On Wednesday, three months after New York’s attorney general issued a 165-page report concluding that Andrew M. Cuomo had sexually harassed at least 11 women during his time as governor, her office released transcripts of the testimony given by Mr. Cuomo and 10 women who were questioned in the investigation.
The documents offered the most complete look yet at the women’s accounts of their experiences with Mr. Cuomo as well as the former governor’s defiant and confrontational defense.
Here are some of the key takeaways.
Cuomo was particularly combative toward one investigator.
In his interviews with the lawyers who led the inquiry, a combative Mr. Cuomo often tried to divert the focus from himself and toward his questioners.
He reserved most of his ire for one of them, Joon H. Kim, saying Mr. Kim’s participation in the inquiry was tantamount to a “perversion” of the entire process. Mr. Cuomo’s objections stemmed from Mr. Kim’s previous role as a top federal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, who was involved in investigations involving Mr. Cuomo’s administration.
“The concept of you as the resolution to the conflict as an independent reviewer is bizarre to me and raises ethical and legal questions,” Mr. Cuomo said to Mr. Kim. “The way you, then, have conducted the review itself I believe raises ethical and legal questions.”
Mr. Kim asked Mr. Cuomo whether he had done anything to follow up “on these theories that you have.”
“Those aren’t theories,” Mr. Cuomo replied. “Those are facts.”
The workplace culture in the governor’s office could be unprofessional.
Mr. Cuomo has acknowledged publicly that he did things that he considered innocuous but that others might have found inappropriate. But the transcript of his testimony provided a fuller picture of the sense of familiarity with which he dealt with members of his staff, holding some aides’ hands and kissing others on the cheeks.
Questioned about his physical contact with staff members, Mr. Cuomo suggested that any time he touched women who worked for him, it was incidental, if it happened at all. He said there might have been an occasion when a staff member kissed him on the lips.
He later said that he did not think that he had kissed anybody on the lips but did not want to deny it definitively.
A state trooper offered more details about her accusations.
An unnamed female state trooper who was assigned to Mr. Cuomo’s protective detail when he was governor told investigators that members of the detail had been advised to “always have an answer, don’t tell him no and whatever he wants, make it happen.”
She also described times when Mr. Cuomo flirted with her in ways that struck her as “creepy.”
Cuomo gets material for a possible defense.
The release of the transcripts arrived at what could be crucial moment for Mr. Cuomo. Last month, a criminal complaint charging him with a misdemeanor sex crime was filed by the Albany County, N.Y., sheriff’s Office.
The filing of the complaint raised the specter of Mr. Cuomo being required to appear in court on accusations that had so far only been debated outside the legal system.
For months, Mr. Cuomo and his lawyer, Rita Glavin, have tested a possible defense strategy by questioning the investigators’ neutrality and citing some circumstantial evidence to suggest that the investigation’s outcome was preordained.
But Ms. Glavin has also urged the public not to rush to judgment prematurely, saying that her response to the report had been hampered by a lack of access to the material that the attorney general’s investigators collected. She and everyone else now have hundreds of pages of it.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo defiantly denied touching women inappropriately during an often adversarial interview with investigators who concluded he had sexually harassed multiple women, according to a 515-page transcript released by the New York State attorney general on Wednesday.
The hourslong testimony offered an unvarnished look into the defense of Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat who resigned in August as a result of the allegations, and his repeated attempts to refute the allegations and explain his behavior toward women.
Mr. Cuomo portrayed himself as an over-engaged manager, the kind of boss who expresses concern about the well-being of his employees, both male and female, as well as their romantic lives and their health. He acknowledged that he often kissed and hugged staffers, but said that if any inappropriate touching occurred, it would have been incidental.
During the roughly 11-hour interview this summer, Mr. Cuomo often struck a confrontational tone with the investigators, characterizing the inquiry overseen by the state attorney general as a “biased political investigation.”
Mr. Cuomo’s testimony was part of a broad release of transcripts and exhibits on Wednesday from the attorney general’s five-month investigation into the sexual harassment claims against Mr. Cuomo that culminated in his resignation in August.
