you link to the page where you pulled your self-redacted quote from. So all you really did was call more attention to it. Clever trolling.

geodel2• 5 years ago

I think unless one keep claiming US exceptionalism everytime discussion like these comes up. This behavior is standard almost anywhere in the world. I would expect the same here.

Maintaining a connection to powerful politicians might well have been in her job description.

Well not doing that will be just resorting to banal technicalities to hire one for an important job. To me it would be as stupid and irritating as companies asking me SpringBoot 2.3.1 experience for a Sr Engineer job instead of problem solving skills.

tqi• 5 years ago

but what Facebook really purchased was political access.

I wish people would evaluate their own susceptibility to conspiracy theory thinking. There is no evidence of this other than "it is something I've seen in the movies that seems plausible," which frankly is more or less the same level of proof as "Plandemic" and "Antivax."

TillE• 5 years ago

This is one of the most common things in the political world, we even have a name for it. It's the revolving door.

Extremely weird or naive to think of it as an implausible conspiracy theory.

brendoelfrendo• 5 years ago

I love that "Bradford Road" reference. That is New England code for an old and well connected family.

Maybe I'm missing something, but you posted an article from a local news site in Scarsdale, NY. I'm pretty sure that just means that her family literally lived on Bradford Road.

I've never heard Bradford Road used as code before, and I grew up in New England. (And besides, NY is not in New England.)

quesera2• 5 years ago

FWIW re your last two paragraphs:

I think you're reading too much into the small town newspaper editorial.

"Bradford Road" is how you describe the road they lived on, in a small town paper.

Scarsdale NY is a wealthy suburb in Westchester County, with a large Jewish population.

"Solomon Schechter" (your redaction) is a private school in Manhattan named after an important rabbi. Censoring his name is confusing. Are you concerned that readers here will think you are reacting negatively to her family's (presumed) religious affiliation?

Small town editorial is chummy and insular, but it's not written for a larger audience. I don't see anything unusual or inappropriate in the writing here.

I feel that you missed the most egregious problem with the article though. It was posted in 2016, and almost five years later, no one has corrected the misspelling of the name of the town!

sandworm1015• 5 years ago

> Censoring his name is confusing.

It isn't that. If we are talking about family relations, daughters working for people who know their fathers, a school with ties to a particular religion or community injects a statement that I did not want to make. It is irrelevant to the issue but can easily start a _very_ negative conversation. I don't think ever mentioning someone's likely religion in such context is ever appropriate.

As for "of such and such road", that is a very common phrase going back centuries. It is a way of stating the wealth, or lack thereof, of a person's family.

icedchai• 5 years ago

Why is it inappropriate? She went to an exclusive high school costing over $45K/year.

thepasswordis• 5 years ago

Cuomo also sent thousands of elderly people to their deaths by forcing them back into nursing homes.

And yes, I mean forcing.

Do you remember the hospital ship? The field hospitals? Javits center?

Did you know the hospital ship went home after being almost completely unused? Did you know it treated IN TOTAL 182 people? With a crew of 1200 and 1000 available beds?

Did you know that javits center never even got remotely close to full? In TOTAL in treated about 1000 patients and had 4000 beds.

And yet he’s forcing these elderly back into nursing homes because it makes him look in charge, and fuels his idiotic feud he had going with the federal government over who was more leadery. He won an Emmy for it!

Cuomo should be facing prison. The people who have been helping him cover up killing thousands of elderly people as a political play should as well.

The fact that he was transferring state employees around so he could kiss them on the cheek and touch their face should get him disgraced and fired. It is absolutely a distraction from the horror he has inflicted upon thousands of people. Imagine him sending your grandmother to her death so that he could look good on television. Absolutely evil.

