Cuomo’s efforts to avoid accountability are even more glaring when he actually pretends to hold others accountable. Early in his tenure, Cuomo established the Moreland Commission on Public Corruption to look into the outside income and political fundraising of legislative leaders and determine if there were conflicts with state business. He abruptly shut down the commission when it started looking into his own affairs, claiming hypocritically that it had no right to do so.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident and instead served as a harbinger of what was to come. In 2019, Governor Cuomo illegally received confidential information from a meeting of the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics. The governor then illegally reached out to the speaker of the state assembly to convey his displeasure with how the speaker’s nominees to the commission voted in a confidential executive session where they discussed investigating him. When this illegality came to light, Cuomo appointed his hand-picked inspector general to look into it. Calling the result an “investigation” would be a stretch, considering the IG’s office never interviewed the participants in the confidential session. Unsurprisingly, the probe found no evidence of any misconduct on the governor’s part.

The obvious lies, the ham-fisted cover-ups, the corruption — we’ve seen it all time and time again from this governor. When there’s even a hint of an investigation into wrongdoing that implicates him or his cabal, Cuomo cuts his losses and scorches the earth. This is who he is: a mean-spirited bully with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, ruthless in defense of his own venal interests and public image.