WASHINGTON — House Republicans have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for 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 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) had acknowledged the risk of asymptomatic spread six days earlier — but media outlets had been reporting on the possibility of such infections since early April.
Cuomo had filed his own request for former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to charge ex-House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) for “colluding” with the husband of Fox News weather forecaster Janice Dean to suggest charges as well as breaking “the principles of federalism” by launching an investigation of a state agency.
“This interrogation far exceeded the Subcommittee’s jurisdiction and appears to have been an improper effort to advantage the interests of private litigants against Governor Cuomo, warranting investigation by the Department of Justice,” read the Oct. 30, 2024, letter from Cuomo’s attorneys, sent the same day as Wenstrup’s referral.
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.”
The Post has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
“The committee counsels … know there is no basis for this pre-election [MAGA] exercise and affirmatively chose to act unethically in order to help their masters score cheap political points,” Azzopardi said in October.
In a June 11 transcribed interview with the House COVID subcommittee, Cuomo said that he had not drafted, reviewed, discussed or consulted people for “peer-review” on the July 2020 nursing home report, which was published by the New York State Department of Health.
“I did not. Maybe it was in the inbox, but I did not,” he told lawmakers, adding that he did not “recall” even seeing the July 2020 nursing home report before its publication.
Emails obtained by subcommittee staff, however, show that Cuomo aides discussed his participation in the drafting of the audit — and the former governor’s own handwritten edits were also submitted as evidence to the DOJ.
Those edits included a note stating that by the date the nursing home mandate was rescinded “the disease was already in the nursing homes” — and crossing out the word “death” to replace it with the approximate timeline it took for infections to become fatalities, among others.
“New York is 6,600?” Cuomo scrawled in the margins of one draft page — despite more than 9,000 perishing when counting those who were in hospitals. The final report cited just 6,432 fatalities.
Ex-Cuomo staffer Farrah Kennedy told the House subcommittee in a transcribed interview last October that she recognized Cuomo’s handwriting and “often” had to decipher and transcribe it.
Other gubernatorial aides such as Melissa DeRosa and Jim Malatras, along with New York Department of Financial Services deputy superintendent Gareth Rhodes, said in similar interviews that a June 7, 2020, email chain worrying about the death count becoming a “great debacle in the history books,” was most likely dictated by Cuomo to his then-secretary Stephanie Benton.
“Documents prove Mr. Cuomo’s testimony to be false,” Wenstrup had written in his signed cover letter to Garland.
The House Republican probe followed an earlier impeachment report written up by the New York State Assembly Judiciary Committee that found corroborating evidence of Cuomo meddling in the nursing home report to “combat criticism” and defend his initial March 25, 2020, order.
