NEW from @ericlach: Ron Kim was bathing his 3 kids when phone rang. The governor was so loud that Kim’s wife and daughters grew upset. “I will go out tomorrow and start telling the world how bad of an Assembly member you are, and you will be finished.” newyorker.com/news/our-local…
Neither Kim nor his wife slept that night...Cuomo kept up the pressure through the weekend. That Saturday, Cuomo’s aides and other intermediaries called Kim, trying to get him to talk to the governor.
“It’s Lunar New Year—I’m with my family,” Kim told me. “I felt extremely uncomfortable.” Kim believes that Cuomo was trying to silence him. “I realized if I changed course, I’m complicit,” Kim said. “And then, politically, he owns me.”
Kim hired a lawyer, to whom he directed any further communications about the issue from the governor’s office. “Ultimately, what he was trying to do was asking me to lie about what I heard,” Kim said.
“It’s like I witnessed a crime, and they’re asking me to say I didn’t witness a crime.”
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