Who's worse, the one who hired the spy in the first place, or the one who brought her into the inner circle? Such is the flavor of the debate in the capital since the arrest of Linda Sun and her husband, Chris Hu.
Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor who resigned in 2021, responded to the media fracas yesterday via his longtime spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, who has been described by critics as "a high-strung mix of sexual abuse enabler, meathead and sycophant".
Azzopardi's statement wasn't difficult to decipher: “While Ms. Sun was promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff in the subsequent administration, during our time she worked in a handful of agencies and was one of many community liaisons who had little to no interaction with the governor.”
In other words, Sure we hired her, but come on, she was just a pretty face in the secretary pool! Given that Cuomo resigned over sexually harassing 11 women during his time in office, one wonders if Sun was one of his conquests who didn't go public.
Let's not forget that Cuomo picked Kathy Hochul to be his Lt. Gov. in 2014--it's not as though the two are political foes. So to attempt to throw Hochul under the bus shows the gravity of the situation. Sun is a potato hot enough that Cuomo is willing to dissolve any good will between the two camps.
For her part, Gov. Hochul's retort left a little too much to the imagination.
“This individual was hired by the Executive Chamber more than a decade ago. We terminated her employment in March 2023 after discovering evidence of misconduct, immediately reported her actions to law enforcement and have assisted law enforcement throughout this process,” a spokesperson said.
Very slippery indeed. Without naming Cuomo, Hochul passes the buck on the hiring/vetting of Sun. Then she points out that Sun was fired after a discovery of "evidence of misconduct," but stops short of saying her office caught Sun in the performance of espionage. This is a critical distinction: Hochul cannot come out and say, over a year later, that she caught Sun spying but decided to keep it quiet.
As tawdry as this episode of Albany Gone Wild has been so far, it isn't the worst crime committed by this pair of Democrats. As CDM has reported in the past, Cuomo (and then Lt. Gov. Hochul) were leaders in the push to place Covid-positive patients in nursing homes.
That was the scandal that forced Cuomo's resignation, in our opinion. Much like Hunter Biden taking the fall for gun charges and potentially for tax issues--the rough equivalent of a plea bargain writ large--so too did Cuomo take a hit for sex charges instead of the much larger charge: sacrificing the elderly in order to make loads of Covid cash for nursing homes, one of Cuomo's largest campaign donors.
It's another Democrat pattern, a way of sating the public's outrage with lesser convictions.
That said, Cuomo has been called to testify on his role in Covid governance on Sept. 10, in a hearing before the House Oversight and Accountability Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