AzzieElbab2• 5 years ago

Sadly the real scandal is that he was "following the science" at the given time and he wasnt the only official who did

neartheplain3• 5 years ago

Whether Cuomo "followed the science" in his nursing home directive is debatable. From Wikipedia (see above link):

Cuomo repeatedly stated that the order was based on CDC guidance issued by the Trump administration. PolitiFact rated that statement as "mostly false" because the guidelines issued by the CDC and CMS indicated that a medically stable COVID-19 patient could be discharged from a hospital to a nursing home "only if the nursing home can implement all recommended infection control procedures."

iammisc5• 5 years ago

Two things:

1. What he did went against published federal guidelines which state no transfers to nursing homes unless they have medical isolation wards

2. Why lie about it?

Also contemporaneous with his policies, pundits like mark Levin (who broke this story) were calling him out on it only to be accused of spreading conspiracy

neartheplain3• 5 years ago

For the doubters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_COVID-19_nursing_home...

In January 2021, Attorney General of New York Letitia James released a report finding that Governor Andrew Cuomo had understated the toll of COVID-19-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as 50 percent. The scandal was made public on February 11, 2021, when the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, a secretary and aide to Cuomo, privately apologized to lawmakers for the administration withholding the nursing-home death toll in fear then-President Donald Trump would "turn this into a giant political football".
U.S. Attorney Seth DuCharme of the Eastern District of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have launched an investigation into New York state's handling of nursing home deaths.

tekknik5• 5 years ago

withholding the nursing-home death toll in fear then-President Donald Trump would "turn this into a giant political football".

When will the left calm down and realize this isn’t a war?

ericb5• 5 years ago

Do you remember the hospital ship? The field hospitals? Javits center?

Let's not mingle in choices that were reasonable given the best knowledge and advice from medical experts at the time along with crimes.

I hate this binary thinking of "bad person did x, therefore x is bad too!"

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

They intentionally shoved COVID positive patients into nursing homes full of vulnerable elderly while simultainiously rejecting the large-scale help offered by the Fed. There's no grey area here, just pure evil. They did the same in PA too, the PA Health Secretary even removed his mother from a nursing home before implementing this policy.

jaywalk2• 5 years ago

It's a good thing the DOJ dropped the investigation into him and Whitmer over this at the end of last month. Evil and corrupt.

balozi• 5 years ago

Don't forget the 40,000 ventilators he demanded for his state (a claim he said was based on science and data no less).

tomschlick6• 5 years ago

He then also criticized the Trump admin for not giving him that number even though they were giving him thousands already. 40k new ventilators didn't even exist at the time, there is no warehouse with tens of thousands of them, they were being built and distributed nationwide; but the media ate it up because orange man bad.

psychlops3• 5 years ago

He has the second highest covid death rate per capita, NJ's Phil Murphy beat him out (so far).

e40• 5 years ago

NY was ground zero in the US, so even without mismanagement it might have been the case. I work remotely with a Dr. in the Bronx and they were hit unbelievably hard early on. The hospital he worked at was surrounded with refrigeration trucks to store bodies.

raxxorrax3• 5 years ago

To be fair, I don't think any politician could seriously influence that number. Crafting sensible policies helps a bit, but infection is a matter of chance and how people behave.

eplanit• 5 years ago

It was disgusting re: the ships and the Javits center. But, the rude refusal to use any of those (by both Cuomo and Newsom), solely because Trump provided them, was also one of the early revelations of the politicization of the pandemic.

dtjb3• 5 years ago

Newsom repeatedly and publicly thanked Trump for the USNS Mercy.

https://www.axios.com/gavin-newsom-trump-coronavirus-cnn-71e...

standardUser2• 5 years ago

Before any of that happened, Trump was promising the pandemic would go away on its own, calling for less testing (implying either an astounding lack of intellect or something more nefarious) and he later admitted on a television interview he lied about the severity of the pandemic.

throwaway8943459• 5 years ago

Yeah, and not a soul in the media or other most elsewhere cared until after the election. Indeed, CNN had his own brother interview him, even coaching him to maximize his appeal. The activist media is detestable.

dtjb3• 5 years ago

I think CNN liked the brother vs. brother angle purely for entertainment value. The only activism they practice is what drives traffic.

gamblor956• 5 years ago

What's with the hysterical anti-media FUD? We know about Cuomo's nursing home shenanigans because the media you complain about were at the forefront of reporting about it, starting as far back as April 2020. (WSJ, Politico, WaPo, NYT, NBC News, Chicago Tribune, ABC, and CBS were just some of the national news organizations reporting on this.)