The long-awaited release of the materials comes more than three months after the attorney general, Letitia James, published a 165-page report that concluded Mr. Cuomo engaged in a range of offenses, from inappropriate comments to kissing, touching and groping multiple women, including current and former state employees.
In the interview, Mr. Cuomo seemed to oscillate between domineering and playful, frequently following up investigators’ questions with questions of his own that included an elongated exchange about the definition of “girlfriend.”
Mr. Cuomo said that he kissed staffers on the cheek “as a general rule,” instead of on the lips, but added that there might have been an occasion when a staffer kissed him on the lips.
“That’s what some people do,” he said. “Never a romantic kiss — right? We’re just talking about a peck on the lips.” (In the report, Annabel Walsh, a former staffer, recalled having kissed Mr. Cuomo on the lips, but said that she did not find the kisses uncomfortable.)
He explained that he had limited the number of unsolicited kisses he bestowed on staff in recent years, as a result of changing workplace culture. “I recently — fairly recently have started to say to women on occasion, ‘May I kiss you?’ That’s fairly recent. More responsive to the shifting norms if you — as you may call it.”
The attorney general’s report came at the end of a monthslong investigation by outside lawyers who pored over thousands of documents and gathered hours of testimony from interviews with Mr. Cuomo, his top aides and the women who accused him of sexual harassment or misconduct.
The documents released on Wednesday by Ms. James, a Democrat who recently announced her candidacy for governor, also included the testimony of 10 women whose allegations were the basis of the investigation. Excerpts from their testimony had been included in the report, but the transcripts offered a raw retelling of their accounts about Mr. Cuomo’s conduct.
Brittany Commisso accused Mr. Cuomo of groping her; a female state trooper accused Mr. Cuomo of inappropriately touching her back, as well as of making inappropriate comments; Lindsey Boylan, a former government staffer, accused him of giving her an unsolicited kiss on the lips; and Charlotte Bennett, a former aide, said Mr. Cuomo sexually harassed her.
Ms. Commisso’s allegation — that Mr. Cuomo grabbed her breast while they were alone in the Executive Mansion in Albany last year — has been particularly damaging for Mr. Cuomo. In late October, the Albany County sheriff’s office filed a criminal complaint charging Mr. Cuomo with forcibly touching Ms. Commisso, a misdemeanor.
Mr. Cuomo forcefully pushed back against her claim during his testimony, suggesting it defied belief that he would engage in such behavior after years in public life.
“That never happened,” he said. “At one point there has to be a little reality. To touch a woman’s breast who I hardly know, in the mansion, with 10 staff around, with my family in the mansion, to say ‘I don’t care who sees us.’”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
A top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Brittany Commisso, detailed a workplace relationship with the governor in which he routinely touched, hugged and kissed her, occasionally on the lips, culminating in an episode at the Executive Mansion when she said he groped her breast.
Ms. Commisso, speaking to an investigator hired by the New York State attorney general to conduct an investigation into allegations by multiple women that Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed them, described an incident in the mansion late last year when Mr. Cuomo swooped in to hug her. As he did so, she said, he slid his hand up her blouse and onto her breast.
“I remember looking down and I remember seeing his hand which is, I would say, a large hand, and over my bra,” Ms. Commisso told the investigator.
Startled, she pushed the governor off, and told him “you’re going to get us in trouble,” according to transcript of her testimony, which was released on Wednesday by the attorney general’s office. “That is not what I was here for and that is not what I do.”
In response, Ms. Commisso recalled, the governor said he did not care, stepped away and slammed a door so hard she worried other employees in the mansion would hear and be concerned about what was happening. Then he turned back toward her, she said, and tried to draw her close again.
“I just remember like completely being at this point like what the — excuse me — what the hell is going on, and pulling him off,” she said. “I think I must have said, ‘You’re crazy.’”
Last month, the Albany County Sheriff’s office filed a complaint against Mr. Cuomo charging him with a misdemeanor sex crime.
In separate testimony included with the sheriff’s complaint, Ms. Commisso said she believed the incident occurred in November but could not be sure of the date, though the criminal complaint specified that the incident happened on Dec. 7.
