Andrew Cuomo Ordered to Return $5.1M in Covid Book Profits

BUCK: We have for you right now a news update. Governor Cuomo — former governor, of course — has to give back his $5.1 million pandemic book, the book profits, to the state. This on the New York Post no. Leadership lessons from the covid-19 pandemic? Here’s a lesson for you, Cuomo. Don’t be a jerk who’s grabbing at and doing things with your staff. The much even bigger problem, of course, is what he did in the nursing homes in New York.

Never mind everything else that was going on under his leadership during the covid situation — and I cannot remind folks enough, as a native New Yorker born and raised here, Clay. This is my home state, for better for worse, and lately it’s for worse. This guy was second only to Fauci in terms of the media worship that he received in May and June of 2020, and our friend Miranda Devine from the New York Post…?

The New York Post broke the story about the nursing home order that, remember, covid-positive seniors were mandated back into nursing homes. Essentially nursing homes had no right to say, “Don’t send people with covid. Keep them in the hospital where they can at least try to prevent contagion,” ’cause they were so worried about hospital bed capacity. We never lost hospital bed capacity, actually. It never overran and we couldn’t treat people. But we did send people who are seniors with covid back into nursing homes to infect other seniors because of an executive order from this guy.

CLAY: Which is why the death rate in New York was so overwhelming to a large extent in March and April and May of 2020, and that’s gonna be a really fascinating case, Buck, because I’m just gonna tell you. If I’m Andrew Cuomo, I’m like, “You already took my office.” I’m not saying that’s unjustified at all. I think he should have lost his job. I think he’s one of the worst governors in the history of the country if you consider the job of a governor is to keep its people safe — like, the most important job of a governor — and he failed at that.

But he’s already signed the contract and been paid for the book, and the state of New York okayed that deal initially. I don’t know how they now… This is me being the lawyer. I would defend Andrew Cuomo on this. I don’t know how they can, ex post facto, claw back that money after they already paid him. Now, this is part and parcel of the bigger issue, but I don’t understand how you can’t…

For instance, Andrew Cuomo couldn’t profit off of his governorship by doing many other things, right, like you have to put a lot of your assets in a trust unusually when you take over a governor’s job but he can sell a book for millions of dollars? I can’t do a radio show and be an elected official, right? But he can write a $5 million book?

BUCK: He had his staff write the book.

CLAY: Yeah. Of course. Of course.

BUCK: The government staff wrote the book, which is part of why he’s having to give back all the money.

CLAY: But that happens for all these staff members, right, these politicians.

BUCK: Oh. Well, no. Well, no. You’re not supposed to. It’s not supposed to be paid on the government payroll.

CLAY: You’re not supposed to. I understand.

BUCK: They may use a ghostwriter.

CLAY: The idea that most of these politicians are sitting in front of an empty laptop screen typing? That’s how I write my books. Most of these guys are not doing that.

BUCK: This is why you go into people’s homes; they have all these books written by former presidents, you’re just like, “No one reads those books.” I was gonna say, “Unless you love a particular president,” and I’m not talking about great biographies. I love great autobiographies. I know you do too. I’m talking about so-called recent autobiographies by recent presidents. Even, like, Bush Decision Points. I didn’t think that was particularly interesting. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.

CLAY: They’re all trying to set the historical record and you don’t know how accurate they are and most of them are writing it so close to when they were president that you really can’t understand the larger historical context in which they governed.

BUCK: But you remind me of something, too, when we’re talking about the Cuomo book and the fall from grace here of the Bros Cuomo, right, both of them now. There wasn’t just the nursing home scandal and of course the sexual harassment issue around Cuomo. They lied about the numbers, the death numbers!

CLAY: Yes. Oh, yes. That’s what’s staggering.

BUCK: They actively suppressed. So he was going around taking a… Not just taking a bow. Let’s remember there was a time in New York when there was something called Cuomo Chips. And I’ve never forgotten this because you weren’t allowed to be in an establishment and just drink alcohol. You had to order food under Cuomo mandate so people would get some potato chips in a little cup in a bar, and they would pay a dollar for Cuomo chips.

He said, “That’s not enough,” and he tried to change the rules again. This guy was a tyrant, and he was a tyrant who was pretending to be a leader in this crisis when he was a liar in this crisis, and he hid the death numbers. That should… It’s one of the reasons also in the background of why he resigned which got lost in all of this. There’s a real investigation going of that part of this, the hiding of numbers of official deaths. Think about that: You’re hiding casualty counts.

CLAY: No doubt. Which is why, look. You can believe #MeToo is significant and the idea that Andrew Cuomo lost his job for #MeToo, but not for hiding thousands of deaths in nursing homes is a fundamental failure of the larger political process because whatever you think about #MeToo, thousands of deaths attributed to you over the way that you handled nursing homes and then hiding them from a Department of Justice investigation is far more significant from a public policy perspective and whether you deserve to be governor than what you may have done or said inappropriately around women or men, for that matter. And yet he loses his job, he got #MeToo’d not for tragic incompetence that cost thousands of lives.

BUCK: And that he lied about, on top of everything else.