16 April 2021: Team Cuomo Using Probes Into Its Scandals To Stonewall Requests for Public Information

Cuomo's office refuses to disclose its exchanges with Justice Department

This report indicates the Cuomo administration is using the investigations into Governor Cuomo and other officials as a shield to prevent their having to comply with New York's Freedom Of Information Law (FOIL) requests from the public and from news organizations:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's office is refusing to make public its correspondence with the U.S. Justice Department related to the administration's handling of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities during the coronavirus pandemic.

The correspondence sought by the Times Union was triggered, in part, by an Aug. 26 letter to Cuomo from the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division that sought a trove of records from the administration regarding the relatively small number of public nursing homes in New York, including "all state-issued guidance, directives, advisories, or executive orders regarding admission of persons to public nursing homes ... as well as the dates each such document was in effect."...

In a letter this week, the governor's office denied the newspaper's request for copies of its correspondence with the Justice Department — which Cuomo had earlier suggested might be released — by asserting those records are exempt from disclosure because they were "compiled for law enforcement purposes" and the disclosure "would ... interfere with law enforcement investigations."

And if that doesn't take the cake for cynical hypocrisy from Governor Cuomo, whose pandemic "leadership" book proclaims the importance of transparency, there's this bit of analysis in the article:

It's unclear how the Cuomo administration's correspondence with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division constitutes records "compiled for law enforcement purposes."

In its denial letter, the governor's office also argued that portions of the records are exempt from disclosure because their release "would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

If that stonewalling tactic sounds familiar, it is because New York Department of Health Commissioner Howard Zucker made a nearly identical claim to block FOIL requests for numerical nursing home death data by news organizations on 8 April 2020. We've inserted an entry for that date on this topic into the timeline.

That episode of Cuomo administration stonewalling only stopped after 3 February 2021, when a state judge ruled against Cuomo administration in a lawsuit against it that was filed under the state's Freedom Of Information Law and ordered the administration to end its stonewalling of releasing data on nursing home resident deaths.