In her statements to investigators, Ms. Commisso, 32, explained that she did not more forcefully physically rebuff the governor because of his position of power. She said she feared that “I would be taken away by the state police officers and I would be the one that would get in trouble and I would be the one to lose my job, not him.”
She paints a picture of the incident in the mansion as a culmination of uncomfortable interactions with Mr. Cuomo. Twice, she says, kisses that he typically gave her on the cheek landed on her lips, according to the transcript.
When an investigator asked if Mr. Cuomo had pressed his pelvis to her body during embraces, she replied that he did not, because she deliberately positioned her body to avoid it.
“The hugs definitely got closer and tighter to the point where I knew I could feel him pushing my body against his and definitely making sure that he could feel my breasts up against his body,” she said.
In December 2020, Lindsey Boylan, a former aide who has accused Mr. Cuomo of kissing her in his office, posted allegations of the misconduct on Twitter. Around that time, Ms. Commisso said, the governor approached her after a discussion with aides about the claims.
“He looked up at me and he said, ‘Brittany, you don’t talk about anything with anyone else, right?’” Ms. Commisso said.
She said she replied that she did not.
Grace Ashford contributed reporting
One of the biggest findings of the attorney general’s report was a previously unreported account from an unnamed state trooper who was assigned to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s protective detail and who told investigators that Mr. Cuomo had harassed her.
The transcript released on Wednesday offered direct testimony from the woman, whose experiences with the governor swayed many state lawmakers to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation.
The report said that the woman was hired for the detail after meeting Mr. Cuomo at an event in 2017 in New York City. The governor asked for her to join the detail, and investigators said that she was assigned there even though she did not have the three years of experience with the State Police that was a requirement for the posting.
In her testimony, the trooper said that she applied for a transfer to the security detail after being told that Mr. Cuomo wanted her to do so. The State Police changed its experience requirement from three years to two in order to make her eligible, and she started working on the detail in January 2018.
The trooper told investigators of two instances when Mr. Cuomo invited her to the Executive Mansion in Albany, leaving her unsettled and unsure what his intentions were.
“He tried to be flirtatious. A lot of times, it came off creepy,” the trooper testified.
In one of those instances, in September 2018, the trooper mentioned that she would be in Albany for her sister’s wedding. Mr. Cuomo asked if she had ever been to the mansion, and the trooper replied she had not. “And he said, ‘Oh, you know, I could give you a tour — unless it’s against any protocols,’ and like, snickered and walked off.”
The suggestive implication — that this was not the run-of-the mill tour of the mansion available to the public — was clear to her, she said. “You knew exactly what he was saying,” the trooper testified.
The trooper also described two other moments that later ended up in Ms. James’s report. She said Mr. Cuomo ran a finger down her spine while she stood in front of him in an elevator in Manhattan. In September 2019, while she was holding open a door for him, he also pressed his hand on her stomach and ran it over to her hip, she said.
“I felt like, completely violated because to me, like that’s between my chest and my privates, which, you know, if he was a little bit north or a little bit south, it’s not good,” the trooper told investigators.
“I kind of like, compartmentalized,” she said. “It happened, I felt uncomfortable, I felt completely violated. But, you know, I’m here to do a job.”
The trooper also described a moment when the governor asked if he could kiss her. She froze in discomfort, unsure how to say no, she said.
The next time Mr. Cuomo asked for a kiss, she told him that she had been ill. “And he looked at me, almost in disgust that I had denied him. So he looks at me and just like, walks off,” the trooper said.
In his testimony, Mr. Cuomo said it was likely that he had hugged the trooper as a greeting but said he had not touched her in the elevator and said that if he touched her while she was holding open the door, it had been “incidental.”
He also said he did not remember offering the mansion tour or asking her for a kiss, though he said he might have kissed her on the cheek at a Christmas party.
— Michael Gold, Kirsten Danis and Benjamin Weiser
On June 5, 2020, Charlotte Bennett, a top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, recalled being alone with Mr. Cuomo in his office in the State Capitol in Albany when he asked her to turn off a tape recorder she had been using for dictation.
Then the governor told her he was lonely, Ms. Bennett said in an interview with Joon Kim, a former prosecutor hired by the New York State attorney general to conduct an investigation into allegations that Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women.
