Last Week Tonight couldn’t ignore recent (and damning) developments against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. That would be the governor’s response to the New York Attorney General’s office release of a 165-page report that summarized the sexual harassment investigation against him. That’s practically a book, and the report ended up detailing allegations from nearly a dozen women (at least 9 of which were state employees, including a state trooper on his security detail) against Cuomo.
Cuomo’s video response to the allegations was completely bizarre. After he gaslit his accusers and named several of them in front of a national audience, he rolled out a montage of him touching and kissing people. His apparent intent: to show himself as a touchy-feely-kind-of guy, and he felt like that would “disprove” groping claims against him. Count John Oliver among the people who can’t figure out who thought this montage was a good idea.
“New York’s AG released a devastating report of (its) investigation into allegations of sexual harassment by Andrew Cuomo which, incredibly, he is trying to ride out, issuing a video in which he tried to deny or downplay the accusations,” Oliver declared before playing the audio of Cuomo’s defense: “I do kiss people on the forehead. I do kiss people on the cheek. I do kiss people on the hand. I do embrace people.”
To that, Oliver exclaimed, “Okay, but that’s not what this is about!” He continued: “It’s frankly incredible that Cuomo thought releasing an irrelevant montage of photos would somehow exonerate him. Apparently his strategy for literally any crisis is ‘Put together a PowerPoint, and that’s it.’”
And that’s about all that can be said (at this point) about Cuomo’s ridiculous attempted defense of himself. From there, Oliver discussed the Olympics before “Opioids III,” his deep dive segment on Oxycontin (and Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family). You can watch that portion of the show on YouTube.