Facing mounting criticism over his administration’s handling of nursing home deaths during the pandemic, Governor Andrew Cuomo spent more than twenty minutes of his press briefing Wednesday publicly lashing out at a state lawmaker who had faulted him for mishandling the crisis.
“If you attack my integrity and my administration's integrity, am I going to fail to respond? No. No,” Cuomo said, accusing Queens State Assemblymember Ron Kim of a “pay to play” scheme involving nail salon owners. The governor based his claims on a New York Times story from 2015 that cited Kim’s abrupt change from supporting a bill to improve safety conditions for nail salon workers, to opposing it.
“I do believe Ron Kim acted unethically, if not illegally. I do think he has a continuing racket where he raises money from the owners of salons who opposed the salon bill. I believe that,” Cuomo said.
Privately, Cuomo called Kim last week and threatened to “destroy” him, the Assemblymember confirmed to Gothamist. That phone call, and the subsequent calls and texts from the governor’s staff, were first reported by the Times. [Update below: Kim spoke to Gothamist/WNYC at length about this phone call. Scroll down for more.]
A spokesman for the Governor denied Cuomo had threatened to destroy Kim, in a statement provided to CNN. Kim told the Times that he has directed further calls from the governor to include his attorney
Kim, whose uncle died of COVID in a Flushing nursing home last spring, has been a vocal critic of the Governor’s handling of the crisis for months, and has also pushed for the full removal of a provision passed in the budget last spring that shielded nursing homes from liability for COVID-19 deaths during the pandemic’s early months. The immunity provisions were drafted in consultation with the health care industry, which has poured campaign donations into Albany for years.
“The Governor can personally attack me all he wants in an effort to distract us from his incompetent management; but these facts are not going away because they are the facts and are unacceptable,” Kim said in a statement after the governor’s briefing. “As legislators we have a duty to uncover the truth behind nursing home deaths and the Governor’s explanation about this do not add up.”
The threats from Cuomo came after Kim had spoken to the New York Post about a conversation between Cuomo’s top aide Melissa DeRosa and democratic lawmakers where she admitted the state withheld nursing home data from legislators to shield it from a federal probe.
Cuomo’s public remarks also came a day after the Post then reported on a letter circulated by state legislators asking lawmakers to support a bill to revoke the governor’s emergency powers. The letter was signed by Kim and eight other lawmakers.
“It is now unambiguously clear that this governor has engaged in an intentional obstruction of justice as outlined in Title 18, Chapter 73 of the United States Code,” the letter reads. “We implore you to set aside any concerns of loyalty or disloyalty to this Governor, or that this matter is politicized.”
According to the letter, if lawmakers don’t revoke the Governor’s emergency powers, and prepare to override a veto, and even potentially start impeachment proceedings against the Governor, “than we too shall be complicit along with this administration in the obstruction of justice and conscious omission of nursing home deaths data.”
Listen to Gwynne Hogan discuss Cuomo‘s commentary with WNYC’s Sean Carlson:
Until late January, the state had been withholding the true death toll inside nursing homes because they were not including nursing home residents who died in hospitals, something experts say every other state in the country was doing. Now the state reports more than 15,000 deaths in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and adult care centers, since the start of the pandemic, which includes 5,744 deaths of people in hospitals.
A scathing Attorney General report on nursing homes, followed by a court order to release information on nursing deaths inside the facilities, has created pressure on lawmakers to vote to remove the emergency powers the legislature granted the Governor at the start of the pandemic.
The pressure also forced the governor to acknowledge the “void” his administration created by not turning over the data sooner.
While Cuomo has said he regrets creating this “void,” he claimed that the criticism of his handling of the pandemic amounted to conspiracy theories, or politically motivated attacks from Republicans and conservative outlets like the New York Post.
“I was a little busy, actually fighting a pandemic, to tamp down every false political statement and every crazy Twitter allegation,” Cuomo said on Wednesday’s call.
Some lawmakers quickly came to Kim’s defense, including Brooklyn Assemblymember Emily Gallagher, who also signed onto the letter and called Cuomo’s comments about Kim a deflection.
“He’s trying to get people to look somewhere else and he’s willing to go to great lengths to do it,” she said. “Ron Kim has incredible integrity and has always pushed for accountability and transparency and I know that he is under no illusions that ...comes with [at a] personal cost.”
Bronx Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie addressed the governor's comments indirectly:
[UPDATE / 5:14 p.m.] In a conversation with Gothamist/WNYC after this story was published, Assemblymember Ron Kim explained the circumstances behind Governor Cuomo’s threatening phone call.
Last Thursday, Kim said he spoke to the New York Post for a story about Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, who had called Kim and other lawmakers and admitted that the administration “froze” and failed to turn over nursing home data in a timely fashion. When the story came out, Kim said he felt bad for DeRosa, and tried to retract his comments.
“I think she made a mistake, she told the truth, but she didn’t mean to tell the truth. But it was the governor. The governor should take responsibility, not her. Just as I was thinking, in that moment, the governor called,” Kim said.
“It was a ten minute, one-sided, screaming and yelling, where I felt threatened, that if I didn’t act in a certain way, to issue a statement, not tomorrow, tonight in his own words, that there would be retribution against me. Specifically, he said, he will go out and publicly ruin me,” Kim said. “I’d never experienced his anger and wrath. And he bit his tongue, he said, for months about me.”
Kim said his wife, hearing the conversation, started “turning pale,” and later expressed anger for drawing the ire of the most powerful person in New York.
“It’s Andrew Cuomo. I’m a nobody from Flushing. And he’s bashing me for ten minutes,” Kim explained. “I think that would scare anybody when they’re making threats to ruin your livelihood.”
At 4:12 p.m. on Wednesday, Rich Azzopardi, a senior advisor to the governor, issued a blistering statement about Kim’s account of the phone call.
"Mr. Kim is lying about his conversation with Governor Cuomo Thursday night. I know because I was one of three other people in the room when the phone call occurred. At no time did anyone threaten to 'destroy' anyone with their 'wrath' nor engage in a 'coverup,'” Azzopardi said. “That's beyond the pale and is unfortunately part of a years-long pattern of lies by Mr. Kim against this administration.”
Azzopardi restated the governor’s charges against Kim about the nail salon industry, and then defended the administration’s handling of the nursing home issue.
"We do agree that we did not provide enough public information quickly enough which created a void for conspiracy theories to flourish. We accept responsibility for creating the void and in a perfect world, the conspiracy theorists would accept responsibility also,” Azzopardi said.
The Governor’s Office also released comments that Kim made during the initial briefing that DeRosa had with lawmakers, in which he praised the administration, in an apparent effort to discredit him.
But those comments also include Kim’s call for transparency and accountability from the Cuomo administration: “I know this is something that is a sensitive issue, and no one wants to talk about it, but I think the families, the public I think just recognize, appreciate some sort of honesty, but just, just the recognition of their pain, and I think some sort of contriteness from the Administration would go a very long way.”
The governor's office did not immediately respond to a request to release the entire transcript of that call.
Kim told Gothamist/WNYC that he drafted a letter to his colleagues, urging them to rescind the governor’s emergency powers, after watching the Governor’s press conference on Monday.
“He’s trying to implicate the Senate, the Assembly. He’s not addressing what happened and what Melissa said. He’s just trying to rope in all of us into what he did, which is cover up nursing homes on purpose,” Kim said.
“Legal immunity is clearly a sensitive issue for him, that’s what we should be focused on. Not anything else. Governor, why did you give legal immunity to nursing homes? Who brought this to you?”
