Ex-NY Governor Andrew Cuomo trades barbs with lawmakers over Covid-19 nursing home deaths

WASHINGTON (CN) — Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went back under the congressional microscope Tuesday at a hearing during which he offered a strong rebuke of accusations that his administration was responsible for thousands of nursing home deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s the second time Cuomo, who resigned amid sexual assault allegations in 2021, has spoken to Congress about his handling of the pandemic — he gave closed-door testimony to lawmakers in June following a subpoena.

Members of the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have argued for months that Cuomo and his leadership team directly contributed to the deaths of 13,000 nursing home residents in New York, pointing to March 2020 guidance from the state’s public health department which they argue ordered such facilities to readmit residents who had tested positive for Covid-19.

Data at the time suggested that the directive resulted in increased virus deaths among nursing home residents, particularly in upstate New York.

Lawmakers have also accused the former governor of covering up the true number of nursing home deaths on his watch by, among other things, refusing to report “out-of-facility” deaths — patients who died of the virus while outside a nursing home.

These accusations were laid out again Monday in a report from the House’s Covid-19 panel, and during Tuesday’s hearing, Republicans grilled Cuomo on the findings, framing their probe as an effort to prepare the country to respond to another pandemic.

“It’s important to review the data, actual data, to recognize the dangerous and disastrous consequences of your directive, a directive that goes against medical protocols and is considered by many medial professionals to be malpractice,” said Ohio Representative Brad Wenstrup, the subcommittee’s Republican chairman.

It wasn’t just the GOP that was looking for answers from Cuomo, though. California Representative Raul Ruiz, the top Democrat on the panel, called the New York policy directing nursing homes to readmit sick residents a “misstep.”

Instead of accusing the former governor of wrongdoing, however, Ruiz framed the directive as an earnest effort to relieve the immense strain on hospitals during the early months of the pandemic and pointed out that data demonstrates that the main reason for nursing home deaths across the country was unchecked community spread of Covid-19.

But Cuomo, testifying before the committee Tuesday, took a stronger stance. He painted a picture of a state government that followed federal public health guidelines despite being hamstrung by poor pandemic response from then-President Donald Trump.

The former governor argued that Trump “fabricated” attacks on him and other Democratic governors, including the nursing home scandal, as a diversion from the fact that he had slow-walked the federal government’s initial response to Covid-19.

“This subcommittee, run by Republicans, repeats the Trump lies and deceptions,” Cuomo told lawmakers.

It was the Trump administration’s Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Centers for Disease Control which first said that people sick with Covid-19 could return to nursing homes, Cuomo contended, adding that New York Attorney General Letitia James had already investigated allegations that the state had shirked federal public health guidelines and found “total compliance.”

“All credible studies now say that Covid came into nursing homes through community spread and infected staff, not hospital admissions or readmissions,” the former governor said. “Numbers don’t lie.”

Cuomo also pushed back on claims that his administration intentionally undercounted nursing home Covid-19 deaths, arguing that he and his staff were working “in real time” to respond to the pandemic and that the lack of communication about out-of-facility deaths and other casualty categories came from a desire for accuracy.

“It was very important to me that whatever I said I knew was accurate,” said the former governor, who gained national attention during the early pandemic for his daily televised briefings — which often became a platform for him to take aim at Trump.

“Whereas President Trump would say a different thing every day, I only said what I knew to be a fact, and I was not going to put out a number unless I knew it was true,” Cuomo told lawmakers.

Further, he pointed out that reporting out-of-facility deaths in their own category would not have changed the total number of Covid-19 fatalities he was reporting, arguing that adding that new column would just reallocate casualties reported as hospital deaths to totals for nursing homes.

Throughout Tuesday’s hearing, Cuomo sparred with committee Republicans, including several lawmakers from his home state of New York angling to get their pound of flesh off the former governor.

Cuomo accused Wenstrup and his panel of “deceiving” Trump administration Covid-19 response coordinator Deborah Birx, who testified in 2021 that New York had violated federal guidelines with its nursing home directive.

“You suggested to Dr. Birx that we did not have transmission-based precautions in place,” he told the Ohio Republican. “That was not true.”

Cuomo also got into a heated spat with New York Representative Elise Stefanik, who argued that the “disgraced” former governor had directly signed off on the state executive order establishing the nursing home guidance.

Stefanik, chair of the House Republican caucus, also appeared to suggest that Cuomo and his team chose to obfuscate the number of Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes while he was negotiating an advance payment on a book deal.

The former governor dismissed Stefanik’s line of questioning as “political theater” and again argued that former President Trump had contributed to the country’s Covid-19 death toll by lying about the severity of the pandemic.

“There is a reason why you are the former governor of New York State,” Stefanik seethed in response. “You will never hold elected office again.”

The lawmaker’s comments elicited a round of applause from the gathered audience, prompting Wenstrup to ask for decorum in the chamber.

Still other members of the House committee agreed with Cuomo’s contention that Congress’ focus instead should be on Trump’s pandemic policy.

“I’m appalled by the majority’s decision to evade and bypass the central events of the pandemic for totally political reasons,” said Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin. “The broader and authentic context for this hearing is, of course, the spectacular failure of Donald Trump’s reckless and incompetent pandemic response.”

Cuomo, for his part, concurred.

“I lived this like few others did,” he told Raskin. “I have little doubt that the problem here was what happened with the federal government.”

Follow @BenjaminSWeiss