On Schneiderman Case, Cuomo and Vance Reach a Tense Truce

In the days after Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s now-former attorney general, was accused of physically assaulting four women he had been romantically involved with, a storm of political sniping ensued between the governor and Manhattan’s top prosecutor over who would investigate the allegations.

The spat came to an end, at least publicly, Thursday, with a news conference that was intended to show a unified front but could not quite shake the acrimony of the previous couple of days.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., sat to one side of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, clenching his jaw, fidgeting, and often taking sips of water. On the other side was the Nassau County district attorney, Madeline Singas, who was asked to oversee the investigation against Schneiderman after Cuomo decided Vance should not.

The governor’s decision incensed Vance, who was already facing a review — led by Schneiderman’s office and ordered by Cuomo — into the district attorney’s handling of a case in 2015 involving Harvey Weinstein.

But Thursday, Cuomo sought to praise Vance’s office, even as he stood by his decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Schneiderman.

“The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is one of the most respected district attorney offices in the country, and Cy Vance has done a magnificent job,” Cuomo said. “But in some ways it doesn’t matter what I think, and it doesn’t matter what District Attorney Cy Vance thinks. It’s important that the public has total confidence in the justice system and everything that we’re doing.”

Vance had started an investigation of Schneiderman shortly after a report by The New Yorker detailing the allegations was published Monday. Vance said at the news conference Thursday that his investigation lasted 12 hours before Cuomo asked Singas to take it over.

Vance fired off a letter Tuesday night taking issue with the governor’s decision. He pointed out that any conflict of interest had been created by the governor himself when he asked the attorney general to review the handling of the Weinstein investigation. And he said the announcement of that review was seen “by some as politically motivated,” given that it was made on the day Cynthia Nixon, Cuomo’s opponent in the primary, announced her campaign for governor.

But the salvos did not stop there. On Wednesday, Alphonso David, a close adviser to Cuomo, shot back in a letter to Vance, attacking what he called “a blatant misstatement of facts.”

“It is frankly absurd to think that you can investigate an office that is simultaneously investigating your own conduct,” David wrote to the district attorney, noting that women’s organizations had raised concerns about Vances’ handling of sexual abuse and harassment cases. “That distrust is your creation, not ours.”

On Thursday, though, it was Cuomo, not David, who was seated next to Vance at the news conference inside the governor’s Manhattan office.

Vance pledged to support Singas in her investigation, saying, “Justice for victims of crime in Manhattan is my top priority, and it always will be.”

“We’re all going to work together,” he added, “and we’re going to do it thoughtfully, and we’re going to do it collectively, and we’re all going to do it with the best interest of survivors in mind.”

But it was evident that Vance remained troubled by the turn of events.

“I was going to keep this case, I needed to get out and get access to witnesses and victims and move quickly,” he said, “and perhaps I was a little frustrated when the ground rules changed.”

He said the public deserved to have confidence that there was no conflict involved. But he also said the governor’s power to appoint a special prosecutor was one that should be “used rarely.”

Singas, a career prosecutor, led the first Special Victims Bureau in the Nassau County district attorney’s office years before she was elected to head the office in 2015.

“These allegations are extremely disturbing and very troubling. We will listen to anyone who is willing to talk to us about the victimization,” she said of the Schneiderman case. “There will be no stone left unturned.”

The women in the New Yorker article said they had been choked, hit repeatedly and spat on. Two of the women had sought medical treatment for their injuries. Schneiderman also threatened to kill them if they broke up with him, they said, and he told one woman he could have her followed and her phones tapped. All four women were romantically involved with Schneiderman, but they said they had not consented to the violence as part of sexual role playing, as Scheiderman asserted in a statement.

Based on the accounts of the woman, prosecutors could weigh a number of charges, including assault, harassment, forcible touching and strangulation, legal experts said. Prosecutors will also consider whether Schneiderman used government resources to cover up his actions and whether he made threats that amounted to abuse of his official powers.

But, Singas said, until she interviewed the women involved, she could not determine the direction of the case. She said also it was too early to tell whether the case could move forward without the women’s cooperation.