CNN suspended host Chris Cuomo on Tuesday over new details that were revealed this week about the amount of help that he allegedly provided to his brother while his brother was the Democrat governor of New York and facing accusations of sexual misconduct.
“CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was suspended indefinitely by the network on Tuesday in the wake of new details about his efforts to assist his brother,” The New York Times reported, adding that while Chris Cuomo had apologized for advising his brother “thousands of pages of new evidence released on Monday by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, revealed that the anchor’s role had been more intimate and involved than previously known.”
In a statement, CNN said:
The New York Attorney General’s office released transcripts and exhibits Monday that shed new light on Chris Cuomo’s involvement in his brother’s defense. The documents, which we were not privy to before their public release, raise serious questions. When Chris admitted to us that he had offered advice to his brother’s staff, he broke our rules and we acknowledged that publicly. But we also appreciated the unique position he was in and understood his need to put family first and job second. However, these documents point to a greater level of involvement in his brother’s efforts than we previously knew. As a result, we have suspended Chris indefinitely, pending further evaluation.
Chris Cuomo weighed in on the allegations made against his brother during an interview on SiriusXM, saying, “The game has rules.”
“And one of the general principles is you can fight against the other party, and you can fight against the media, but only if you have your party,” Chris Cuomo said. “Andrew had his party enforcing a rule against him that if you have accusations, you have problems, and you don’t really get to really vet the accusations, and you don’t get to go against your accusers.”
Mediaite reported that Chris Cuomo said that his brother’s resignation was forced in-part because “he had the Republicans hating him” and because “the media never really liked him.”
“So that is too much,” Cuomo said. “And that is why he had to resign. I did not want him to resign in the beginning, because I believed him. … But eventually, when there wasn’t going to be due process, and his party was against him, and obviously the Republicans weren’t going to help him, then he had no choice because he couldn’t do the work of the state anymore.”