11 June 2024: Cuomo Testifies He Was Unaware of Nursing Home Order His Office Edited

Cuomo testifies he was unaware of nursing home order his office edited

The revelation that former New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo sought to blame an unknown state government or political staffer for drafting the deadly 25 March 2020 directive he and former New York Public Health Commissioner Howard Zucker approved, implemented, and enforced with tragic consequences is one that deserves much more attention. In the aftermath of Cuomo's 11 June 2024 testimony before a select subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, we sought out any additional reporting that might provide more information about his testimony under oath.

Here is the first of two excerpts from the Albany Times-Union's coverage, which summarizes Cuomo's allegation:

Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday told a congressional subcommittee that he was unaware of a controversial directive that had been issued by the state Department of Health in March 2020 directing nursing homes to accept residents even if they had tested positive for COVID-19.

Cuomo’s statement about his lack of knowledge of the directive was made to members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which has been probing New York’s handling of the health crisis.

The former governor’s assertion — that he was unaware of a directive that had been issued to ease pressure on New York hospitals as they became overwhelmed with patients — echoes public statements he made a month later, in April 2020, when he claimed during a news conference that he was not familiar with the advisory.

Sources familiar with a now-closed FBI investigation of the Cuomo administration’s decision to issue that directive said that a draft was edited for more than two days by the Health Department and members of the governor’s office before it was issued on March 25, 2020. Cuomo’s testimony that he was unaware of the directive — even nearly four weeks later — means that he was not briefed on or otherwise part of the discussions of one of the most consequential decisions that was made at the time to deal with hospitals potentially running out of bed space.

There has been a running consideration of whether Cuomo's directive and the actions to implement it constitutes either criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter.

That's the background. In the second excerpt, a former state government official has been identified as the person who potentially drafted Cuomo's ill-fated directive, though they firmly deny it and Cuomo's spokesperson later sought to muddy the waters as to who was responsble for drafting the deadly directive:

In addition, former Health Department officials interviewed in that federal investigation, which was headed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn, told the FBI that Cuomo was frequently on their calls with his coronavirus task force, but would usually only listen without speaking. At least one of those former officials told the FBI that Larry Schwartz, a former secretary to the governor who was brought back to help with the public health response, had a hand in editing drafts of the nursing home advisory.

Schwartz on Tuesday said the allegation that he edited or reviewed a draft of the nursing home directive “is false.”

“I don’t know who said that, or who told the FBI that; that is factually an inaccurate statement. I had nothing to do with that. Zero,” Schwartz said. “I had zero to do with anything involving nursing home policies.”

After this story was published online, Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, said there was a distinction between staff of the governor’s office and members of the coronavirus task force, who were volunteers.

The governor had announced Schwartz’s return to service on March 23, 2020 — the same day early drafts of the advisory began being exchanged between the governor’s office and the Health Department. The announcement of Schwartz’s appointment to the task force said he would be tasked with “helping the state acquire health care equipment and supplies and increasing New York’s hospital surge capacity.”

Cuomo's reported claims indicate he is continuing to follow a strategy of attempting to pass the buck to avoid legal and criminal consequences in blaming an unknown, unidentified staffer or volunteer for his actions as governor. Even if true, we think that may further implicate Cuomo in those consequences. If the policy had been produced as he describes, Cuomo could easily have acknowledged the policy was flawed and changed course to correct it within a matter of days, with little to no political penalty.

But that's not what happened, is it? Even though Cuomo fully possessed the ability to reverse course at any times his deadly directive remained in effect, he refused to alter it for weeks. As a capable lawyer might argue, that Cuomo did not represents a true failure of leadership.

This entry was added to the timeline on 13 June 2024.

11 June 2024: Cuomo Testimony Short of Remorse for Actions

Cuomo grilled by House panel over NY’s COVID nursing-home deaths: ‘Don’t see a lot of remorse’

This report covers Andrew M. Cuomo's testimony under oath behind closed doors to a U.S. Congressional select subcommittee investigating the consequences of Cuomo's policy decisions while serving as New York's state governor during 2020's coronavirus pandemic, including his deadly 25 March 2020 directive. According to this report, the testimony was primarily self-serving:

A defiant former Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday blamed everyone but himself for New York’s deadly COVID nursing-home debacle while being grilled by lawmakers on Capitol Hill, GOP pols said.

“I don’t see a lot of remorse. He is deflecting,” said Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), who is one of several doctors serving on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic as it investigates the former governor’s conduct at the closed-door hearing.

Cuomo allegedly refused to shake the hand of House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik of New York at one point but was otherwise very cordial, sources and lawmakers said — and when asked by The Post how he was feeling heading into the session, replied, “Cool dude, loose mood, always.”

Republican lawmakers exiting the questioning said Cuomo was still trying to frame the congressional inquiry as political and did not provide any noteworthy new context to the panel, instead keeping to what he wrote in his related book, a gushing story of his administration’s response to the horrific crisis.

