Returning his cash doesn’t solve Democrats’ Harvey Weinstein problem
Now we know what it takes for Gov. Cuomo to sacrifice from his campaign war chest: a parade of other top local pols letting go of gifts from a donor suddenly in the news for decades of alleged sexual harassment.
Tri-state Dems spent Friday running hard and fast from now-toxic Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein in the wake of an avalanche of exposés.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who has branded herself a fighter on women’s issues, was the first to bolt, returning $11 grand in donations. Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker (NJ) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) rapidly followed in re-gifting their Weinstein largesse to women’s charities.
But it wasn’t ’til early Friday evening that Cuomo joined in, coughing up $50,000 the mogul had given in the current election cycle. (That leaves $100,000 in Weinstein giving to earlier Cuomo campaigns dating back to his run for state attorney general.)
Oh, and the Democratic National Committee is simply passing most of its nearly $300,000 in Weinstein cash on to other party organizations.
Still to speak up are Harvey’s two favorite candidates: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who got millions from him personally or via campaign bundling. (Weinstein even hired Malia Obama as an intern.)
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Clinton, of course, is still on her book tour, reminding listeners that she wanted to tell Donald Trump what many women in Hollywood actually did tell Harvey Weinstein: “Back off, you creep!”
Yet the entire Democratic Party still has a big Harvey Weinstein problem: By many accounts, his behavior was an open secret long before it was exposed by The New York Times. How did no one tell any of the pols who so eagerly grabbed for his cash?
Or did they know, but not care? There’s plenty of precedent for that, starting with Bill Clinton.
So it’s no coincidence that Weinstein prepared for the Times exposé with the help of Obama communications director Anita Dunn and Clinton ex-counsel Lanny Davis.
As for Cuomo: He still hasn’t returned a dime of the $1.2 million he raked in from Glenwood Management, the firm deeply involved in corrupt payoffs that resulted in the criminal convictions of ex-legislative bosses Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos.