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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Are you ready for a little time capsule? Take a listen to these 22 seconds.

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Governor Andrew Cuomo: Government needs to perform. It is a matter of life and death, government operations, and wasting energy on distractions is the last thing that state government should be doing and I cannot be the cause of that.

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Brian Lehrer: Can you believe that was only a year ago? It was August 10th, 2021 that then Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned a week after the release of that report from the state attorney general's office detailing the sexual harassment accounts of 11 women, most of whom worked in some form for the state, remember, and the report that concluded that Cuomo violated state and federal law.

With me now is Casey Seiler, editor of the Albany Times Union, who is joining us one year later to look back and also to talk about what has happened that makes this past year different than the years that came before it, also how Cuomo successor, Governor Kathy Hochul, is running for election in her own right, as is the Republican Lee Zeldin. Casey, thanks for joining us.

Casey Seiler: Brian, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Can I get you on some breaking news from the Times Union first? You report that a GOP petitioning effort to revive the so-called Independence Party as an additional ballot line for Republicans, that that petitioning effort used more than 11,000 duplicate signatures, so the effort to revive the old party ultimately failed. Your report was spearheaded by Zeldin. Explain what role the Republicans were hoping the Independence Party line would play and what are these duplicate signatures by the 1,000, 11,000.

Casey Seiler: Well, the Independence Party line has been one of the third-party lines long sought by both parties. The Independence Party has, as Chris Bragg, our investigative reporter who wrote today's story put it and it's a very appropriate adjective, it's something of a moribund party. It used to take very few signatures to secure that line. In recent years, of course, as you and your guests have talked about, there's now a much higher bar in order to get that line statewide.

It is, I believe, more than 45,000 signatures now. What happened in the case of the Zeldin campaign and the state Republicans Party to secure the Independence line is that pages of the petition signatures were duplicated and submitted in the bound volumes that went to the state board of elections. The way that those duplicate pages were included in the binding-- In other words, it wasn't just 100 pages at the very end. They were thrown into the bound copy and that indicated that, potentially, there might have been some intention in perhaps throwing these in.

Now, what Chris reported is that this appears to have been done at state Republican Party headquarters in Albany. Basically, the party is falling on their sword as it were for this and they are ascribing it to a great deal of confusion and tumult even leading up to the hours in which the deadline for the petitions to be submitted led up to. Now the board of elections discovered this pretty quickly. It was pointed out by another third party's representatives, the Libertarian Party, and Lee Zeldin lost the line.

This, of course, has become the subject of much criticism of Zeldin's campaign because his attitude towards this error effort, depending on how you look at it, has been well, our campaign really isn't at fault here. This was clearly just an error, which, of course, stands in stark contrast to Zeldin's raising concerns after the 2020 presidential election, that there was a voter fraud in various states. He was, of course, one of the Republican congressmen who voted to decertify several states' electoral results.

Brian Lehrer: Now running for Governor of New York. It's a footnote to the Cuomo story, I guess, because part of the Cuomo legacy, and I'm curious to get your take on it, is that he led the change that made it harder for any of these third parties, any party that's not the Democrats or the Republicans, to maintain a ballot line in New York State and raise the number of signatures or the number of votes that were needed in a gubernatorial election to give a party a ballot line over the next four years in the state. The common assumption, though, of course, Cuomo never admitted it, was that he was out to kill or weaken the Working Families Party and its ballot access because they kept challenging him from the left.

They endorsed people mostly within Democratic primaries, but it was still kind of a Working Families Party initiative that put people like Zephyr Teachout and others on the ballot against him. He wanted to harm the Working Families Party and so instead of just 50,000 votes needed for somebody in a gubernatorial election, it had to be many, many thousands more. Now maybe that came back to haunt the Republicans. Is that telling of history at all accurate in your view?

Casey Seiler: Oh, yes, absolutely. I think that's a very cogent analysis. The significant increase in the number of required signatures was very much seen as the capper, the attempted deathblow, as it were, at the end of Cuomo's long-standing antipathy and feuding with the Working Families Party despite the fact that the Working Families Party, going back many election cycles, tended to support democratic gubernatorial candidates. There was always a lot of-- or frequently there was rancor there.

