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 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 he’s convicted of — and said his panel would “fully cooperate” with a future DOJ probe of the 67-year-old ex-governor.
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 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.
The DOJ referral could prove a stumbling block as Cuomo is currently the odds-on favorite to win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, besting and socialist state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani by 45% to 22%, according to a new poll from the Honan Strategy Group, with current Mayor Eric Adams coming in at just 6%.
The “Luv Guv” 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 spouse of a Fox News weather anchor 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.
The Post reached out to reps for Cuomo for comment. Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for the former governor, previously characterized the referral as “a taxpayer-funded farce and an illegal use of Congress’ investigative authority.”
“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 last 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 members of Congress serving on the panel, 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 included noting that by the date when 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 factoring in those who were in hospitals. The final report cited just 6,432.
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 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 written authored by Cuomo through 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 nursing home order.