The public decided it didn't care.

gorbachev• 5 years ago

...and he made the nursing homes not liable for anything related to covid-19. That's super villain evilry.

He repealed that law after becoming under federal investigation for it.

This man is the perfect illustration of New York State politics. Corrupt to the core.

kordlessagain2• 5 years ago

I’m glad I have a downvote button in this country.

_-david-_4• 5 years ago

Can you explain why you downvoted? Just making a snarky comment doesn't add anything to the conversation or explain why the post is incorrect or misleading.

eezurr• 5 years ago

He was not allowed to transfer covid patients to the ship. The captain/navy didnt want to deal with the cleaning/disinfecting after the fact.

Tha javits center was for overflow, not first priority.

Where else were the elderly supposed to go? This one i have no info on

lordloki• 5 years ago

Then you move non-infected folks out of hospitals or nursing homes onto the ship, then use the empty space for the covid patients. There were still ways to utilize the resources available in a much better and safer way.

adolph• 5 years ago

The captain/navy didnt want to deal with the cleaning/disinfecting after the fact.

That sounds weird, like they weren't going to clean up after non-COVID patients? Is there a cite on this claim?

Alupis2• 5 years ago

You forgot his "Best Selling" braggadocios book about how great he handled COVID-19, including his decision to send thousands of elderly to their deaths.

It's one thing to make a policy blunder and deal with the consequences... It's another thing entirely to cover it up, lie, and suppress just to cling to power.

Just reflect for a second... the media cooed at how great this man was and how he was going to be the next President. And now, he won't go down for killing thousands of elderly and the ensuing cover-up, no - he's going to go down (big maybe!) for being a sexual creep. What a world...

vkou2• 5 years ago

And now, he won't go down for killing thousands of elderly and the ensuing cover-up, no - he's going to go down (big maybe!) for being a sexual creep.

A politician killing a few (hundred) thousand people is rarely that big a black mark on their legacy, especially among their supporters.

jasonlotito• 5 years ago

Did you know the hospital ship went home after being almost completely unused? Did you know it treated IN TOTAL 182 people? With a crew of 1200 and 1000 available beds?

That's probably because it wasn't sent originally to support COVID patients, and it wasn't until later that they opened up for COVID, and then left shortly after it had opened for COVID. Not sure about Javits.

raxxorrax3• 5 years ago

He won an Emmy for it!

Isn't that a TV/movie price? For good acting?

giancarlostoro• 5 years ago

News reporters win Emmys too, they got varying categories.

paxys• 5 years ago

Let's not be hyperbolic. He may not have handled covid perfectly but there are dozens of governments and legislatures out there that literally made mask mandates and lockdowns illegal to implement. If he deserves prison what about them?

fareesh• 5 years ago

This story is generally not discussed openly because there's a silent acknowledgement amongst people that distasteful things were done from 2016-2020 for obvious reasons.

Behind closed doors plenty of people say they think it's fine because the end goal was achieved.

Apotheos• 5 years ago

I believe the initial rehousing of elderly patients back into nursing elder care facilities predates the arrival of the hospital ship and the construction of the Javitz Center hospital and triage space.

I'm ignorant on if this practice continued post arrival and construction of the added COVID treatment centers though.

jsnell• 5 years ago

The only link to HN here appears to be the Facebook angle. But from the phrasing in the article, I don't think those "confidental files" had anything to do with Facebook?

slibhb• 5 years ago

The shocking thing about Cuomo is how blatant it all was. Not just the sexual harassment but his character across the board.

This is a guy who wrote a book about his leadership in the covid pandemic during the covid pandemic. That's like Churchill writing his memoir of World War II during The Blitz.

