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EXCERPT Schneiderman was viewed by liberals as the rare bright light in the dismal tea party election season of 2010, and he quickly became a nationwide progressive darling, winding up on the cover of magazines like The American Prospect. Barack Obama called out to Schneiderman (he was seated behind Michelle) at Obama’s 2012 State of the Union, and announced that the New York attorney general would lead a group investigating fraud during the subprime mortgage crisis.
Schneiderman was able to claw back billions of dollars from banks and wrongdoers, including a $13 billion settlement with JP Morgan Chase, even as some Obama administration officials feared that the New York attorney general was acting too aggressively.
But largely Schneiderman failed to live up to the examples of his predecessors. He almost immediately began a feud with Governor Andrew Cuomo, who before he had Bill de Blasio to fight with saw Schneiderman as his biggest threat. Soon after being sworn in as governor, Cuomo unveiled a new unit in the executive branch, the Department of Financial Services, and installed a top aide, Benjamin Lawsky, in the job and tasked him with investigating financial fraud. It was as if Cuomo didn’t want to leave his old job behind, and Schneiderman vented to a friend, “I have got to get this guy off my ass.”
Spitzer and Cuomo had their glory years during the George W. Bush administration, when there was a need for Democratic legal oversight. Although there were some wins, like suing Exxon for misleading the public over climate change and suing over unfair labor practices in the fast food industry, Schneiderman was largely a man without a cause for much of the Obama years, and several New York political figures told me over the last couple of years that the energy and oversight out of that office hadn’t been what it once was.
Until Trump came aboard. As much as Schneiderman was looking forward to an increased role under a President Hillary Clinton, the truth is that the prospect of a President Trump meant that at last the attorney general had a target worth taking on. The president was taking aim at environmental regulation, labor laws, the emoluments clause in the Constitution, and left behind a rash of seemingly corrupt business deals in New York. (Never mind that Schneiderman previously dragged his feet on the investigation of Trump University — something that, if it had been settled sooner, potentially could have stopped the Trump candidacy in its tracks.) Top lawyers from the private sector and from the U.S. attorney’s office came to work for him. “New York Attorney General in Battle With Trump,” the New York Times declared late last year, noting that Schneiderman had taken 100 legal or administrative actions against the administration in its first year in office. As Cynthia Nixon and Andrew Cuomo squabbled on the campaign trail, Schneiderman was in the catbird seat, the overwhelming favorite to replace Cuomo eventually in the governor’s mansion.
But now none of it will be, and Schneiderman will join the long list of disgraced New York politicians who become a national punch line —Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, Michael Grimm, David Paterson.