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Joe Biden won't remove Andrew Cuomo from leading weekly Covid calls, president finds allegations 'hard to read'

Amid the ongoing sexual harassment investigation, Andrew Cuomo's longtime adviser Larry Schwartz, who heads the state’s vaccine rollout, had called county officials to gauge their loyalty to the governor

White House press secretary Jen Psaki has confirmed that President Biden won't remove New York Governor Andrew Cuomo from his role leading the nation’s weekly COVID-19 coordinating calls with governors on Monday, March 15. This comes in the wake of at least seven women leveling allegations of sexual harassment and bullying against the governor since February. 

New York House Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, among others in the party, have called for Cuomo’s resignation. But the Biden administration seems to want to keep Cuomo in a position of power despite the sexual harassment charges against him.

When a reporter pressed Psaki at her daily press briefing, asking why Cuomo was still leading the weekly White House pandemic calls in his role as chair of the National Governors Association, Psaki said, “It would be up to the NGA to determine if they were to make a change on that front. It’s also up to the legislature and others in New York to determine if he still has the confidence of the people in the state.”

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"The New York attorney general is pursuing, of course, an independent investigation against Governor Cuomo, and that is appropriate," said Psaki. "The president believes that’s appropriate, as does the vice president. The investigation needs to be both quick and thorough, consistent with how serious these allegations are."

"Of course, our objective though, here, continues to be to get the COVID pandemic under control and we don’t want the people of New York or any state to be impacted negatively. We will continue to work with a range of governors, including Governor Cuomo, who I would expect would join the call tomorrow, we’ll leave that up to him, but in order to continue to coordinate on getting the pandemic under control and economic assistance out the door," she said.

“New developments seem to happen every day,” Psaki, however, said of the allegations. “We find them troubling. The president finds them troubling -- hard to read.”

However, Psaki also reacted to reports about how Cuomo’s vaccine czar blurred lines by querying county officials about their loyalty to the New York Governor. She called them “concerning” and “inappropriate.”

On Monday, March 15, it was reported that Larry Schwartz, the head of the state’s vaccine rollout and a longtime adviser to Cuomo, phoned county officials in the past two weeks in attempts to gauge their loyalty to the governor amid the ongoing sexual harassment investigation.

The Washington Post reported that an executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said: “At best, it was inappropriate. At worst, it was clearly over the ethical line.” The executive said that they feared the county’s vaccine supply could suffer if Schwartz was not pleased with their response to his questions about the support of the governor.

Schwartz acknowledged making the calls but said he did so as a 30-year friend of Cuomo and did not discuss vaccines in the conversations. “I did nothing wrong,” Schwartz told The Post. “I have always conducted myself in a manner commensurate to a high ethical standard.” He added, “Nobody indicated that they were uncomfortable or that they did not want to talk to me.”

“We work to ensure that [the Covid vaccine] is equitably distributed and that there are not steps that are taken that are concerning,” Psaki told reporters Monday. “So we were concerned, of course, about the reports of this inappropriate behavior, but we also have a number of steps in the system to ensure that the people of New York, the people of any state [that] the vaccines are being distributed fairly and equitably.”