Cuomo should resign after harassment report, NC Gov. Cooper says about fellow Democrat

N.C. Gov. Roy Cooper joined the list of politicians calling on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign after a report revealed numerous allegations of sexual harassment.

Cooper, like Cuomo, is a Democrat and is the vice chairman of the national Democratic Governors Association.

“Yes I believe he should step aside,” Cooper said when asked about it at a press conference Wednesday.

That echoed a written statement his office had sent out earlier in the day.

“The Attorney General’s report in New York is troubling,” Cooper said in the written statement. “I cannot speak for any other governors, but I believe Governor Cuomo should step aside.”

On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report finding that Cuomo had sexually harassed at least 11 different women while governor. He’s now under criminal investigation in Albany, the state’s capital, according to The New York Times.

Democratic President Joe Biden also has called on Cuomo to resign following the report.

But many Democratic politicians from New York have been calling on Cuomo to resign since March, including U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as reports about the harassment became public.

The national attention on Cuomo, who has frequently been named as a possible presidential candidate for Democrats in the future, has ratcheted up since the attorney general’s report came out and backed up the women’s accusations.

In addition to the sexual assault allegations, he also faces accusations of covering up COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes to try to make the state’s statistics look better. He was simultaneously seeking a multimillion dollar book deal for a memoir, The New York Times has reported, called “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

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