Not that long ago, an 11th-hour revelation that the Justice Department was criminally investigating a candidate like Andrew M. Cuomo would have been enough to kill or at least seriously maim a mayoral campaign.
So it was something of a mile-marker in Democrats’ growing distrust of the Trump administration that when news of the inquiry into the New York City front-runner broke late Tuesday, not even Mr. Cuomo’s rivals could quite be sure who would benefit politically.
On one hand, the inquiry appeared to echo his rivals’ criticisms of Mr. Cuomo as dishonest and corrupt. It centers on whether Mr. Cuomo lied to Congress about decisions he made as governor during the coronavirus pandemic.
Several candidates seized on the Justice Department’s action to argue that New Yorkers should not replace Mayor Eric Adams, whose administration was upended by a federal inquiry, with a second politician who might have reasons to curry favor with Mr. Trump.
“We cannot trade one compromised mayor for another,” said Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn.
But Democrats’ conviction that President Trump is abusing the Justice Department is now so deep that party leaders and even some of Mr. Cuomo’s critics said that being a target could help him in the June 24 mayoral primary in the nation’s largest Democratic city.
“I’m not here to support Andrew Cuomo or oppose him, I’m just here to tell you this is another example of retribution and using the Justice Department for political purposes,” said Jay Jacobs, the chairman of the New York Democratic Party.
“You’re talking about active, highly motivated Democrats. That’s who’s going to be voting,” he added. “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ is pretty much the theory this goes under.”
Those voters’ views could change in time. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the inquiry into Mr. Cuomo was opened only in recent weeks by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington based on a criminal referral it received from House Republicans. No charges have been brought.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the Cuomo campaign, denied any wrongdoing and accused the Justice Department of abusing its power to interfere with an election.
The issue is especially sensitive in New York City.
In February, Trump Justice Department appointees overruled career prosecutors in Manhattan to toss bribery charges against Mayor Adams after he courted the president. Among other reasons, the department argued that the September 2024 indictment had improperly interfered with Mr. Adams’s own re-election prospects. (He is now running as an independent.)
In March, The Times reported that the same interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia who was in charge when the Cuomo case was opened had pushed to escalate an inquiry into Senator Chuck Schumer of New York over years-old public comments about the Supreme Court.
Then, this month, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into Letitia James, the New York State attorney general who has tangled with Mr. Trump in court, over her personal real estate transactions.
Mr. Cuomo, 67, has faced criticism as a candidate for not being more aggressive in attacking Mr. Trump. But his closest supporters were quick to spin the investigation as a sign of Mr. Cuomo’s perceived strength.
“Trump wants a mayor who will bend the knee (or be up his butt),” Melissa DeRosa, a top adviser to Mr. Cuomo, wrote on X. “Andrew Cuomo is his nightmare come true … enter law-fare … and a galvanized Democratic base.”
Paradoxically, the strategy echoes Mr. Trump’s own approach in 2024, when he used the criminal charges he faced to galvanize Republican support.
Still, even if many Democrats eye the Cuomo investigation as a politically motivated attack, the federal scrutiny may be a fresh complication to Mr. Cuomo’s attempt to re-enter political office less than four years after he resigned as governor in the face of sexual harassment allegations that he denied.
It will give his opponents an opportunity to renew focus on one of Mr. Cuomo’s biggest perceived vulnerabilities: how he handled the spread of Covid in state nursing homes in the pandemic’s early months. At worst, it could result in federal charges and a trial.
The families of New Yorkers who died in the nursing homes have long blamed Mr. Cuomo, citing a March 2020 state directive that ordered the facilities to accept Covid patients from hospitals. They have become a fixture outside Mr. Cuomo’s campaign events.
The federal investigation specifically appears to involve a report Mr. Cuomo’s administration produced later in 2020 that further infuriated victims’ families by deflecting blame for thousands of the deaths.
In closed-door testimony last summer, Mr. Cuomo initially denied having seen or reviewed the report before its release. He later qualified his denials, saying he did not “recall” viewing it.
But The Times subsequently reported, and the committee concluded, that Mr. Cuomo had not only seen the report but had personally written portions of early drafts.
Zohran Mamdani, the state assemblyman running second behind Mr. Cuomo in most polls, seemed to embody his rivals’ conflicting views about how to respond.
“Andrew Cuomo’s career has been defined by corruption and deceit, and his lying to Congress about his Covid response is no exception,” he said. “But Donald Trump cannot be trusted to pursue justice.”
Nicholas Fandos is a Times reporter covering New York politics and government.
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