Mr. Cuomo asked her when was the last time she had been hugged, “like a real hug,” according to transcript of Ms. Bennett’s testimony, which was released by the attorney general’s office on Wednesday. Then, Mr. Cuomo, who was 62 at the time, asked Ms. Bennett, 25, if she had ever been with an older man.
It was one of several conversations about her sex life that Ms. Bennett said the governor initiated when they were alone together, before she left the administration a year ago. He asked her, for instance, if she were monogamous. He also offered unsolicited information about his own sex life, saying how young an appropriate sexual partner would be for a man of his age: he said 22.
“I just said, ‘Oh, like your daughters,’” Ms. Bennett said to Mr. Kim, referring to Mariah, Cara and Michaela Kennedy-Cuomo, who are all in their 20s. “And he ignored me on that.”
The exchanges left Ms. Bennett “shaking,” according to a text message she sent to a friend and shared with the attorney general’s office as evidence. Taken together, the conversations left a clear impression, she said in her statement to Mr. Kim.
“It was between him asking me if I would or have I slept with an older man in combination with all these conversations about my romantic life and my sex life and the fact that he was willing to sleep with someone my age,” Ms. Bennett said. “It was very clear to me that he, over the course of these conversations, was propositioning me for sex.”
“I was scared and I was uncomfortable, but I also was acutely aware that I did not want him to get mad,” Ms. Bennett added, describing Mr. Cuomo’s workplace as “extremely toxic and abusive.” She continued: “I know him. I’ve seen his temper. I’ve heard it. I’ve worked with him for a year now, and I was trying my best to get through the conversation.”
The governor also asked Ms. Bennett about the number and locations of piercings she had and suggested a location of a future tattoo she had planned to get. She wanted it on her shoulder, she told an investigator. The governor suggested that she should have it applied on her buttocks so it would not be visible, she said.
Ms. Bennett has said in previous interviews that she reported the June 5 interaction with Mr. Cuomo to his chief of staff. She was then transferred to a new position as a health policy adviser, on the opposite side of the Capitol grounds.
Hours after the state attorney general’s office released transcripts and exhibits from its investigation into sexual harassment accusations against former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said on Wednesday that the new material only reinforced the governor’s contention that the inquiry was flawed and biased.
“The more we know about this investigation the more we know what a fraud it was,” said the spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, in a statement that cataloged Mr. Cuomo’s defense.
Mr. Cuomo’s lawyer, Rita Glavin, went further, accusing the attorney general, Letitia James, of trying to “prejudice people” against Mr. Cuomo and influence a pending criminal case against him.
Statement from Rita Glavin: “The AG deliberately harms a pending case by broadcasting to each witness what other witnesses have testified to, & spreading false and salacious hearsay and rumors. No legitimate law enforcement officer acts like this in a pending case.” pic.twitter.com/YIwqop7Nte
— Andrew Cuomo (@andrewcuomo) November 10, 2021
For months, Mr. Cuomo and his team have said Attorney General Letitia James’s final report was influenced by her own political ambitions — she is running for governor. Mr. Cuomo has also questioned the impartiality of one of the two outside lawyers hired by Ms. James to carry out the investigation — Joon H. Kim, who had worked as a federal prosecutor investigating the Cuomo administration.
Ms. Glavin has said repeatedly that the investigators omitted key evidence from the report and failed to ask questions that would have lent credence to Mr. Cuomo’s defense, a line that Mr. Azzopardi picked up on Wednesday.
In his statement, Mr. Azzopardi called the attorney general’s report “shoddy,” took issue with “questionable redactions” in the transcripts and said that the inquiry “reeks of prosecutorial misconduct.”
Mr. Azzopardi said that Ms. James’s office had redacted an assertion that Mr. Cuomo made about ties between Ms. James’s chief of staff and the political campaign of one of his accusers, Lindsey Boylan. He suggested the redaction was meant to hide an “obvious conflict of interest.”
Mr. Azzopardi also posed question about the transcripts meant to cast doubt on the testimony of several of Mr. Cuomo’s accusers, including Ms. Boylan and Brittany Commisso, a former executive assistant who said Mr. Cuomo groped her breast at the Executive Mansion in Albany.
