Resign, Gov. Cuomo

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has had a good run. With his tough-on-Trump attitude, hard-charging coronavirus response, and little brother Chris playing booster for him on CNN, whispers about an eventual run for the presidency were beginning to circulate.

And then things began to unravel. The Emmy award-winning Mr. Cuomo started mandating “medically stable” (whatever that means) coronavirus patients be shipped back to nursing homes. This created an unnecessary, avoidable spike in deaths for the elderly. That’s bad. But it gets worse.

As The New York Post first reported, this week secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa admitted (in a leaked conversation to state lawmakers) that the Cuomo administration purposely covered up and withheld full COVID reporting out of fear that the numbers would be used as political retribution. What Mr. Cuomo and co. hid, of course, were thousands of senior deaths. Double the official tally.

The governor of New York, who once callously quipped “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died,” is now under attack from both Democratic and Republican officials. Calls for an investigation by the Department of Justice and New York’s attorney general are intensifying.

Good.

What Mr. Cuomo did is disgusting, and during a pandemic where already trust in government is at a nadir, criminal. Everywhere small businesses are shuttered, children kept from schools and social events, families urged indoors. And why? Because the so-called experts say so. Because, we are told, the data does not lie.

Except in this case the experts did in fact lie. And they only admitted their lie two weeks after a report by the state’s attorney general made it impossible to keep up the charade. And even then, it took a court order to get Mr. Cuomo to comply.

The only honorable course of action left to Mr. Cuomo and his cover-up team is to resign and, when the knock comes to the door, comply with the officers. Of course, this won’t happen, and soon the spin (Here’s looking at you, Chris) will set in, somehow placing the blame for the cover-up on former President Donald Trump. And the Emmy? There are calls now for it to be revoked.

It is probably too much to hope that President Joe Biden, with whom Mr. Cuomo met on Friday, will encourage the governor to step down. But if Mr. Biden is smart, he will pressure hard. After all, Washington needs the American people to trust the experts now more than ever. Would be a shame if that trust ran out.