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.