Ms. Commisso’s accusation is at the center of a criminal complaint charging Mr. Cuomo with a sex crime that was filed last month by the Albany County Sheriff’s Office.
Material released by the New York State attorney general on Wednesday illustrated how top aides to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo leapt into action after the governor was accused of sexual harassment by a former aide in February.
Among the items released on Wednesday was a copy of an email sent in the wake of the accusation from the aide, Lindsey Boylan. The email, sent by Mr. Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, to his office director, Stephanie Benton, came with the subject line, “Q’s to practice.”
The email contained a list of questions relating to Ms. Boylan’s accusations, which included claims that the governor had kissed her without her consent and had invited her to play strip poker.
“Did you forcibly kiss Ms. Boylan?” was the first question on Ms. DeRosa’s list. It continued:
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“Did you touch her legs/arms/torso?”
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“Did you tell her you wanted to play strip poker?”
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“Did you say that she looked like a better version of your ex girlfriend?”
Other evidence released by the attorney general on Wednesday included email exchanges between the governor’s staff and outside advisers. In one email, Annabel Walsh, a former scheduler for Mr. Cuomo, shared a letter that had been released on behalf of Tom Brokaw after he was accused of sexual harassment in 2018.
In another exchange, top aides appeared to discuss several different drafts of a comment that Mr. Cuomo could release in response to Ms. Boylan’s accusations, insisting that those allegations were false.
The evidence offered a rare portrait of an office in crisis, looking to push back firmly against Ms. Boylan’s accusations even as the governor, who had not yet been accused by other women, signaled his belief in transparency.
Brittany Commisso, an assistant to Mr. Cuomo who also accused him of having groped her, told the investigators she had witnessed the frantic effort to discredit Ms. Boylan firsthand.
“They were actively trying to portray a different story of it,” she testified, “trying to make her seem like she was crazy and wanting to get her personnel file out.”
In his interview with investigators, Mr. Cuomo repeatedly said that he was not involved in discussions about releasing Ms. Boylan’s personnel file to reporters to counter her characterization of her time in his administration.
The governor said he was aware that his aides were working with in-house and outside lawyers about how to respond to Ms. Boylan’s public statements, but that he was only involved in a general way.
“I only get involved when I have to go out there and what am I going to say,” Mr. Cuomo said.
However, he did tell investigators that he had favored putting together a statement or opinion essay signed by current and former female aides defending him. He compared it to an approach President Biden had taken when a sexual misconduct claim was raised against him during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Mr. Cuomo described personally working on a “circulating, revolving draft” but said it was his choice not to publish it.
“For myself, I ascribe to the Lincoln theory,” he testified. “President Lincoln would read an article in the newspaper that totally infuriated him, where he was accused of all sorts of things. He would sit down, hand write a long response letter, and then crumple it up and throw it out.”
Later, Mr. Cuomo played down the whole exercise, contradicting earlier statements that the letter was intended for public release.
In his interview with the attorney general’s investigators, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was often defiant. But he also made it clear that he had assumed an air of familiarity with staffers that at times veered sharply away from the professional.
He said that it was possible that he had commented on a specific employee’s weight and that he occasionally made jokes about marriage. Asked what type, he said “just about the basic advisability of the institution.”
Questioned about physical contact with staffers, Mr. Cuomo suggested that any time he touched women on his staff, it was incidental, if it had happened. He said that he kissed staffers on the cheek “as a general rule,” instead of on the lips, but added that there may have been an occasion when a staffer kissed him on the lips.
He did not specify which staffer, and later said that he did not think that he had kissed anybody on the lips but did not want to deny it definitively.
“That’s what some people do,” he said. “Never a romantic kiss — right? We’re just talking about a peck on the lips.”
Asked specifically about a number of staffers, Mr. Cuomo said it was possible that he had kissed some of them on the lips. But when asked about Brittany Commisso and Lindsey Boylan, two of his accusers, Mr. Cuomo expressed confidence that he had not.
