New York’s former Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo has been referred to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for prosecution over his role in the state’s nursing home deaths during the pandemic.
A Republican-led House subcommittee found that Cuomo lied to Congress in an effort to cover up his role in the scandal.
The referral was signed by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), the leader of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The subcommittee accuses Cuomo of engaging in a “conscious, calculated effort” to avoid responsibility for how nursing home deaths were accounted for in early 2020 when the pandemic began.
Cuomo held a behind-closed-doors meeting with the subcommittee.
According to a new report by the New York Times, Cuomo didn’t review a State Health Department report that blamed him for those deaths.
Cuomo reportedly reviewed the reports from his state’s health department and wrote parts of early drafts in emails.
However, the former governor says he doesn’t recollect such a thing.
In a statement, Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi said:
“This taxpayer-funded farce is an illegal use of Congress’s investigative authority.
“The governor said he didn’t recall because he didn’t recall.
“The committee lied in their referral just as they have been lying to the public and the press.”
This comes as Cuomo has surfaced as a top name for next year’s New York City mayoral contest.
It’s unclear whether current Democrat Mayor Eric Adams will run again as he’s recently been indicted by a grand jury on five counts of bribery and corruption.
The charges against Adams include soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.
Cuomo resigned in disgrace as governor in August 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, which he still denies.
The criminal referral by the House subcommittee doesn’t carry water in the legal system, however.
Congress doesn’t have the wherewithal to instruct the Biden-Harris DOJ on what to do with it.
There’s also no indication if the upcoming election will have any bearing on the subcommittee’s referral — regardless of who gains control of Congress or who wins the presidency.
Cuomo’s memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” has been under scrutiny over the last few years.
He was ordered to return $5 million on his payment advance for the piece after a state ethics board declared he used New York’s taxpayer-funded resources to help pen it.
That’s something Cuomo also denied and successfully sued the board for, claiming it was his right to due process.
Cuomo has insisted that information and data regarding Covid deaths during the early stages was unreliable, according to the Times.
He argues that his administration focused on more reliable numbers that people could trust.
In Wenstrup’s letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, he said Cuomo falsely said “he did not have any discussions about the July 6 report being peer-reviewed” and “that he did not know whether the July 6 report was reviewed by persons outside” the State Department of Health.
“Mr. Cuomo provided false statements to the select subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability,” Wenstrup wrote in the referral letter reviewed by the Times.
“The Department of Justice should consider Mr. Cuomo’s prior allegedly wrongful conduct when evaluating whether to charge him for the false statements described.”
Cuomo has accused the subcommittee of misusing government resources to “investigate a matter beyond its jurisdiction, apparently in service of a private lawsuit.”
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