Zephyr Teachout on When Andrew Cuomo’s BFF Tried to Intimidate Her

Zephyr Teachout never was an Andrew Cuomo fan. Mostly because the attorney and candidate for New York AG ran against him in 2014. But she also found “his reputation for vengeance and retaliation” scary—and experienced it firsthand.

In this episode of The New Abnormal—which has a brand new host, by the way, but we’ll get to that—Teachout recounts the ways she experienced that “part” of Cuomo.

One such instance was during her campaign against the former New York governor through his righthand man, Joe Percoco, who is currently in jail for bribery.

Subscribe to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Overcast. To listen to our weekly members-only bonus episodes, join Beast Inside here. Already a member? You can listen here and sign up for new episode email alerts here.

“[Percoco] would call people for talking to me. I mean, I wasn’t getting endorsements. This was, this was for having conversations,” she explains.

Speaking of the Cuomos, they’ve become a hot topic on the show for co-host Molly Jong-Fast, producer Jesse Cannon, and The New Abnormal’s brand new co-host, political commentator and (by his own admission) former libertarian Andy Levy.

“My Chris Cuomo hot take is he should have been fired a long time ago,” Levy says. “He should never have been allowed to have his brother, the governor, on as a guest on his show. That was one of the most embarrassing things I have seen on cable news. And that is really, really, really saying a lot. I worked at Fox News.”

Which leads to his big first episode question: Can Ryan Murphy create a show about the Cuomo brothers?

The CIA’s Slipshod Path to Torturing Its ‘Forever Prisoner’

Levy also warns that we shouldn’t be so quick to laugh off GOP members of Congress like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and of course, Kevin McCarthy: “McCarthy, as dumb as he is, he’s like a savant. Like the one thing he’s not dumb about is gaining power.”

Plus! The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank explains the very depressing analysis comparing President Joe Biden’s negative media coverage the last four months to the same four months of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2020.

“With Trump, it’s like, this is really bad that the president of the United States is trying to overturn democracy,” Milbank explains. “And now we’re saying, ‘Boy, this is really bad that Biden can’t, uh, get his majority in Congress to enact his social infrastructure bill.’ They’re not exactly the same thing.”

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!

Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.