Asked if he ever laid on a couch with his head in a staffer’s lap, he said that he did not remember ever having done so. Asked about specific people, he maintained that it had not happened, but added that, with his arm on the back of his head, he may have leaned against the side of their leg.
Asked if any female aides had sat on his lap, he said he could not rule it out.
“Not as a general rule,” Mr. Cuomo said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised, at a social event or something, somebody may have sat on my lap.”
He continued: “I don’t recall anyone specifically. But, you know, I have people who have worked with me years, 10 years. I go to their weddings. We do social events. We do Christmas parties.”
Mr. Cuomo said it was also possible that he had referred to staffers as “honey,” “darling” and “sweetheart,” adding that there was a point at which those expressions had been acceptable in a professional context.
One striking exchange that is included in the documents released by the attorney general’s office on Wednesday involves Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo telling investigators about the broad range of state documents he had empowered a top aide to sign on his behalf.
“I get hundreds of documents per day that have to be signed,” Mr. Cuomo said, explaining that he often had the aide, Stephanie Benton, handle the tasks. “I sign very few actually myself. I’ll often review the material, review the documents, tell her to sign them, or autopen.”
He said Ms. Benton was authorized to sign “virtually almost any document” that crossed his desk, including checks, legislation and executive orders. Mr. Cuomo’s lawyer, Rita Glavin, later had Mr. Cuomo clarify that Ms. Benton used the autopen — a mechanical device that reproduces signatures — on legislation and executive orders.
The exchange came as Mr. Cuomo sought to explain why the document attesting that he had completed his 2019 sexual harassment training contained handwriting that was not his own.
In her testimony to the attorney general’s investigators, Charlotte Bennett, one of Mr. Cuomo’s accusers, said Ms. Benton had completed Mr. Cuomo’s sexual harassment training for him.
Mr. Cuomo has repeatedly said he completed the course himself. In 2018, Mr. Cuomo ordered state employees to complete the training annually as part of a broader anti-harassment initiative.
The transcripts released by the New York State attorney general’s office on Wednesday were the latest chapter in a scandal that started with multiple women accusing former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of sexual harassment and grew into a series of investigations.
The attorney general, Letitia James, began her office’s investigation into Mr. Cuomo’s behavior in March, focusing on women’s claims that he had engaged in harassment, unwanted touching or other inappropriate conduct.
Ms. James named two outside lawyers to lead the inquiry, and investigators took testimony from 179 witnesses and reviewed tens of thousands of documents over several months. They questioned Mr. Cuomo as well as his accusers. In August, Ms. James released a report based on the investigation that found Mr. Cuomo had sexually harassed 11 women, nine of them current or former state employees at the time.
When the report came out, the State Assembly was in the process of conducting its own broader impeachment inquiry into potential abuses of power by Mr. Cuomo and members of his inner circle.
The Assembly inquiry, under the oversight of the Judiciary Committee, encompassed the sexual harassment accusations as well as issues like how the governor and members of his staff had handled deaths at nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.
The release of the attorney general’s report accelerated the pace of the impeachment investigation. It also renewed calls for Mr. Cuomo to resign, including from longtime allies like President Biden, other Democratic governors and state lawmakers. Several district attorneys said they were considering possible criminal investigations into Mr. Cuomo’s alleged behavior.
With pressure mounting, Mr. Cuomo resigned on Aug. 10, although he continued to deny touching anyone inappropriately. He and his lawyer, Rita Glavin, have continued to try to cast doubt on the allegations against him, arguing that the attorney general’s report was incomplete and politically motivated.
Even after Mr. Cuomo left office, the fallout continued. Last month, the Albany County sheriff filed a criminal complaint charging Mr. Cuomo with a misdemeanor sex crime. The case was thrown into doubt last week when the Albany county district attorney said the complaint was filed without his knowledge and might be “potentially defective.”
At times during his interview with the attorney general’s investigators, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo turned the tables on his questioners, particularly Joon H. Kim, a law firm partner and former federal prosecutor.
Mr. Kim was the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan from 2017 to 2018 and a top deputy in the office during a yearslong inquiry into Mr. Cuomo’s administration. Mr. Cuomo and his lawyers have argued publicly that Mr. Kim’s history posed a conflict and have called the investigation politically motivated.