There was especially rancor there with Cuomo, especially during the years when Cuomo was working alongside Senate Republicans who, for many moons, were in the majority in that chamber for most of the time that Cuomo was governor. Of course, the creation of the Independent Democratic Conference, that was Jeff Klein and company, was seen as being something that Cuomo kind of tacitly went along with.

There were those who said that he helped wire the whole thing up. Certainly, it worked well for him, divided the legislature, the Assembly controlled by Democrats, the Senate controlled by Republicans, made him as it were the tiebreaker in those partisan disputes. Certainly, you can see that a lot of the trouble that Cuomo got into in his third term was in no small way a result of facing a unified Democratic legislature.

Brian Lehrer: The clip we played in the intro was just 20 seconds out of an over 20-minute speech, Cuomo's resignation speech, in which he seems to imply that he did us all a favor by resigning, by, "Letting government get back to governing," as he said in the clip, but of course, he was facing an impeachment inquiry by the State Senate and not just for the sexual harassment of 11 women that was alleged, but for his administration's role in obscuring the number of nursing home deaths from public view. Is it fair to say that the timing of Cuomo's exit, as we look back one year ago this week, was an example of his adeptness at political maneuvering even as it cost him his job?

Casey Seiler: I think you would have to say that it was the only tactic available to somebody who finds himself in a box or at the end of an alleyway with no other way out of it. Even in the days leading up to that appearance. I had people who were very, very close to Cuomo saying there is no way he's going to resign, it is absolutely against his character, and with Cuomo, more than with many other politicians, character is very much destiny. They said, "No, he's going to fight this out till the bitter end. There is no way he's constitutionally built to resign."

I'll tell you, that day, which was a Tuesday, of course, one week exactly after the release of the report from the Attorney General's office, I was very very glad that we had a stand-up story ready to go that began in a stunning fall for the most powerful state politician of his generation, Andrew Cuomo announced, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: To your knowledge, what's Cuomo been up to since his resignation, and has he faced any consequences for his alleged actions other than losing his job as governor, though that in of itself is a big thing?

Casey Seiler: Well, based on there was a Vanity Fair story that came out a couple of days ago, I'm confident there will be more as we tick down to August 24th, which is, I believe, the one-year anniversary of his actually leaving office, there are probably going to be more pieces. That story noted that, apparently, it's been a lot of cars and a lot of fishing. Certainly, based on his social media accounts, there have been lots of photos of both of those activities.

In terms of consequences, they're still very much there. He is being sued by one of the 11 women whose accounts were examined by the Attorney General's report. This is the woman identified as trooper number one who was brought on to the governor's protective detail. Basically, at the governor's request, his office made an end run around the minimum time requirements for a trooper to actually be on that detail.

The governor's staff and the State Police provided the Times Union with false information about that process that was dealt with in the Attorney General's report. Only last week, actually on the one-year anniversary of that announcement that you played at the top of this, Cuomo sued the Attorney General's Office, claiming that it was improper for the attorney general's office to refuse to provide him with a defense in the federal lawsuit that was brought a couple of months ago by that female trooper.

That petition, basically that was filed by Rita Glavin who is Cuomo's longtime attorney or longtime in the sense that since the beginning of these controversies arose, of course, repeated a lot of the same defenses, not only in the case of the trooper but in the rest of the more serious claims that were brought up in the Attorney General's report basically saying that Cuomo was just an affectionate guy in the case of some of what I think we would refer to as the less damaging of the misconduct alleged by the women brought up in the report and claiming that it just never happened in the case of others.

It's important to note that when it comes to trooper number one, in that same announcement, in which Cuomo announced that he would be stepping down in two weeks, he admitted too much of the behavior that was brought up in the report, either saying, "Yes, I did do this," but he made comments that are being interpreted as inappropriate, "Because I was just joshing with employees," or "I don't remember touching her, but if she claims I did, it might have happened." This is going to be a tougher lawsuit for him to defend because much of the behavior that's at the heart of it, he's already admitted.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us for another few minutes is Casey Seiler, the editor of the Albany Times Union, as we talk about least political life in New York State one year after the resignation of Andrew Cuomo as governor and getting back to the fact that he resigned rather than fight the Senate's impeachment effort that was beginning.

Cuomo wasn't impeached, therefore, for any of his alleged crimes or misdeeds, which leaves him technically eligible to run for state office again, which he would not have been, I believe, if he had been impeached and removed from office not to mention that he resigned with $18 million in campaign funds. That's the number I've seen, that had things turned out differently, it would probably have been used to run for his fourth term in governor.

I guess my question is, do you think that was a key motivation for his resignation? The fact that he saw impeachment and removal on the horizon, which would have barred him from a political comeback, at least, an elected office political comeback. In your opinion, do you think he ever will run for something again?

Casey Seiler: Yes. I think that absolutely played into his calculation because he, obviously, in a depth analyst of where the legislature is recognized that impeachment being a political process, he was probably going to lose it. Of course, his defense since then, and those of many of his defenders has been, well, he never got due process, the due process was never afforded to him.

Of course, the response to that is that he could have gotten all the due process he wanted in an impeachment trial where he would be able to present a full defense in the state senate chamber with all the members of the Senate and the judges of the Court of Appeals looking on. I think it's completely accurate that he wanted to leave open the chance for a political rebirth, which would be Andrew Cuomo's second, [chuckles] certainly his more dramatic if it happened.

Of course, he had to bounce back from a crushing gubernatorial primary loss in 2002 when he was beaten by Carl McCall and really bruised himself up in the Democratic establishment. Of course, we've seen in the month since then, back in the winter, and in the spring, you saw him making speeches before Black and Hispanic churches, which were considered to be a more friendly venue for him talking about canceled culture, talking about recognizing when you've done wrong, that sort of thing. Those have fallen away. We haven't seen many of those over the course of the last couple of months.

I believe it was the New York Post reported that Cuomo spends a little bit more than $90,000 on polling in the months after he stepped down. As Jay Jacobs, the chair of the state party noted, you don't blow that kind of money on polling, unless you're trying to test the waters for a potential run. Perhaps because of what that polling showed, or perhaps because Cuomo recognized he is still up against it in the public mind, we haven't seen any indication from him that any run is imminent.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, I want to acknowledge a technical difficulty that I've been told that we're having. Apparently, there's some distortion on WNYC 93.9 FM right now. If you are bearing with me anyway, through that distortion, I can advise you that you can go to AM 820, on the AM band on your radio if you're using a conventional radio, or you could go to wnyc.org and continue listening on the live stream.

Again, if you're listening on WNYC FM, and you're getting a distorted signal, I know some of you have been calling in the last few minutes to report that and our engineers are working on it, you do have a couple of other options. You can go to wnyc.org and listen to our live stream or go to AM 820 and continue listening there. Of course, we hope to get this problem, whatever is causing it, resolved in the very next few minutes. Oh, and I'm told that they think it's fixed. Hello FM listeners, there's nothing you need to do. [chuckles] All right.

We continue to talk to Casey Seiler, Editor in Chief of the Albany Times Union a year after the resignation of Governor Andrew Cuomo. In his resignation speech, Cuomo introduced his successor then Lieutenant Governor, Kathy Hochul. Let's take a listen to 20 seconds of that.

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Andrew Cuomo: Kathy Hochul, my Lieutenant Governor, is smart and competent. This transition must be seamless. We have a lot going on. I'm very worried about the Delta variant, and so should you be but she can come up to speed quickly. My resignation will be effective in 14 days.

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Brian Lehrer: The Delta variant. Those are quaint times compared to Omicron. At that point, he was trying to confer legitimacy and an aura of competence on Kathy Hochul. Now, of course, Casey, Governor Hochul is in an election campaign against a Republican. If we can detach from that because, obviously, there's a competition between the two parties, that's the thing.

