An advisor to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo boasted about getting MSNBC's Katy Tur to use her "spin" on air

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Lis Smith, the communications director for Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign, was brought in by former New York Gov. Cuomo's team to help deal with the PR fallout after the governor was accused of sexual harassment. As Defector's Laura Wagner and Patrick Redford report, Chris Cuomo "wasn’t the only media figure breaking a sweat trying to manage fallout for Andrew. At Smith’s behest, MSNBC’s Katy Tur evidently carried her fair share of water for the governor in a televised report on March 3, the day Cuomo first addressed the growing number of allegations against him in a public statement that went something like, I am sorry women didn’t like my innocent hugs and friendly banter. Per the documents released by the AG, Smith and her fellow savvy political operatives monitored the response to Cuomo’s public statement, including a segment on Katy Tur’s MSNBC program." “I’m texting w Katy Tur,” Smith wrote. “Katy is saying my spin live. Like verbatim on (MSNBC).” On her March 3 broadcast, Katy Tur said: “I’ve just been talking with somebody who is close to the family and I asked them, given the moment we have been living in for the past two years, given how everyone has had a reckoning with this Me Too moment, why would someone like Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is a savvy politician, not have buttoned things up, not have gotten the message to be careful about what he says around his staffers around others. And the person said, it’s not that he didn’t think the rules didn’t apply to him, it’s just that in the Cuomo DNA, they are extraordinarily friendly, I guess, by nature.”