No sooner did COVID erupt in early 2020 than Team Cuomo roared into action —racing desperatelyto find ways to . . . capitalize on the pandemic, of course, and promoteAndrew 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.
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.
Gal Luft, the “missing” witness in the House Oversight Committee’sBiden family corruption investigation, has told The Post he is alive and living as a fugitive in an undisclosed location.
The former Israeli Defense Force colonel vanished from Cyprus last month while on bail awaiting extradition to the US on seven charges.
He denies the allegations, which include five charges relating to the Arms Export Control Act of conspiring to sell Chinese products to the United rab Emirates, Kenya and Libya, as well as a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and of making a false statement.
Luft claims he was forced to skip bail because he is the victim of a political persecution by the US to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and brother Jim.
“The chances of me getting a fair trial in Washington are virtually zero,” he said in a call from an undisclosed foreign country, explaining why he skipped bail. “I had to do what I had to do.”
He will not say how he escaped Cyprus because “I don’t want to get people in trouble.”
Gal Luft claims he was forced to skip bail because he is the victim of a political persecution by the US to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and brother Jim.Pool/ABACA/Shutterstock
His car was found by police abandoned near the airport.
“I was charged for a thought crime,” he says of the gun-running allegations, which date from email correspondence five years ago. “I was asked by a bona fide arms dealer, an Israeli friend, to inquire with a company I knew if they had an item and what would be the price of an item. This is where the conspiracy ended. No follow-up, no money, no brokering activity.”
Luft, the “missing” witness in the House Oversight Committee’s Biden family corruption investigation is living in an undisclosed location.supplied
He sees sinister intent in the date of the extradition order, Nov. 1, 2022, seven days before the midterm elections when the Republicans were expected to win control of the House and start investigating allegations of Biden family foreign influence peddling.
House Oversight investigators were preparing to interview him before he disappeared.
“When it was clear the Republicans are going to win the House or the Senate, all of a sudden comes [GOP Rep. James] Comer and [GOP Rep. Jim] Jordan and the game is changing. There will be questions and subpoenas and investigations [so] they [the administration] have to discredit me. I never thought of coming forward. Through 2020 I sat quiet like a fish . . .
“I didn’t want to get caught up in this game, but when they arrested me I had no choice but to blow it up.”
Luft attracted the attention of House investigators on Feb. 18 when a tweet appeared on his timeline after he was detained at the Cyprus airport.
“I’ve been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US . . . claiming I’m an arms dealer . . . I’ve never been an arms dealer.
“DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim and Hunter Biden.”
Luft claims everything he told US officials was “corroborated,” when the FBI subpoenaed Hunter’s laptop.AP
Info on Hunter payment
In March 2019, Luft met with four FBI officials and two DOJ prosecutors at the US Embassy in Brussels to provide information that Chinese state-controlled energy company CEFC had paid $100,000 a month to Hunter Biden and $65,000 to his uncle Jim, in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world.
Luft, who had a business relationship with a nonprofit think tank associated with CEFC, also told the FBI that Hunter had an FBI mole named “One Eye” who had tipped off his CEFC business partners Patrick Ho and Ye Jianming that they were under investigation; he said that CEFC officials and one other person had been named in a sealed indictment.
Ye believed “the FBI were following him when he took walks in Central Park,” says Luft.
Luft was worried he was on the indictment because Ho told him it named a “Jew.”
Soon after the tip-off from One Eye, Ye offered Hunter $1 million to be his “private counsel” and flew to China, leaving his wife, daughter, son, mother and nanny in his $50 million Central Park West penthouse.
He was detained in Shanghai three months later and disappeared.
Ho told Luft that Hunter and Jim Biden flew to Hong Kong in the fall of 2017 to meet him.
“They were behaving very suspiciously and changing phones,” says Luft. “Ye said send a million dollars and those guys will take care of you.”
The only evidence on Hunter’s laptop that he flew to Hong Kong in that period is an email receipt for a one-way first class flight from Dulles Airport to Hong Kong on Aug. 25, 2017, with IFlyFirstClass.com.
In emails with the travel company a few days later, Hunter requested a return flight Sept. 8, 2017, from Koh Samui in Thailand to Baltimore-Washington Airport.
In Luft’s view, Ho was a “naïve . . . patsy” who believed Ye’s assurances that he would not be arrested if he returned to the US.
Luft attracted the attention of House investigators on Feb. 18 when a tweet appeared on his timeline after he was detained at the Cyprus airport.supplied
Ho was convicted and sentenced March 25, 2019, to three years in prison, after which he was deported.
During Ho’s trial, claims Luft, prosecutors removed all reference to the Bidens from emails between Ho and Hunter associate Vuk Jeremic, who was a CEFC advisory board member, a former Serbian foreign minister and ex-president of the UN Nations General Assembly.
‘Redaction’ dispute
A court transcript shows a dispute between Ho defense lawyer Edward Kim and prosecutor Dan Richenthal over whether to redact from an email the name of one of the “prominent and powerful friends” whom Ho asked Jeremic to invite to a dinner or lunch in Washington, DC, on Dec. 6, 2015.
Geoffrey Berman’s letter to Luft’s attorney about the Brussels “proffer” meeting.
