CLAY: One of the erstwhile stars of the Democratic Party — they even gave him a special Emmy where they rescinded it. They also said that he was maybe gonna be their presidential nominee, before they ended up forcing him to step down. That is one Andrew Cuomo. And, by the way, the Andrew Cuomo implosion ended up costing his brother, Chris, his job at CNN; cost Jeff Zucker, who was running CNN, his job; cost Jeff Zucker’s girlfriend her job, and has left a monster mushroom cloud behind. But when all of this started, if I remember correctly, Buck, we were doing the show together in New York when Cuomo resigned and announced that he would no longer be doing the show.
BUCK: We were.
CLAY: We were, and I argued then — shortly thereafter — there’s no way that Andrew Cuomo is gonna ride off into the sunset and that he is done. He’s got too much money, and he will try to find a way to find himself inextricably bound up in state politics again. And, with that in mind, guess who is now running ads in New York State? Have you actually seen this ad on television, Buck, flipping around?
BUCK: Only heard it. Only heard it.
CLAY: All right. So let’s listen. Andrew Cuomo on the comeback trail. This is the ad that he is running in the state of New York.
BUCK: Okay. So, loo,k he’s an egomaniac, right? That was obvious from the press briefings he was giving during covid, the way that he handled all of this stuff, but it is remarkable because he may force us… Here’s the thing all along. I wasn’t calling for Cuomo to step down or for him to be no longer the governor because he allegedly touched someone in the stomach area or something or whatever.
CLAY: Right.
BUCK: It was because he not only sent covid-positive patients back into nursing homes but then lied about it and covered it up officially. You cannot have someone who does that during a crisis continue to be in power or else you make a mockery if you have any accountability, any legal accountability too. So he may force us to relitigate, if you will, that issue in the public because that’s really the problem is. And I think, Clay, he’s more vulnerable on that than he was in the past because so much of the Fauciite covid narrative — which he was a huge part of in the early days — has all come apart.
CLAY: Fauci said that he was a hero. He argued, Fauci did, that Cuomo couldn’t have handled anything better, that the whole process of New York… He wrote a book lauding his overall response along with everybody else in New York, and remember in the early days of the Cuomo show on CNN, when Chris Cuomo would interview his brother, Andrew, the idea was, “Oh, these guys are heroes of covid!”
They even staged that fake recovery for Chris Cuomo from covid when he came out of the basement when he was never actually in danger, and all of this was a total sham. And what’s amazing is I do think there’s a strong chance that Andrew Cuomo will come back from this. I really do. There’s some talk that he may challenge Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, in sort of a head-to-head battle royale because it was her investigation that effectively pushed him out of the office in the first place.
CLAY: Probably Allison Gollust.
BUCK: I was gonna say Chris Cuomo, but okay. (laughing) Close enough, close enough.
CLAY: Allison Gollust was her name, the girlfriend of Jeff Zucker —
BUCK: Zucker, yes.
CLAY: — who had previously been with Andrew Cuomo his marketing.
BUCK: Chief of staff.
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