Andrew Cuomo Says He Would’ve Been Able to ‘Win’ Impeachment in First Interview Since Announcing Resignation

Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave his first interview since he announced on Tuesday he will step down after the state attorney general’s office concluded he sexually harassment 11 women.

“You can’t talk a nail into going into a board,” said the governor in quintessential Cuomo-ese while speaking to New York magazine on Friday. “You can’t charm the nail into a board. It has to be hit with a hammer.”

The massive report quotes the governor as saying he’d “win” if the state legislature attempted to impeach and remove him from office. But, he rued, rather predictably, it would scar the state.

“I feel like I did the right thing,” he told New York. “I did the right thing for the state.”

He explained that he wasn’t going to “drag the state through the mud, through a three-month, four-month impeachment, and then win, and have made the State Legislature and the state government look like a ship of fools, when everything I’ve done all my life was for the exact opposite. I’m not doing that. I feel good. I’m not a martyr. It’s just, I saw the options, option A, option B.”

It was a defiant response from a man who still denies he did anything wrong.

Another interesting tidbit about the drama surrounding the governor is that Cuomo supposedly wanted to cut a deal with New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. Under the arrangement, Cuomo would serve out the rest of his third term through 2023 and agree not to seek reelection in order to avoid being impeached.

That was a nonstarter, apparently. New York reported,

In a last-ditch effort, Cuomo dispatched intermediaries to try to talk to people close to Heastie and several other assembly members to find out if they would be willing to cut a deal, such as promising not to run for a fourth term if the Assembly would not impeach him. But Cuomo didn’t take “no” for an answer until Monday afternoon, when Heastie unequivocally dismissed the idea of a deal during a press conference.

One person close to Cuomo told the magazine, “If he saw any possible way out, any possible deal that could have been worked out with the legislature for him to leave more gracefully, he would have kept fighting.”

However, “there was just no path, and for once in his life, there was no one around him to even tell him there was a path.”