New emails highlight a Team Cuomo COVID priority: promoting Andrew

 No sooner did COVID erupt in early 2020 than Team Cuomo roared into action — racing desperately to find ways to  . . . capitalize on the pandemic, of course, and promote Andrew Cuomo.

That’s the gist of new emails obtained by the Empire Center for Public Policy, showing that by as early as March 30, 2020, Team Cuomo began drafting a “preface” for a possible “book” on Cuomo’s “leadership” and “decision-making.”

That was just 10 days after Cuomo signed the executive order that set off New York’s pandemic lockdown.

And only five days after his team ordered nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients from hospitals (which led to thousands of potentially preventable deaths).

The work continued amid the state’s first deadly COVID wave.

“We are hoping to produce a narrative . . . about decision-making, leadership and the goals and values of government” during the crisis, Cuomo speechwriter Jamie Malanowski wrote in an April 28 email.

Cuomo spokesperson Richard Azzopardi insisted the work by Malanowski and others “was never viewed by the governor” nor used in the book Cuomo ultimately wrote, “An American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

Cuomo’s staffers first began drafting a “preface” for a possible book on March 30, 2020.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Malanowski, too, said he “had nothing to do with the writing of ‘An American Crisis.’”

Yet a 2022 report by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics found that a Penguin Random House editor suggested the idea of a pandemic memoir to Cuomo’s literary agent as early as March 19 and that Cuomo & Co. had begun drafting the tome by early June 2020.

Indeed, by July 1, Cuomo somehow had already reportedly produced a 70,000-word manuscript; his book was published in October.

Clearly, the idea of a book — or some such project — focusing on the governor’s supposedly stellar leadership during the pandemic was a serious priority for Team Cuomo.

Remember, at that point, Cuomo was still dreaming of running for president.

And his book, with its painfully ironic title about “leadership,” also brought him a cool $5 million (even as he illegally used staff to help write it).

Cuomo’s towering ego and sense of self-importance were clearly driving his pandemic actions — at a time when everyone else was suffering, sacrificing and dying.

Has an elected official ever stooped lower?

https://nypost.com/2023/05/31/new-emails-highlight-a-team-cuomo-covid-priority-promoting-andrew/