By james art A U.S. House committee will refer former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the Justice Department for making “criminally false statements” about a state audit that understated nursing home deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Post.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic accuses Cuomo of falsely saying he had no part in prompting, drafting or reviewing the July 6, 2020, report that downplayed the total number of COVID deaths in nursing homes in the state by 46%, according to a draft criminal referral to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In a bipartisan legal exchange, Cuomo filed his own criminal suit against the subcommittee on Wednesday, alleging it acted “in violation of the principles of federalism.”
“This questioning far exceeded the jurisdiction of the subcommittee and appears to have been an improper effort to favor the interests of private parties against Governor Cuomo, which warrants an investigation by the Department of Justice,” said a letter also sent by the former administration’s lawyers to Garland .
It noted that nowhere in the House resolution authorizing the subcommittee’s COVID investigation was there a mandate to “investigate the state’s internal regulatory boards regarding nursing home admissions.”
Cuomo’s legal team also accused subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) of “collusion” with Fox News weather anchor Janice Dean, “whose husband, Sean Newman, is a named plaintiff in a private lawsuit seeking damages from Governor Cuomo and others based on allegations regarding the March 25, 2020 nursing home board.”
Wenstrup (R-Ohio) was interviewed by the Weatherwoman twice on her own podcast to discuss the nursing home debacle and appeared at Cuomo’s Sept. 10 cookout before a Capitol Hill subcommittee.
“Watch what happens next. It’s not over after all,” Dean posted to X in a message aimed at Cuomo on Oct. 1, a day after her husband’s lawsuit was dismissed by a judge. “But enjoy your brief celebration. I hope you get your money back.
Asked whether he drafted, reviewed, discussed or involved people outside his administration in “peer review” of the death toll report, Cuomo told the House panel during a transcribed interview on June 11 that he had not.
“I didn’t. Maybe it was in the inbox, but I didn’t,” Cuomo said during his transcribed interview when asked if he had reviewed a draft of the report.
Cuomo subsequently added that he did not “recall” reviewing or seeing the July 2020 nursing home report prior to its release.
But subcommittee staff in the 104-page subpoena produced emails to aides discussing his involvement in editing and reviewing the report.
Drafts of the report containing what House investigators called the former governor’s own chicken scratch were also included in the filing.
Cuomo rescinded the disastrous March 25, 2020 directive that ordered COVID patients to be placed in nursing homes — without testing — on May 10 of that year, after thousands of New Yorkers were admitted or readmitted to nursing homes.
His apparent remarks, included in the subcommittee’s filing, deflect responsibility for the mandate itself, with one claiming his administration only learned in May that “asymptomatic people can infect others. By this time, however, the disease was already in nursing homes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged the risk of asymptomatic spread six days earlier, even though news outlets had been reporting on the phenomenon since early April.
In a one-page draft, Cuomo claimed to have changed the phrase “neither CDC guidelines nor state directive mandated” to “neither CDC guidelines nor state directed.”
Another purported governor’s memo crossed out the word “death” and replaced it with the approximate timeline it takes for infections to become fatal.
Cuomo also directed staff to have nursing home deaths in neighboring states “compared to New York,” using the reduced number of nursing home deaths alone.
“New York is 6,600?” he wrote in the margins of a page draft — but more than 9,000 died, including those in hospitals. The final report listed 6,432.
Farrah Kennedy, a former senior Cuomo staffer, said in a transcribed interview with the House COVID panel earlier this month that she recognized Cuomo’s handwriting and “often” had to decipher and transcribe it.
Former Cuomo aides Melissa DeRosa and Jim Malatras and New York Department of Financial Services Deputy Chief Garrett Rhodes previously told the subcommittee in interviews that a June 7, 2020 email chain worrying about the number of deaths, became a “major failure in the history books,” probably authored by the then-governor through his secretary, Stephanie Benton.
Other emails unsealed by the committee also show an Executive House staff member wrote in an email chain dated June 28, 2020 that “the governor has passed on the edits to the version you asked me to give him.”
“On closer inspection, these are not edits I can make,” replied another staff member. “Governor’s edits attached.”
New emails unsealed by the subcommittee reveal that Cuomo’s office sought guidance from Northwell Health CEO Michael Dowling and Kenneth Raske, president and CEO of the Greater New York Hospital Association.
“Take the Harvard guy[,] Dowling[,] and Ken Davis [sic] to be experts in “peer review” of the report. Give them the draft now to study,” reads a June 30, 2020 email written by Benton but dictated by Cuomo, according to a former official.
“Ken Raske’s team and mine can do a complete rewrite [of the Executive Summary] if you like,” Dowling responded in an email two days later.
“The documents prove that Mr. Cuomo’s testimony was false,” Wenstrup wrote in a signed cover letter, also obtained by The Post, that must accompany the criminal referral.
The subcommittee in September hit Cuomo’s successor as governor, Kathy Hochul, with a subpoena to turn over relevant documents — but a whistleblower ended up providing them instead.
An impeachment report cited in the filing and prepared by the New York State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee also found evidence that Cuomo prompted, reviewed and edited drafts of the report to “combat criticism” and defend his nursing order home.
“Mr. Cuomo has no valid legal defense,” the subcommittee’s criminal referral concluded. “Mr. Cuomo did not recant or correct his false statements during his June 11 transcribed interview, despite being given the opportunity to do so, or during the September 10 subcommittee hearing.”
“The facts, evidence and precedent suggest that the Department of Justice should proceed to bring criminal charges against Mr. Cuomo under 18 USC § 1001 for false statements,” he concluded.
“This is a taxpayer-funded farce and an illegal use of congressional investigative powers,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi responded in a statement. “Commission boards … know there is no basis for this primary [MAGA] exercise and affirmatively chose to act unethically to help their masters score cheap political points. Looking forward to Rep. [Elise] Stefanik and [Nicole] Malliotakis and the committee’s advisers must be held accountable for their conduct before the DoJ.”
Trump ally Roger Stone was the most recent figure to be prosecuted under the same federal law for making false statements to the House Intelligence Committee as part of its investigation into ties between the former president’s 2016 campaign and Russia.