The transcripts released on Wednesday show Mr. Cuomo expressing that view directly, and bluntly, to Mr. Kim.
Asked whether he recalled a possible protocol change that would prevent him from being alone with young staff members, Mr. Cuomo said that he did not but that he would have taken care to always have additional staff members around.
“Now, I’m pretty paranoid, as you know,” he said, noting that Mr. Kim’s office had investigated his administration for years.
Asked whether he was aware of efforts to dig up negative information about the legal team investigating him, Mr. Cuomo said he was not. He added, though, that Mr. Kim’s history was “well known,” before expressing his frustration over how Letitia James, the attorney general, had handled the appointment.
“I had a conversation with the attorney general where I said, ‘There can’t be any games here,’” Mr. Cuomo recalled, adding that Ms. James had sought to reassure him.
“You then get selected as a reviewer,” Mr. Cuomo said. “You, as a reviewer, I believe, is such a perversion of fair — independent, fair reviewer with no predisposition, investigated me for years.”
“Your office compared me to Trump,” Mr. Cuomo said, a possible reference to a quote in a New Yorker article in which Preet Bharara — the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan and Mr. Kim’s onetime boss — described Mr. Cuomo’s efforts to tamp down an investigation by his office. “Trump did that,” The New Yorker quoted Mr. Bharara as saying.
“I mean, the concept of you as the resolution to the conflict as an independent reviewer is bizarre to me and raises ethical and legal questions,” Mr. Cuomo said. “The way you, then, have conducted the review itself I believe raises ethical and legal questions.”
In response, Mr. Kim asked Mr. Cuomo whether he had done anything to follow up “on these theories that you have.”
“Those aren’t theories,” Mr. Cuomo replied. “Those are facts.”
In the transcripts from the attorney general’s investigation that were released on Wednesday, Andrew M. Cuomo discusses his interactions with a female state trooper who was assigned to his protective detail when he was governor and has accused him of sexual harassment.
The trooper, who has not been publicly identified, told the attorney general’s investigators that Mr. Cuomo touched her inappropriately on several occasions, including kissing her on the cheek while she was stationed outside his home.
Mr. Cuomo said he could not recall whether he had done that, and denied ever touching the trooper inappropriately.
She had told investigators that he once asked to kiss her while she was stationed outside his home. On another occasion, she said, he ran his fingers down her back in an elevator. Another time, she said, he ran his hand across her stomach while she held open a door.
Mr. Cuomo denied those allegations, saying of running his hand across her stomach: “If I did, it was incidental, and I don’t remember doing that.”
The trooper also told investigators about several comments Mr. Cuomo made that left her feeling uncomfortable, including about her clothing. She said she felt particularly uneasy when Mr. Cuomo asked her on one occasion why she wanted to get married.
“It always ends in divorce, and you lose money, and your sex drive goes down,” she recalled him saying to her, according to the attorney general’s report.
“I don’t think I said that,” Mr. Cuomo responded, according to the transcripts released on Wednesday.
The trooper told investigators that she first met the governor in a brief interaction in 2017. Afterward, Mr. Cuomo asked that she join his protective detail, even though she did not have the necessary experience, the report said.
Mr. Cuomo was asked if he recalled meeting the trooper and later suggesting that she join his security unit.
“I was on constant alert to recruit more women, blacks, and Asians to the state police detail,” he said, according to the transcript, adding, “I had a constant refrain with the state police, ‘We have to have more diversity on the detail.’”
Mr. Cuomo said he remember meeting two female troopers who seemed “good and smart and with it” at an event at the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2017, and that he asked the State Police to gauge their interest in joining the detail.
He was also asked whether he remembered discussions about anyone who did not meet the qualifications being allowed to join the detail.
“I don’t remember any conversation about — they don’t have any set rule,” he said. “They have, ‘This is how we always do it.’ Yeah, I know this is how you always do it, and that’s why we have 57 white people.”
Even as he stepped down from office, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo maintained a defiant tone.
While acknowledging the attorney general’s report had created a politically untenable situation, Mr. Cuomo disputed many of its findings. He said that he never touched anyone inappropriately and that many of the allegations against him stemmed from differing generational norms of which he was not aware.
