(The Center Square) — A House Republican panel is recommending criminal charges against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, alleging the Democrat made false statements to Congress during his testimony on the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Monday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent a criminal referral letter asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge Cuomo with making false statements to Congress as part of an investigation into his administration’s response to COVID-19 nursing home deaths in New York state.
The panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., called Cuomo a “man with a history of corruption and deceit” and said he was “now caught red-handed lying to Congress” and called for him to “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
“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,” Comer said in a statement. “Let’s be clear: lying to Congress is a federal crime.”
Cuomo was grilled by members of the Republican-controlled Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic during a September hearing when they Cuomo with questions for hours about the controversial March 25, 2020 directive issued by his administration in the early days of the pandemic that required nursing homes and long-term care facilities in New York to admit COVID-19-positive patients.
His directive required nursing homes to begin accepting “medically stable” patients recovering from COVID-19 as they were discharged from hospitals. It was rescinded after several weeks, but Cuomo was widely criticized for contributing to the high death toll in the state’s long-term care facilities.
Cuomo, a Democrat who stepped down from office in 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations, defended himself before the House panel and blasted GOP members for conducting a “partisan” investigation. He pointed out that the DOJ had previously looked at the allegations against him and found no wrongdoing.
The demands to open a new DOJ investigation come as Cuomo is seeking to resurrect his political career with a challenge to incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who is running as an independent. President Donald Trump has praised Adams over the Democrat’s vocal support for his deportation policies.
“This is nothing more than a meritless press release that was nonsense last year and is even more so now,” Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said Monday in a statement. “As the DOJ constantly reminds people, this kind of transparent attempt at election interference and law-fare violates their own policies.”
Cuomo has pointed the blame for the high number of COVID-19 deaths nationwide on Trump, whom he claimed “willfully deceived the American people” during the pandemic.
House Republicans have cited evidence from testimony that Cuomo and his team “made a deliberate decision to exclude scientifically significant nursing home-related COVID-19 deaths from mortality rates” and “heavily edited” New York State Department of Health documents “to shift blame away from Mr. Cuomo and his team.”
Over 80,000 New Yorkers died of COVID-19 from the beginning of the pandemic to May 2023, including 15,000 nursing home residents, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
