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republican led The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will send a letter Thursday morning to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland calling on the Justice Department to refer a possible criminal case involving former Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo over allegations that he lied to Congress.
At issue is Cuomo's veracity regarding his role in writing and reviewing a June 2020 state health department report that underestimated the death toll in nursing homes by nearly half.
An advisory from the Cuomo administration sent in March 2020 barred nursing homes from rejecting patients based solely on a COVID-19 diagnosis. Subcommittee Chairman Representative Brad Wenstrup, an Ohio Republican, has alleged that the former governor's “misguided decision effectively admitted thousands of COVID-19 positive patients into nursing homes, leaving New Yorkers with the most vulnerable.” Had predictable but fatal consequences.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Cuomo's legal team filed a referral letter to the Justice Department requesting that they investigate alleged abuses of power by the select committee, with a particular focus on Wenstrup, whom they claim That he's hooking up with a Fox News personality and her husband. Which is part of a separate Covid-related lawsuit against the former governor.
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said the GOP-led committee “engaged in pre-election MAGA exercises and made an affirmative decision to act unethically to help their masters score cheap political points.”
“It's a joke,” Azzopardi said of the testimony in question. “The governor said he didn't remember because he didn't remember.”
Cuomo's handling of the pandemic has come under intense scrutiny in recent years. After reports first surfaced that his administration had misled the public about the death toll, officials in New York launched an investigation.
In January 2021, New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report stating that the number of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents was down by nearly 50%. The Health Department had messed up the numbers by excluding deaths that occurred after a patient was taken to hospital.
The report preliminary concluded that deaths were underreported based on a survey of 62 nursing homes, which is about a 10% sample of total facilities statewide. James' report detailed a facility where 29 deaths were under-reported to the health department.
The expected criminal referral is based partly on the testimony of Cuomo's former executive assistant Farrah Kennedy, who wrote an email to Cuomo's then-senior staff in June 2020 offering to edit the report and rewrite parts of it. The email they sent on June 28, 2020, was titled “Editing to Nursing Home Document.” Cuomo denied that the edits were his, but Kennedy told the subcommittee, “I believe it is his handwriting.”
In a letter obtained by CNN, the subcommittee said Cuomo's alleged “false statements” were made during a June 11 written interview and related to “his involvement in and knowledge of the drafting of the July 6 report.”
“As stated in the attached referral,” the subcommittee letter said, signed by Wenstrup, “Mr.” Cuomo made several criminally false statements, including that he was neither involved in the drafting nor the review of the July 6 report.
According to the letter, Cuomo “also testified that he had no discussion about peer review of the July 6 report” and that he did not know that the report was to be reviewed by individuals who are not at the Health Department. .
The subcommittee says the documents show all of those statements to be false. The committee says Cuomo lied in “a conscious, deliberate effort to shield himself from accountability.”