They're democratic views and Republican views, all of that, but what can you say about the continuity of government? If people are afraid to lose Andrew Cuomo because whatever else he might have been, he was really competent at running the state and people felt comforted by the way he was in charge at the beginning of the pandemic and other things. Have we seen continuity or have we seen disruption to any meaningful degree?

Casey Seiler: I think you'd have to come down on the idea of continuity with the exception of the selection of Brian Benjamin as her first Lieutenant Governor, I should say, and of course, Brian Benjamin is now facing corruption charges of his own which he has pleaded not guilty to. She has shown decided competence. There hasn't been a great deal of flail in her management of COVID.

There's been some bulky messaging at times, but I think people would probably say that somewhat hectic messaging is probably the nature of the beast when you're dealing with some of the reversals that we've seen in COVID over the course of the last year. She has been a prodigious fundraiser perhaps even outdoing her predecessor, in terms of the speed with which she raised enough of campaign kitty to dissuade Letitia James from continuing with her gubernatorial challenge, her primary challenge to Hochul.

The Times Union has done a number of stories noting that donors have certainly gotten access to the administration that there have been situations where contracts have gone to those who provided large campaign donations, of course, Hochul's response. She bridles at the notion that any campaign donation affects any decision by the state but of course, this is the game. This is the system that has been set up. What is for sure is that Hochul has an enormous pile of campaign financial resources to draw on as she takes on Lee Zeldin.

Brian Lehrer: Does she have a tremendous pile of campaign resources compared to Zeldin because, generally, we tend to thank big money, meaning corporate money goes to the Republicans?

Casey Seiler: No, I believe that I haven't seen the latest numbers, but I think that Hochul's campaign resources are significantly larger than Zeldin's.

Brian Lehrer: Then even with that, a major poll that came out recently showed that she has what some people are characterizing as only a 14-point lead over Zeldin at this point, which means, theoretically, he could win and in Blue, New York, it shouldn't be that close. I think Cuomo's margins of victory in his reelection campaigns were much larger than 14 points and Republicans and conservatives are playing it as, look, Republicans exceeded expectations on Long Island and elsewhere in the state and smaller elections last year and with crime, with inflation, with dissatisfaction, with past COVID policies, this year favors Republicans and Zeldin might catch lightning in a bottle. What do you think?

Casey Seiler: I'll answer that, but just to jump back, I did some very quick googling while you were asking your question and according to the most recent six-month campaign filings, and this is according to a New York Times story that I just got to pop up on my screen, Hochul has almost 12 million in the bank and Zeldin has about 1.5 million, so significant difference there. Of course, that's up through June but it's a long road but [unintelligible 00:24:30]

Brian Lehrer: Wow. I guess these commercials we're going to be seeing on TV constantly between now and November and who's were not, right?

Casey Seiler: You will definitely be seeing. Of course, there are outside expenditure campaigns that can mount pro-Zeldin or pro-Hochul commercials for that matter, but just based on individual campaign committees, that is a stark difference. You're talking about the latest [unintelligible 00:24:56], yes, of 14 point difference, which in Blue State, New York, is not hideous for Zeldin, but it's important to note that in New York City, the difference was something like 50 points.

In other words, Hochul was just completely blowing Zeldin away while his leads in the suburbs and upstate where Republicans need to really rack up huge numbers in order to offset that big Blue, New York City number, he's not performing like he needs to, so yes, anything can happen. All you need to do is ask Andrew Cuomo about reversals in New York State politics but at this point, you would much rather be Kathy Hochul than Lee Zeldin.

Of course, we don't know how the travails of Donald Trump who, once again, has been the subject of much support from Lee Zeldin, could impact this state race as it is likely to impact races all over the country.

Brian Lehrer: Casey Seiler, Editor in Chief of the Albany Times Union. Thank you so much, Casey.

Casey Seiler: Brian, my pleasure.

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