NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio: Gov. Andrew Cuomo lacks ‘credibility,’ likely to be impeached

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday said Gov. Andrew Cuomo “doesn’t have any credibility” and will probably face impeachment over the burgeoning sexual harassment scandal that has prompted Democrats to abandon the New York governor in droves.

“I think he will try to hold out,” Mr. de Blasio said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “He is used to getting his way.”

The mayor said impeachment proceedings will occur and “perhaps right before that he will resign.”

Mr. de Blasio is on a long list of Democrats who are abandoning Mr. Cuomo, as six female accusers say the high-profile governor harassed them or made them feel uncomfortable.

The governor says he didn’t harass anyone. He specifically denied the latest allegation of a current aide who said Mr. Cuomo groped her at the governor’s mansion after she was summoned there late last year.

Mr. de Blasio didn’t hold back in his Sunday interview. He said the governor’s troubles are a threat to public health.

“He’s holding up our effort to fight COVID,” Mr. de Blasio said.

Mr. de Blasio also said there wasn’t any doubt the governor covered up nursing home death numbers. The official state tally subtracted those who died in a hospital setting, prompting a federal investigation.

Mr. Cuomo’s team says the overall death toll is still the same, so it’s just a matter of how it is broken down.

Others say he fiddled with the numbers to preserve his reputation as a sober counterpoint to President Trump during the height of the pandemic. The governor even wrote a book about his COVID-19 response.

“Everything was about his public image,” Mr. de Blasio said of Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. de Blasio waited until mid-March to shut down the city last year, as COVID-19 cases crested and caused havoc in New York.

He said that’s Mr. Cuomo’s fault, too, citing his own push for a San Francisco-style lockdown at the time.

“If I had local control, we would have done shelter-in-place,” Mr. de Blasio said.