Government

Andrew Cuomo Attorney General Chatter Latest Reason To Run Railway Spike Through Your Eyeball

Please tell me this isn't serious.

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(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In the latest twist in the existential nightmare that is 2020, Axios reported over the weekend that they “were hearing” that Joe Biden is considering elevating New York governor Andrew Cuomo to Attorney General in his now likely administration. The story caused a brief flurry of attention among legal analysts before being swamped by the Amy Covid Barrett hearings.

Thankfully, the story comes from Axios, which is the political equivalent of PR Newswire so there’s every reason to believe that it’s not really happening. Whenever a politico wants to generate buzz they can generally trust that whispering it to Axios will land it in the news unvarnished by critical analysis and flagged by “what we’re hearing,” which should be read in exactly the same voice as the president explaining “a lot of great people are saying.”

In this case, Axios cited “some Democratic donors in Cuomo’s orbit,” which probably means “Cuomo himself” in the parlance of Washington, D.C. For his part, Cuomo is publicly denying interest, which is also standard operating procedure when you’re floating trial balloons to Axios:

“100% he’s made zero outreach, has had zero conversations about this and has made his desire to stay in New York clear as day and be governor as long as people want him,” Cuomo’s senior adviser Richard Azzopardi tells Axios.

Could I propose the alternative of not wanting him and not giving the Department of Justice over to a guy whose administration cronies have already landed in prison?

With Bill Barr eroding the integrity of the nation’s law enforcement apparatus to transform it into a Praetorian goon squad to service the White House — an effort that has already reached the absurdity of claiming that defaming rape victims is an official duty of the office of president — the next Attorney General should be someone who restores the office, as opposed to the guy who used blew up an independent ethics commission when it started figuring out that the corruption was oozing out of his office.

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Cuomo’s closing of the Moreland Commission was not a federal crime, but if Cuomo’s effort to cast the lack of charges as an “exoneration” sounds awfully familiar, it’s no accident. One hopes that a Democratic Senate would find it problematic to hand over a wounded Justice Department to a guy who denigrated the work of prosecutors probing corruption at the highest levels of his government.

Despite the urging of these “donors in Cuomo’s orbit,” one has to think the Biden camp sees the AG job as a role that needs to be dramatically depoliticized. Sally Yates, who already served as Acting Attorney General, spoke at the Democratic National Convention and has worked as a career prosecutor under Republican and Democratic administrations. For a Department desperately seeking a return to normalcy, going back to the last person who ran it before it went off the rails would be a good start. There are other options, of course: soon-to-be-out-of-work Senator Doug Jones, former Civil Rights Division chief Vanita Gupta, and the man who investigated Cuomo, Preet Bharara.

Hopefully this trial balloon has gone Hindenburg within Biden’s inner circle. But it’s 2020, so who knows.

Buzz grows around Cuomo as Biden’s attorney general pick [Axios]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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