23 July 2021: Biden DOJ Halts Civil Rights Probe of New York COVID Nursing Homes Deaths

DOJ declines to investigate New York's public nursing facilities

As expected, the Biden-Harris administration's Department of Justice dropped its civil rights probe into excess COVID nursing home deaths in New York. At this writing, only the status of the DOJ's probe of New Jersey's COVID nursing home deaths remains uncertain, but given the free pass now being issued to New York's Cuomo administration, the announcement that case will be dropped should soon follow.

This report confirms the Cuomo administration remains under investigation for violations of other federal statutes with respect to its COVID nursing homes scandals.

Republicans expressed outrage on Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice will not open an investigation into the policies by New York and several other states that spurred nursing homes to take in residents who were being discharged from hospitals but still testing positive for COVID-19.

But the decision by the Justice Department's civil division does not signal an end to an ongoing criminal investigation of Gov, Andrew M. Cuomo's administration by the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn, which is also examining the state's nursing home policies and the number of fatalities in those facilities that had been reported by state officials.

In a letter on Friday to U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, the House's ranking Republican member on the Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, an attorney with the Justice Department's Legislative Affairs Office said they had declined to open an investigation under Civil Rights statutes related to any public nursing facilities in New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan and New Jersey.

There are, however, only a handful of publicly run nursing homes in New York — a fact that was pointed out when DOJ officials initially sent a letter to New York officials last summer seeking data and information specific to those facilities.

This report also indicates a high likelihood that the Biden administration's DOJ bent over backward to look the other way at excess COVID deaths in states that adopted similar COVID patient admission policies as the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive:

U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, issued a statement Friday afternoon calling the civil unit's decision a "gross miscarriage of justice" and noting the New York delegation's request for a broader investigation had been rejected.

“This decision from President Biden’s Department of Justice makes President Biden complicit in the criminal corruption scandal and cover up of deaths of thousands of vulnerable seniors," Stefanik said. “New Yorkers deserve answers and accountability. I was the first member of Congress to call for an investigation into Gov. Cuomo’s corrupt criminal cover-up and I will continue to fight for the families who lost loved ones because of the cruelty and corruption of our governor.

The report continues to observe the Cuomo administration has used the excuse of the federal investigation to deny providing state government data and documents to media outlets seeking to compel the state to provide them under New York's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In April, Cuomo's office, citing ongoing investigations, rejected a request by the Times Union to make public its correspondence with the 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, 2020, 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."

The Cuomo administration will likely continue using the excuse of the ongoing federal investigations being conducted by the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn to avoid complying with the media's FOIA requests to release public information on the correspondence between state government officials and federal government officials.