The Trump Justice Department is reportedly investigating Andrew Cuomo, after Republicans accused the Democrat of lying to Congress about his handling of the pandemic response as New York governor. But the investigation combines two of the worst aspects of the Trump 2.0 DOJ thus far: the unserious leadership of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., that opened the investigation and the Eric Adams dismissal debacle.
Cuomo is running for New York City mayor, making him of a rival of the current mayor, Adams, who’s running for re-election as an independent after being initially elected as a Democrat.
Adams, of course, was charged in a federal corruption case during the Biden administration. The reason he’s free from those charges now is that the Trump administration moved to dismiss them. Notably, the Trump DOJ moved to dismiss Adams’ case “without prejudice,” which would have let the government revive the case later, if (for example) it became displeased with Adams’ cooperation on immigration enforcement. But the presiding judge saw through that gambit and dismissed the case permanently.
That failed bid to gain political leverage through the courts colors the Cuomo investigation. Bringing a criminal case against him could benefit Cuomo’s mayoral rival, Adams, who’s been willing to align with the Trump administration and knows first-hand that it will use the justice system to achieve its political ends.
And what if the administration wants to make Cuomo the next Adams? That is, what if the government wants to use a criminal case to gain political leverage over the next possible mayor of the city? The courts are wise to the Adams gambit, so the Trump DOJ wouldn’t be able to carry out the same scheme it failed to execute in Adams’ case. But there are all sorts of ways the government can gain leverage even at the investigatory stage, given how valuable it can be for a prospective defendant not to face charges in the first place.
And then there’s the D.C. office that opened the investigation during the tenure of Ed Martin, who was too extreme for even this Congress to confirm to the top prosecutor job. The president replaced Martin on an interim basis with Jeanine Pirro, who joined the office from Fox News, where she spoke out against Cuomo. She may well have had good reason to do so, regardless of whether he committed any crime. Cuomo isn’t an entirely sympathetic figure in Democratic circles, either. But that’s not the point. The point is that any charges that come out of this investigation will need more scrutiny than usual. Any presumption of good faith from this administration has long passed. Responding to the investigation news, a Cuomo spokesperson called it “lawfare and election interference plain and simple — something President Trump and his top Department of Justice officials say they are against.” The spokesperson added that Cuomo “testified truthfully to the best of his recollection about events from four years earlier, and he offered to address any follow-up questions from the Subcommittee — but from the beginning this was all transparently political.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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