Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) has been referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges by House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Comer accused Cuomo, who is now running for New York City mayor, of making "criminally false statements" about how his state managed nursing homes during the pandemic.
Comer demanded Cuomo be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”
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“Andrew Cuomo is a man with a history of corruption and deceit, now caught red-handed lying to Congress during the Select Subcommittee’s investigation into the COVID-19 nursing home tragedy in New York,” he said. “This wasn’t a slip-up—it was a calculated cover-up by a man seeking to shield himself from responsibility for the devastating loss of life in New York’s nursing homes.”
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Cuomo, told Politico in a statement that Comer wrote "nothing more than a meritless press release that was nonsense last year and is even more so now."
“As the DOJ constantly reminds people, this kind of transparent attempt at election interference and law-fare violates their own policies," Azzopardi said.
Cuomo became a national fixture during the early days of the pandemic in a state that saw more than 800 COVID-19-related deaths a day at one point, and which once considered using military beds to treat patients.
But Cuomo was eventually accused of deliberately underreporting and covering up the actual number of COVID-19-related deaths in state nursing homes. Congressional investigations and House Republicans have said Cuomo and his administration oversaw the drafting, editing, and review of a 2020 state Department of Health report that undercounted nursing home deaths by as much as 46 percent.
They also said he lied to Congress about his role in producing the report and the extent of his knowledge regarding the report's preparation and peer review.