House Republicans are calling on Pam Bondi and the DOJ to levy charges against disgraced former Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo for his role in a “calculated cover-up” of NY nursing home deaths during the peak days of the COVID crisis.
They accuse Cuomo of making “criminally false statements” to Congress, citing “overwhelming evidence” that an audit he presided over had low-balled nursing home deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The House Oversight Committee re-upped the criminal referral after then-Attorney General Merrick Garland declined last year to prosecute Cuomo for allegedly triggering, helping to draft, and reviewing a July 6, 2020, report that undercounted the total number of deaths in senior care facilities by 46%.
“Andrew Cuomo is a man with a history of corruption and deceit, now caught red-handed lying to Congress during the Select Subcommittee’s investigation into the COVID-19 nursing home tragedy in New York,” said Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) in a statement.
“This wasn’t a slip-up — it was a calculated cover-up by a man seeking to shield himself from responsibility for the devastating loss of life in New York’s nursing homes.”
Comer demanded that “Cuomo must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law” for lying three times to Congress — a charge that carries a maximum five-year prison sentence for each count — and said his panel would “fully cooperate” with a future DOJ probe of the 67-year-old ex-governor and current mayoral front-runner.
The former Governor’s March 25, 2020, directive forced recovering COVID patients into senior care facilities — without mandated testing to see if they could still infect others. By May 10, when Cuomo revoked the order, thousands of sick New Yorkers had been either admitted or readmitted into nursing homes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged the risk of asymptomatic spread six days earlier, but media outlets have been reporting on the possibility of such infections since early April.
This is not the first time that House Republicans wanted to bring charges against the disgraced governor, however, they suspect they have a better shot under Trump and Bondi’s DOJ than the did under Biden’s and Merrick Garland’s.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the former governor, said in a statement: “This is nothing more than a meritless press release that was nonsense last year and is even more so now.”
“As the DOJ constantly reminds people, this kind of transparent attempt at election interference and law-fare violates their own policies,” Azzopardi added. “Referrals like these — which have been also made against Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton and Anthony Fauci — don’t have to be resubmitted with a new administration, so the only point to doing this is politics.”
