GOP-led House panel to refer former NY Gov. Cuomo to DOJ for potential prosecution over report on Covid nursing home deaths

By CNN Newsource

Published October 30, 2024 6:29 PM

By Jake Tapper and Gregory Krieg, CNN

(CNN) — The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Thursday morning will send a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland referring a potential criminal case involving former New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the Department of Justice, alleging he lied to Congress.

At issue is Cuomo’s truthfulness regarding his role in the writing and review of a state health department report from June 2020 that underestimated the nursing home death count by nearly half.

A Cuomo administration advisory sent out in March 2020 barred nursing homes from rejecting patients solely on the basis of a Covid-19 diagnosis. Subcommittee chairman Rep. Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, has alleged the former governor’s “misguided decision effectively admitted thousands of COVID-19 positive patients into nursing homes, causing predictable but deadly consequences for New York’s most vulnerable.”

Earlier Wednesday, Cuomo’s legal team filed a referral letter to the Justice Department requesting they investigate an alleged abuse of power by the select committee, with a particular focus on Wenstrup, whom they claim to be in cahoots with a Fox News personality and her husband, who is part of a separate Covid-related lawsuit against the former governor.

Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said the GOP-led committee was engaged in a “pre-election Maga exercise and affirmatively chose to act unethically in order to help their masters score cheap political points.”

“This is a joke,” Azzopardi said of the testimony in question. “The Governor said he didn’t recall because he didn’t recall.”

Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic has come under stricter scrutiny in recent years. After reporting first surfaced that his administration had misled the public about the death toll, officials in New York began investigations.

In January 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a report stating Covid-19 deaths among residents of nursing homes had been undercounted by approximately 50%. The health department had skewed the numbers by omitting in their count deaths that occurred after a patient was transported to a hospital.

The report preliminarily concluded that deaths were underreported based on a survey of 62 nursing homes, roughly a 10% sample of total facilities across the state. James’ report detailed one facility where deaths were underreported to the Department of Health by as many as 29 deaths.

The expected criminal referral is based partly on testimony by Cuomo’s former executive assistant Farrah Kennedy, who wrote emails in June 2020 to then-senior staff of Cuomo offering edits to the report and rewriting parts of it. A June 28, 2020, email she sent was titled “Edits to nursing home doc.” Cuomo denied the edits were his, but Kennedy told the subcommittee, “I believe this to be his handwriting.”

Cuomo’s allegedly “false statements,” the subcommittee said in a letter obtained by CNN, were made during a June 11 transcribed interview and related to “his involvement in and knowledge of the drafting of the July 6 Report.”

“As explained in the attached referral,” the subcommittee letter signed by Wenstrup states, “Mr. Cuomo made multiple criminally false statements, including that he was neither involved in the drafting nor the review of the July 6 Report.”

Cuomo, according to the letter, “also testified that he did not have any discussions about the July 6 Report being peer reviewed” and that he didn’t know whether the report was to be reviewed by individuals not in the department of health.

The subcommittee says that documents show all of those statements to be false. The committee says Cuomo told the falsehoods in “what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability.”