What a disgusting farce: Gov. Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Tish James are exploiting the Cornell 7 furor to serve their re-election campaigns, paying transparently insincere lip service to any quest for justice.
Citing doubts over the initial campus police investigation and a loss of confidence in Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, Hochul late Thursday named James as special prosecutor in the case.
Yet this came days after both women had publicly prejudged the whole thing, issuing statements taking the accuser’s charges (actually, the accuser’s lawyers’ charges) as simply true, even though other evidence already public suggests the story’s far more complicated.
That is: Hochul and James figure it serves their needs to join the lynch mob — truth and justice be damned.
“She’ll follow the facts,” the gov declared at their joint press conference Friday, adding that “if the evidence supports criminal charges,” James will “pursue them.”
How does “follow the facts” squares with James having already posted that “what the young woman” — ID’d as “Jane Doe” — “has been forced to endure is horrific and unacceptable,” that she is “holding her in my heart and in my prayers” and “vowing stand with you”?
Asked about that plain evidence of bias, the gov blurred, while the AG sniffed that she “doesn’t comment on Facebook posts.”
Nobody should be jumping to conclusions about what went on at the frat house that night; lots more evidence will be coming out.
As it disciplined most of the young men and shut down the frat, Cornell did a substantial investigation, producing 120 pages of evidence that were condensed to six for DA Van Houten — a progressive who’s not at all reluctant to prosecute rape, and had already reopened the case on learning of troubling info he hadn’t when seen before.
Maybe the school did some kind of coverup, but maybe not: The young woman’s story changed multiple times and included many statements that will make her civil suit hard to win and any kind of rape conviction near-impossible (outside a kangaroo court, anyway).
Heck, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s fiery “gang rape” description contradicts even what the victim’s civil lawsuit alleges.
This is all cheap posturing, right along with Hochul’s preening words Friday: “No public official gets to look the other way when the system breaks down and fails our young people.”
The known details of that ketamine-fueled night at the frat house are every college parent’s worst nightmare, but the unknowns should rule out any rush to judgment . . . unless, apparently, you’ve got an election coming up.
Hochul’s also now insisting she’ll fix the “loophole” in state law this case has supposedly exposed, which is more posturing.
The law says getting voluntarily intoxicated doesn’t guarantee that someone who has sex with you is committing rape; where’s the loophole?
If (as at least some of her own accounts indicate) the girl willingly got drunk and stoned and the boys (also intoxicated) stopped as soon as she said “no,” this falls into a squalid gray zone that no law can sort out.
We can’t recall a Tish James investigation that wasn’t blatantly political, so Hochul knows exactly what she’s ordered up here.
It’s nothing resembling justice; neither of these shameless hacks cares about that.
The post Kathy Hochul, Tish James rush to exploit ‘Cornell 7’ — justice be damned appeared first on New York Post.