In the months since, Mr. Cuomo and his surrogates — his lawyer, Rita Glavin, and a longtime spokesman, Rich Azzopardi — have continued to discredit the report and have tried to call into question some of the women’s accounts.
Mr. Cuomo and his team have not commented publicly since the attorney general released transcripts on Wednesday of testimony provided by the former governor and his accusers during the investigation that led to the report.
But he and his allies have repeatedly characterized the 165-page report as politically motivated and driven by the desire of the attorney general, Letitia James, to run for governor.
They have recently taken issue with the filing of a criminal complaint against Mr. Cuomo in Albany City Court, which came a day before Ms. James announced her campaign for governor. Both Mr. Azzopardi and Ms. Glavin have suggested, without offering evidence, that the two may have been coordinated.
Ms. Glavin has for months taken issue with the claims at the center of the criminal case, which focus on an alleged interaction between Mr. Cuomo and an aide in the governor’s residence in Albany. The aide, Brittany Commisso, had previously accused Mr. Cuomo of groping her breast while they were alone in the mansion late last year.
Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Glavin have repeatedly denied that he inappropriately touched Ms. Commisso. Ms. Glavin has focused on seeming inconsistencies in Ms. Commisso’s accounts regarding the date of the alleged incident. That appears to be part of a larger strategy. She has sought to cast doubt on the claims made by women in the report by pointing to circumstantial evidence or inconsistencies that did not necessarily disprove the women’s accounts.
She has also pointed to small errors in the report to suggest that investigators had not been thorough enough.
Mr. Cuomo, who once basked in the national spotlight for his handling of the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, has made a concerted effort to stay out of it in the last months.
Since resigning, he has been living on Long Island and has made few public appearances. Photos posted to his Instagram account suggest that he has been spending his time fishing with his dog, Captain, who had his fourth birthday on Sunday.
A female state trooper assigned to Andrew M. Cuomo’s security detail who told investigators he had sexually harassed her also testified about some of the mundane challenges involved in protecting him, which at times seemed to center on his impatience.
Mr. Cuomo did not like to wait for elevators when he was on his way to his 39th-floor Manhattan office, the trooper, who has not been publicly identified, told investigators. He got frustrated if a lobby security gate was not open upon his arrival. He wanted to move swiftly through airports. And when traveling by car, Mr. Cuomo wanted to get where he was going fast — a message that was not lost on the protective detail’s drivers.
The trooper also testified that what happened in the truck — meaning the governor’s Chevrolet Tahoe S.U.V. or Dodge Charger sedan — “stays in truck,” as a supervisor wrote in a text message.
Everyone on the detail had to sign a confidentiality agreement pledging “basically not to speak about anything that goes on there with anybody outside the detail,” the female trooper testified.
The trooper, who joined the State Police in March 2015 and moved to the protective detail in January 2018, served as one of the governor’s drivers for less than three months as part of her duties. She acknowledged that in addition to Mr. Cuomo’s impatience, the need to keep him moving was sometimes based on security concerns.
But, she testified, he was also often in a hurry.
“When it comes to drivers, the governor is extremely particular about who drives him because there’s an expectation when you drive him,” the trooper testified, noting that the governor would sit in the front passenger seat. “He’s a car guy. He doesn’t want anyone passing him.”
Asked by one investigator whether Mr. Cuomo told his drivers to exceed the speed limit, the trooper said, “He never said it. But you know what’s expected of you. So it’s kind of like an unwritten rule.”
The trooper said Mr. Cuomo’s drivers routinely reached speeds of 70 to 80 miles an hour on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in New York City and used their lights and sirens “to push people” into the right lane. (The speed limit on the drive is 40 m.p.h.)
The trooper testified that she believed her brief tenure behind the wheel for Mr. Cuomo ended because “there was one time that I stopped short, getting off the F.D.R. Drive.”
She said that a superior recounted for her a conversation that he had with Mr. Cuomo about her driving.
“He said, ‘Hey — he said he had too many close calls. You’re still allowed to drive, but you’re not going to be the primary driver,’” the trooper recalled in her testimony.