29 November 2021: Opinion - Hold Cuomo Accountable for NY Nursing Home Deaths and COVID Blood-Money Book

Hold Cuomo accountable for NY nursing home deaths, COVID blood-money book

SI Live's Tom Wrobleski's column argues in favor of state lawmakers doing more to hold Andrew M. Cuomo accountable for the biggest scandals of his governorship. Here's an exerpt that picks up on how interlinked Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals and his pandemic "leadership" book deal are:

Cuomo’s answer should have been quick and to the point: Book? I don’t have time to write a book. I’ve got a major public health crisis to deal with here.

But it apparently didn’t work out that way.

By July 1, Cuomo’s literary agent told Penguin that Cuomo had been working on the book and had written nearly 70,000 words.

Penguin eventually gave Cuomo a $5.1 million advance for the tome, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From The COVID-19 Pandemic.”

Meanwhile, on March 25, a Cuomo edict had forced nursing homes to accept COVID patients, leading to questions about whether the move caused more virus deaths among the elderly.

Attorney General Letitia James would find that the Cuomo administration had undercounted the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50 percent.

And the Assembly report showed that Cuomo was directly involved in editing and reviewing a state Health Department report on COVID cases in nursing homes, issued on July 6, 2020, that looked to shift blame away from the administration.

Four days later, Cuomo and Penguin finalized their book deal.

Talk about blood money.

According to the NY Assembly's impeachment probe report, the book deal provided Andrew M. Cuomo with a guaranteed $5.2 million worth of blood money. That's $80,000 higher than the previously reported figure of $5.12 million for the book contract, but we still haven' seen an accounting for that small percentage difference.