Albany County’s district attorney will drop a criminal charge against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for forcible touching, his office announced Tuesday.
District Attorney David Soares, who foreshadowed the decision in calling the criminal complaint against Cuomo “potentially defective” in November, said his office concluded during its review that it “cannot meet [its] burden” of proof if it brings the charges to trial.
“While we found the complainant in this case cooperative and credible, after review of all the available evidence we have concluded that we cannot meet our burden at trial. As such we have notified the Court that we are declining to prosecute this matter and requesting the charges filed by the Albany County Sheriff be dismissed,” Soares said. “I, like most New Yorkers, remain deeply troubled by allegations like the ones at issue here. Such conduct has no place in government or in any workplace.”
WESTCHESTER COUNTY DA WON’T PROSECUTE CUOMO OVER ‘CREDIBLE’ ALLEGATIONS OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT
Rita Glavin, an attorney for Cuomo, said on Friday the dismissal of the charges against the former governor proved the case was a “blatant political act by an astonishingly unprofessional and rogue sheriff,” an apparent reference to Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, who brought the charges against Cuomo in October.
“No jury would have found [the accuser] credible. That is why this case was dismissed,” Glavin said on a Zoom call with reporters on Friday.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi concurred, saying Friday, “This entire situation was a political manipulation and would be disproven when a non-corrupted legal review was conducted.”
“Facts matter — even in politics and even in Albany,” he continued in a statement shared with the Washington Examiner. “Stay tuned.”
In November, Soares criticized Apple for “uniformly and inexplicably” filing the criminal complaint for forcible touching without the consent of the alleged victim, who claimed in the complaint that on Dec. 7, 2020, while at the New York governor’s mansion, Cuomo “did intentionally, and for no legitimate purpose, forcibly place his hand under the blouse shirt of the victim [REDACTED] and onto her intimate body part, specifically, the victim’s left breast.”
“We were in the middle of [our] investigation when the Sheriff unilaterally and inexplicably filed a complaint in this Court,” the district attorney wrote in a November letter to Judge Holly Trexler of Albany’s City Court.
Soares said the “speedy trial clock” began ticking “the day the sheriff filed the charges,” meaning his office would need to conclude its investigation and be ready for court within 90 days or risk dismissal of the charges.
“Therefore, in order to reduce the risk of a procedural dismissal of this case, and with the understanding that the defendant is in agreement, the People are asking for an adjournment … to give my office time to continue with our independent and unbiased review of the facts in this case,” he wrote.
Trexler agreed to the delay, and Cuomo was scheduled to appear in court on Friday.
Apple conceded the announcement of the charges against Cuomo came “much” sooner than originally planned.
“We would have liked to have presented everything, sat down with the DA, and explained exactly what we had,” he said at an Oct. 29 press conference. “I would have also, out of courtesy, liked to have reached out to [Cuomo attorney Rita] Glavin and explained what we had and what the next process would be, but again, things change, and it doesn’t always work out as planned.”
But surrogates for Cuomo, who has denied all allegations of inappropriate touching, said Apple’s rush to serve charges proved his process was flawed.
“‘Accidentally’ filing a criminal charge without notification and consent of the prosecuting body doesn’t pass the laugh test, and this reeks of Albany politics and perhaps worse,” Azzopardi said on Oct. 28.
On Oct. 28, Apple announced Cuomo would be placed under arrest and criminally charged with forcible touching. The charges stemmed from the women whose allegations of sexual impropriety against the then governor were vetted as part of Attorney General Letitia James’s investigation, the findings of which were revealed in an Aug. 3 report that precipitated Cuomo’s resignation.
Despite stepping down, Cuomo has repeatedly railed against James’s “unjust” report, and the two, once political allies, have been verbally sparring ever since. In September, James slammed Cuomo for not taking “responsibility for his own conduct” after he blasted his ouster as “politics.”
Several other law enforcement officials have declined to press charges against Cuomo in recent weeks. Nassau County’s district attorney announced on Dec. 23 that Cuomo would not be charged for allegedly inappropriately touching a state trooper in September 2019, and Westchester County’s district attorney followed suit, saying on Dec. 28 that it would not prosecute the former governor in connection to “credible” claims of sexual misconduct that allegedly occurred in Mount Kisco.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Azzopardi celebrated the district attorneys’ refusal to pursue charges, saying on Friday that they “have proven that what we said all along was correct — the law was not broken and not a single case has been brought.”
Representatives for Apple did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
