Cuomo Defends Partying Governor
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- July
- 31
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a possible gubernatorial foe to Gov. David Paterson next year, said today that Paterson’s late-night partying Thursday was “totally appropriate.”
The Daily News and the New York Post reported this morning that in the hours before Paterson was set to announce the state’s declining fiscal condition Thursday, he was out until the early morning at the Manhattan nightclub Taj to celebrate the birthday of BET executive Rhonda Cowan, who is Paterson’s friend.
Also in attendance was rap impresario Russell Simmons and popular hip-hop deejay Funkmaster Flex.
But Cuomo, who may seek to run for governor himself next year, declined to knock Paterson.
“I don’t know the facts and the circumstances of the situation,” Cuomo said on Fred Dicker’s radio show this morning.
“The way I heard it, you know, what the governor was doing was totally appropriate. He was at a party, he was celebrating somebody’s birthday. He’s come to birthday celebrations for me. So from the facts that I heard, I thought it was totally appropriate.”
Cuomo went on to reiterate that he’s only focused on doing his job as attorney general, not politics. (He didn’t mentioned that he raised a whopping $5 million in campaign cash over the last six months.)
“I do my job better, I believe, when I stay away from the politics,” Cuomo said. “I work in a bi-partisan way, I’ve gotten a lot of legislation passed with Republican support.”
This entry was posted
on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 11:00 am by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