There was however a confirmation about the nature of Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive that undermines claims Cuomo had previously made:

In his opening statement, Cuomo had denied accusations of mishandling the COVID response and pointed to federal guidance as having hampered his administration’s response.

But under sharp questioning from Stefanik on Tuesday, Cuomo acknowledged that the order sending infected older people into the nursing homes was a state directive and not a federal mandate from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a source familiar with the exchange told The Post.

There's more, as Cuomo attempted to assign some of the blame for his deadly 25 March 2020 directive to a lower level bureaucrat in the state government, but also continued to claim it followed directions from the federal government:

Cuomo placed partial blame on a professional staff member at the New York Department of Health for drafting it — but by the end of the marathon session told reporters it was the wrong decision.

“If I knew then what I know now, I would have told my Department of health, ‘Don’t listen to the federal government; they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ Because what the facts now show is you know what happened in nursing homes.”

Cuomo's claim was refuted by Representative Susan Molinaro, who continued to describe a motive for Cuomo's subsequent actions:

“They [Cuomo and his then-staff] want to assert that that order is exactly the same as the federal CMS, which it is not,” Molinaro told reporters while the hearing was on a break. “The state order says, ‘You shall take back individuals and you cannot deny them solely on the basis of COVID,’ which left them no option but to accept individuals that we knew would cause risk to the other patients.

“Andrew Cuomo was attempting to shift blame for what was a clear directive,” Molinaro said. “When they identified and knew that the order was causing great loss, they subsequently cooked the books to suggest that the numbers of those who died in nursing homes were much less than we knew.”

There's quite a lot more in the article, much of which repeats Cuomo's claims involving other aspects of how he and his administration implemented its COVID policies that contributed to excess COVID deaths during the 2020 pandemic.

11 June 2024: Cuomo Congressional Testimony on Deadly COVID Directive Taking Place Behind Closed Doors

Ex-New York Gov Andrew Cuomo to face House GOP committee over COVID nursing home deaths

The resigned-in-disgrace former state governor of New York Andrew M. Cuomo delivered testimony under oath behind closed doors to a U.S. Congress select subcommittee on 11 June 2024.

While the content of the arranged testimony will remain under wraps for now, it does mark one of the first attempts to hold Cuomo accountable for the consequences of his deadly 25 March 2020 directive. Here's an excerpt from the article describing what Cuomo faces in the U.S. Congress:

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is paying a visit to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for a closed-door transcribed interview with the House select subcommittee investigating the coronavirus pandemic.

Cuomo's handling of the pandemic as governor has been a significant focus of the panel's – in particular, a March 25, 2020, executive order by the then-governor that restricted nursing homes from refusing to admit or readmit residents "solely based on confirmed or suspect[ed] diagnosis of COVID-19."

"We want to uncover the circumstances that led to this. There has to be some kind of process where this was written up and he signed it. And we want to make sure that something like this is never repeated," subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital. "I'm a physician who happens to care. And I'm concerned for my fellow Americans, especially during a very difficult time in a pandemic. So, who advised such things?"

Wenstrup said committee investigators have "several hours of questions" lined up for the former governor, such as "Why was he spending so much time writing a book while we had a pandemic going on, while we have this nursing home problem?" and "Why did it take him so long to rescind [the executive order] when it became very obvious that this was a bad plan?"

A spokesperson for the committee's Democrat minority told Fox News Digital, "The Select Subcommittee Democrats take seriously any effort to evade transparency and mislead the public and remain committed to the forward-looking work of fortifying infection control and prevention to protect America’s nursing homes residents."

A damning report released in March 2022 by the New York State comptroller found Cuomo's Health Department "was not transparent in its reporting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes" and it "understated the number of deaths at nursing homes by as much as 50%" during some points of the pandemic.

We'll see what other headlines come out from it.

7 June 2024: Cuomo to Testify on NY COVID Nursing Home Policies on 11 June 2024

Cuomo to be questioned by COVID subcommittee for nursing home deaths

Andrew M. Cuomo is scheduled to testify under oath before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives on 11 June 2024. This article gives a preview of some of the questions will be raised with respect to Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive and its consequences.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is slated to appear before Congress on Tuesday in a closed-door interview to answer for the outsize number of nursing home deaths in the Empire State during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic subpoenaed the former governor in March. It set June 11 as the date for testimony after several months of scheduling delays.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), said in a press statement on Friday that it is “well past time for Cuomo to stop dodging accountability” for his nursing home policy in 2020 that required care facilities to accept COVID-positive patients.

“Not only did the former Governor put the elderly in harm’s way, but he also attempted to cover-up his failures by hiding the true nursing home death rate,” Wenstrup said.

Cuomo issued an order on March 25, 2020, that prohibited nursing homes from denying readmission or admission on the basis of a positive COVID test. The former governor has publicly argued even after leaving office that the controversial order followed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidance at the time.

This entry was added to the timeline on 8 June 2024.