We ought to have a culture where someone who behaves like this is laughed out of the building.

stefan_2• 5 years ago

The things described by the victims were indeed perfectly relatable for anyone who ever watched one of his press briefings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK_kB-JJMKo

74d-fe6-2c6• 5 years ago

After you realize that Jimmy Savile could do it in front of an entire nation live on TV for several decades this ugly Schmock's feat doesn't seem so incredible anymore. Same goes for Epstein. Humans are a bunch of opportunistic little fuckers who will look away whenever it gets uncomfortable or is useful.

linuxftw• 5 years ago

We ought to have a culture where someone who behaves like this is laughed out of the building.

Some of us do, but the partisan politics have blinded many. We can't even agree on basic things any more, like supporting the Iraq war should be a disqualification for either party at this point. People keep supporting these liar, fraud, war criminal types.

iammisc5• 5 years ago

To be fair, Iraq basically was a disqualifier in 2016. Little data is to be had on 2020 since the gop primary didn't really mean much.

Trump campaigned on how dumb Afghanistan and Iraq are and promised to remove troops.

bequanna2• 5 years ago

Only in New York is a persona like that tolerated and celebrated. Those of us in Middle America are indeed laughing at his obvious attention seeking and machismo.

Like many other officials during this period, his frequent press conferences were nothing but ego satisfying spectacles.

d232• 5 years ago

Are you serious? Middle america voted for a guy exactly like that.

ggggtez2• 5 years ago

I think you are unintentionally describing another New Yorker. Trump.

I thought I should make the comment from the sibling poster more explicit.

misiti3780• 5 years ago

Was paid 4M to write a book*

specialist• 5 years ago

Highest recommendation for Robert Caro's The Power Broker, biography of Robert Moses. The guy who built NY's parks, bridges, highways, etc. How he acquired and wielded power. The impact he had nationally. It gives some insight into the game Cuomo and so many others are playing.

Politics is nasty. Full stop.

My only TIL that I can offer: Everyone should run for office. Any office. At least once.

Once you decide to play the game -- play to win -- every thing makes perfect sense.

Not to excuse it, in any way. It's just that folk theories aren't even wrong. So people get worked up about the wrong stuff. There will always be devils doing bad stuff.

What should we do about them?

(Haven't started Caro's LBJ biographies yet. I've gleaned that LBJ makes Moses look like a middleweight.)

nova22033• 5 years ago

as a communications manager

OMG...this person worked as THE "communication manager" for facebook...everyone knows facebook only has ONE communication manager and she pretty much runs the company...

This is guilt by loose association...Typical NYPOST/Murdoch crap..

brian_herman• 5 years ago

Why am I not surprised at this at all.

sayhar2• 5 years ago

First off, Cuomo is terrible. People are right to point to the nursing home problems, but there's even more. Stuff like setting up an "anti-corruption" commission to attack his political foes, then hastily shutting it down when it started investigating him. Many of his close aides being arrested for straight up corruption, etc. He's been flagrantly bad for a long time. (Look up the Moreland commission)

That said, a communications manager is strongly, hilariously, obviously not a "facebook executive". For one thing, it's an IC position. CM's don't manage people, they "manage" a message. (Source: I worked at FB)

Please don't let yourself get baited by the literal tabloid that is the Murdoch post.

bquest2• 5 years ago

When i saw this was from the post, i was saddened by how many comments there where as so many seem to take it seriously.

sayhar2• 5 years ago

Yeah, it's really sad. I don't know what to do about it. There's just a shocking lack of context when it comes to news/politics here. Which, I guess, shouldn't be so shocking -- why should we expect people to have expertise in this area?

Maybe the truly shocking thing is the ratio of strong opinions to actual knowledge.

happynacho• 5 years ago

Dems and Big Tech, name a more iconic duo.

discordance• 5 years ago

There is an endless amount of hideous behavior from the folks over at Facebook that we all inevitably hear about.

I was always puzzled why so few FB employees whistleblow (RSUs aside). That was until I read An Ugly Truth and read about Sonya Ahuja's internal policing tactics. Scary stuff!

I feel sorry for you all being keylogged and monitored so closely by your employer!

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

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