House GOP seeks DOJ criminal charges for Cuomo in nursing home death scandal

Select subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland Wednesday obtained by the Washington Examiner calling for Cuomo to be investigated by the Department of Justice for hiding his involvement with the New York State Department of Health report regarding the number of seniors who died due to state requirements for nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients.

“Mr. Cuomo provided false statements to the Select Subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability,” Wenstrup wrote to Garland. 

The subcommittee confirmed for the Washington Examiner that their referral to the Justice Department was not in relation to the initial drafting of the directive of March 25, 2020, that mandated that nursing homes could not deny admittance based upon COVID-19 diagnosis. 

But, in its referral to the DOJ,  the subcommittee submitted over 100 pages of documentation demonstrating that Cuomo made “criminally false statements” to Congress about his role in the report estimating the number of deaths in connection to the policy, published on July 6, 2020. 

Initial drafts of the July 6 NYSDOH report on the nursing home directive estimated the number of nursing home-related deaths to be less than 10,000, but evidence obtained through multiple investigations indicates that there may have been as many as 15,000 deaths as a result of the mandatory admittance policy. 

Cuomo repeatedly told the subcommittee during his transcribed interview in June and his public hearing in July that he was not involved in drafting the mandatory nursing home admittance policy or the July 6 report that undercounted the number of deaths. 

Rich Azzopardi, Cuomo’s publicist, told the Washington Examiner that the referral is nothing more than a “taxpayer-funded farce” and an “illegal use of Congress.”

“This is a joke – the Governor said he didn’t recall because he didn’t recall,” said Azzopardi. “The committee lied in their referral just as they have been lying to the public and the press.”

But testimony from New York Executive Chamber staff, including senior adviser Jim Malatras and executive assistant Farrah Kennedy, indicate that Cuomo was intimately involved in drafting the July 6 report, revising significant sections of the report to downplay the severity of the death toll caused by the nursing home policy. 

More than 20 pages of the document submitted to Garland contain scanned pages of the initial drafts of the July 6 report with handwritten notes, identified by Kennedy as Cuomo’s handwriting. 

Kennedy told the subcommittee during a voluntary transcribed interview on Oct. 8 that executive assistants were often asked to decipher Cuomo’s handwriting, as Cuomo preferred to make changes to documents by hand rather than electronically. 

Azzopardi told the Washington Examiner that Cuomo’s attorney sent a letter to Wenstrup and the counsel for the subcommittee on October 18, indicating that Cuomo was not presented with the hand-edited documents that the subcommittee used as the basis of its referral to the DOJ. 

On Wednesday afternoon, Cuomo’s attorney filed their own criminal referral against the select subcommittee. 

“The committee counsels Mr. [Mitchell] Benzine and Mr. [Jack] Emmer know there is no basis for this pre-election Maga exercise and affirmatively chose to act unethically in order to help their masters score cheap political points,” Azzopardi told the Washington Examiner. “We look forward to Rep. Stefanik and Malliotakis and the committee counsels having to answer for their conduct before the DoJ.”

Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) have been two of the most vocal representatives from New York during the subcommittee’s investigation into Cuomo.

Wenstrup’s referral to Garland also referenced an email sent from Stephanie Benton, another executive assistant, on June 7 about the nursing home deaths report, which at that time was still in draft status. 

The email said that the mandatory admittance policy was “going to be a great debacle in the history books” and asked “Don’t u see how bad this is? Or do we admit error and give up?”

According to Kennedy, Cuomo would frequently stand over the shoulder of executive assistants in the governor’s office as he dictated to them what to type.

Cuomo’s secretary, Melissa DeRosa, confirmed for the subcommittee that the multiple Executive Chamber staff members who received the email understood the message to be directly from Cuomo, who DeRosa said would “often dictate emails to Stephanie” and other assistants. 

Recipients of the June email included Malatras, state legal counsel Gareth Rhodes, and NYSDOH Commissioner Howard Zucker.

Cuomo’s press representative did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.

Last month, the select subcommittee accused Cuomo of intimidating Malatras, who at that point in the investigation was the only witness to contradict Cuomo’s denials of involvement in drafting the report. 

Malatras told the subcommittee that Cuomo contacted him several times during the course of the subcommittee’s investigation after the two had not spoken for several years. Malatras said the communications from Cuomo made him feel “uncomfortable.” 

The subcommittee’s report to Garland notes that the DOJ has in the past prosecuted witnesses for making false statements to congressional committees, referencing the prosecution of Roger Stone in 2019 regarding Russian influence in the 2016 election.

At this point, it is unclear how the relationship between Cuomo and Garland could affect the likelihood of a DOJ investigation into the former governor’s cover-up.

Cuomo, who resigned from office in 2021, requested a meeting with Garland in February to discuss a settlement agreement between the DOJ and the state of New York regarding the investigation into Cuomo’s alleged sexual harassment of at least 13 women. 

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In the request to Garland, Cuomo’s legal team outlined that there had been “seemingly no actual investigation” into the sexual harassment case against Cuomo, saying that the former governor had not been interviewed by a DOJ representative.The DOJ did not respond to the Washington Examiner regarding whether or not the meeting between Garland and Cuomo took place.