“The name of that individual is not relevant and could introduce a political dimension to this case that we don’t think is worth dealing with” Richenthal told the judge, who agreed to the redaction.
There is no evidence the lunch or dinner came about but a calendar entry on Hunter’s laptop shows that he had a meeting on Dec. 7, 2015, with “CEFC Chairman Ye Jienmaing [sic] and [CEFC consultant] Scott OH” scheduled.
After Ho was convicted, Luft contacted the Southern District of New York US Attorney’s Office from Israel to offer a voluntary interview or “proffer” meeting.
He says DOJ officials settled on Brussels as neutral territory.
Luft has shown The Post a letter arranging the Brussels “proffer” meeting, signed March 25, 2019, by Geoffrey Berman, then the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose agents had arrested Ho the previous year.
“We are writing to advise you that the US Attorney’s Office for the SDNY will not arrest or cause to be arrested your client, Gal Luft, during the time that he is in Belgium between approximately Tuesday, March 26, 2019 and Monday, April 1, 2019, in connection with his attendance at meetings with this office on March 28 and 29, 2019,” writes Berman to Luft lawyer Robert Henoch.
Less than four weeks after the Brussels meeting, Joe Biden announced he was running for president.Shutterstock
Luft says the two assistant US attorneys who interviewed him over 18 hours in Brussels were part of the team that had prosecuted Ho: Richenthal and Catherine Ghosh, whose names also appeared on his Cypress extradition order.
Also present in Brussels, he says, were four FBI agents, at least two from the National Security Branch at FBI Headquarters and one from the Baltimore field office, which has been involved in the Hunter Biden investigation run by Delaware US Attorney David Weiss since 2018.
Luft told them about CEFC payments to Hunter and Jim Biden, and that Biden family associate Rob Walker was involved in distributing payments, a fact later corroborated by subpoenaed bank records released by the House Oversight Committee showing Walker funneling more than $1 million from China to at least three of President Biden’s relatives.
Luft claims everything he told US officials was “corroborated” nine months later, when the FBI subpoenaed Hunter’s laptop from a Delaware computer repair shop where he had abandoned it.
“They were sitting on all the information. No new information as needed after they had the laptop plus my proffer yet they wasted another year and did nothing so . . . now there is a guy who can shed light on the cover-up and they arrest him.”
Less than four weeks after the Brussels meeting, Joe Biden announced he was running for president.
Despite the bombshell allegations Luft made in Brussels, he never heard from the FBI or prosecutors again until he was arrested in Cyprus.
The allegations against Luft are serious and should be fully investigated, but so, too, are his allegations of a cover-up.
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The House voted Wednesday night to approve a bill that would raise the debt ceiling for more than two years, giving the Senate just days to do the same before the US potentially runs out of money to pay its bills.
The vote was 314-117, with more Democrats than Republicans offering their approval. There were 71 Republicans opposed and 46 Democrats who voted against it.
The concessions needed to get the deal done proved to be unpopular with certain members on both sides of the aisle, complicating efforts to squeeze legislation through Congress before a default on US debt. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that day could come as early as Monday.
“Every great nation that overextends itself has collapsed,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said in a speech before the votes were counted Wednesday night.
President Biden in a statement praised “Speaker McCarthy and his team for negotiating in good faith.”
The agreement, he added, "is a bipartisan compromise. Neither side got everything it wanted."
The centerpiece of the legislation negotiated by McCarthy and Biden is a cap on federal spending. It would hold spending flat for 2024 and impose new limits for 2025 without touching Social Security or Medicare while boosting spending on the military by 3%.
The legislation would also increase work requirements in order to qualify for food assistance, an incentive for people to find jobs.
In exchange, the nation’s borrowing limit would be boosted for more than two more years. That would take the full faith and credit of the US off the negotiating table through the next presidential election and give the markets an extended breather on an issue that regularly threatens economic chaos.
Some House Republicans wanted the spending cuts to be deeper, as proposed in a separate piece of legislation passed by GOP lawmakers in April.
But Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry, who was on McCarthy's negotiating team, called it 'the most conservative spending package during my time in Congress," adding that "for the first time in a debt-limit negotiation, the US will spend less money than it did the year before."
The bill now requires 60 votes in the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim 51-49 majority. One challenge there is whether a vote can happen quickly or not.
It can if all 100 senators agree, setting up a vote before the end of the week. But any one senator can choose to hold things up for days with amendment votes.
At least one Republican senator, Mike Lee, has warned that he might offer resistance. On Wednesday he called the bill a “fake response to burdensome debt” and said he “will emphatically vote no.”
He pledged to file "a bunch of amendments" but also suggested he wouldn't hold up the bill past Monday as long as votes are held on his amendments.
Senator Rand Paul has also said he wants a vote on deeper spending cuts.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has told members that they should be prepared for “potential Friday and weekend votes” because of ‘the time it may take to process the legislation in the Senate without cooperation.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has asked his colleagues to “swiftly” approve the bill.
“The deadline to raise the debt ceiling is rapidly approaching, and the likelihood of triggering a negative market reaction with severe economic consequences will only increase as we approach the precipice,” Business Roundtable CEO Joshua Bolten said in a statement after the House vote.
“We call on the Senate to eliminate the threat of a default by passing this bipartisan bill as soon as possible.”
