Andrew Cuomo – New York’s governor who was once hailed the king of the US Covid-19 response – was facing fresh calls for his removal from office on Friday after new allegations emerged that he and senior staff covered up the extent of the virus deaths in the state’s nursing homes.
The New York Post said it obtained a leaked recording of the governor’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitting to Democrats in private conversations this week that the administration withheld the true data because it feared the Department of Justice would use the figures to pursue complaints of state misconduct.
“Basically, we froze,” the newspaper said DeRosa told the lawmakers, referring to tweets from Donald Trump last August that she said turned the issue of New York’s nursing home deaths “into this giant political football”, and his calls for the justice department to investigate.
“We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”
On Friday, however, New York’s 14 Democratic state senators released a joint statement calling for the repeal of Cuomo’s emergency executive powers to deal with the pandemic. “While Covid-19 has tested the limits of our people and state … it is clear that the expanded emergency powers granted to the governor are no longer appropriate,” they wrote.
It emerged earlier this week that New York’s nursing home coronavirus death toll was far higher than Cuomo’s administration had initially admitted. New figures were released following a court order in response to a freedom of information request by the Empire Center for Public Policy showed a significant rise from about 9,000 to close to 15,000 once the previously omitted deaths of nursing home residents who died in hospitals were factored in.
“Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died,” Cuomo said at a news conference in January after New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, released a damning report stating nursing home deaths were 50% higher than his administration had claimed.
DeRosa’s admission added fuel to growing calls for Cuomo’s resignation, impeachment or removal from office, and on Friday the New York congressman Tom Reed said he would pursue legal action against the governor’s aide.
“I’m going to be looking at filing a personal criminal complaint against this individual today in local law enforcement offices as well as federal offices, because she needs to be arrested today,” he said in an interview with Fox Business.
Other Republicans were quick to attack Cuomo. “If the governor is involved, he should be immediately removed from office,” said Rob Ortt, state senator and minority leader, in a statement.
DeRosa’s admission, he said, “was the latest in a series of disturbing acts of corruption by his administration. Instead of apologizing or providing answers to the thousands of New York families who lost loved ones, the governor’s administration made apologies to politicians behind closed doors for the ‘political inconvenience’ this scandal has caused them.”
Nick Langworthy, the state GOP chair, said: “Andrew Cuomo has abused his power and destroyed the trust placed in the office of governor. Prosecution and impeachment discussions must begin right away,” according to Politico.
New York Democrats are also unhappy with Cuomo, who was on Friday scheduled to be in Washington DC to join a conference with Joe Biden on the Covid-19 American Rescue Plan.
“This is a betrayal of the public trust. There needs to be full accountability for what happened, and the legislature needs to reconsider its broad grant of emergency powers to the governor,” Andrew Gounardes, the Democratic state senator, said on Twitter.
Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the senate majority leader, was equally scathing. “Crucial information should never be withheld from entities that are empowered to pursue oversight,” she said in a statement. “Politics should not be part of this tragic pandemic and our responses to it must be led by policy, not politics.”
On Friday, DeRosa was attempting to downplay the situation, according to the New York Times, claiming that the administration had to temporarily shelve state legislators’ calls for greater transparency over the figures to prioritize demands from the justice department.
“We informed the houses [of the New York legislature] of this at the time. We were comprehensive and transparent in our responses to the DoJ and then had to immediately focus our resources on the second wave and vaccine rollout,” she said in a statement.
New York state had recorded a total Covid-19 death toll of 45,453 by Friday morning, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus database, second in the nation to California (46,022).
The New York health commissioner, Howard Zucker, told lawmakers this week that the number of nursing home residents who had died was 13,297, which rose to 15,049 with the inclusion of deaths from other assisted living or adult care facilities.