2 June 2021: Cuomo Administration To Spend Millions of Taxpayer Dollars Defending Itself

$2.5M taxpayer contract for Cuomo nursing home probe

The Cuomo administration will spend $2,500,000 ($2.5 million) of New York taxpayer dollars to defend itself from a federal investigation of its COVID nursing home deaths scandals.

Taxpayers will spend up to $2.5 million defending Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office in a federal investigation examining its alleged suppression of figures showing the true number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19.

That’s according to OpenBookNY.com, a website maintained by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office, which discloses information about state contracts. The website states that the Executive Chamber’s $2.5 million contract for legal services with the law firm Morvillo Abramowitz was “approved and filed” on April 27.

A copy of the contract, provided by DiNapoli's office, says the firm will charge up to $937.50 an hour for work performed by law firm partner Elkan Abramowitz. The contract says the rates are "significantly discounted" from standard hourly rates: By 25 percent for Abramowitz and 15 percent for other attorneys.

Abramowitz' firm is just one of four law firms that have been retained by the Cuomo administration. It is the first however for which the cost of defending Governor Cuomo's from facing consequences in his multiple scandals has been made public.

By contrast, the New York Assembly's impeachment probe has allocated $250,000 to investigate every single one of Governor Cuomo's multiple scandals - not just the administration's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. The order of magnitude difference is one reason the Assembly's impeachment probe has become widely considered to be a sham.