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.