During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Andrew M. Cuomo, the pugilistic former governor of New York, was initially hailed as a national model for his leadership of the state’s response.
His televised daily briefings brought acclaim from Americans craving reliable information and a sense of calm that many felt they were not receiving from the White House.
But at a hearing on Tuesday before the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Mr. Cuomo was placed firmly on the defensive.
It was confrontational theater, with Republican representatives including Elise Stefanik of New York and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia hammering him on issues ranging from the state Health Department’s early-pandemic guidance on nursing homes to a former aide in his administration who was recently charged by federal prosecutors with taking payoffs in exchange for actions that benefited the Chinese government.
“You are the former governor of New York State and you will never hold office again,” Ms. Stefanik said at one point.
The hearing comes at a politically significant moment for Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, as he mulls a potential run for mayor of New York City next year or possibly a challenge to his successor, Gov. Kathy Hochul, in 2026.
Throughout the hearing, it was clear that Mr. Cuomo was intent on protecting his reputation, and that the Republican members of the subcommittee were intent on tearing it down.
Many of the subcommittee’s questions focused on the Cuomo administration’s handling of the early days of the pandemic, particularly on efforts to conceal the number of New Yorkers who died in nursing homes and shift blame for the deaths. Guidance from the New York State Department of Health in March 2020 directed nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus.
The elected officials’ questions centered on what Mr. Cuomo knew about this guidance and what role he played in its development.
“Any public official who sought to obscure transparency or mislead the American people during the Covid-19 pandemic should answer to the American public, regardless of political party,” said Representative Raul Ruiz, Democrat of California.
“That is why the former governor and members of his administration faced serious questions from both sides of the aisle,” he added, “about allegations that they misrepresented nursing home fatality data to evade public scrutiny during the closed-door transcribed interviews that led up to this hearing.”
Mr. Cuomo responded that the nursing-homes guidance had conformed with federal guidelines, and disputed that any decisions made by his administration had contributed to more deaths in nursing homes.
Mr. Cuomo and his top aides previously sat for private interviews with the subcommittee, which also reviewed nearly 550,000 pages of documents before issuing a 48-page report earlier this week that was highly critical of elements of New York’s Covid response.
In the days leading up to the hearing, Mr. Cuomo wrote opinion pieces to portray it as a charade cooked up by allies of former President Donald J. Trump. On Tuesday, he stuck with that message, using his opening statement to criticize Mr. Trump for his lack of leadership and misleading and often false statements about the virus.
In contrast, Mr. Cuomo’s daily briefings early in the pandemic resonated with people because, he said, “they got the truth.”
Much of the hearing was dedicated to parsing whose versions of the truth carried more weight.
In July 2020, the state Health Department released a report saying that its nursing-homes directive was not responsible for the more than 13,000 nursing home residents who died from the virus in New York between March 2020 and February 2021.
The House subcommittee found that the state report was “not independently drafted” by the Health Department and had been heavily edited by Mr. Cuomo’s close aides and by the governor himself.
In an earlier interview with the subcommittee, Mr. Cuomo said he did not recall seeing the report before it was released. On Tuesday, he said his team had been working with unreliable data at a chaotic moment in the middle of the pandemic, and had wanted to give numbers that people could trust and then update and explain them later if necessary.
“I was not going to report inaccurate information,” Mr. Cuomo said.
Representative Nicole Malliotakis, another Republican of New York, saw politics and blame-shifting at work. She and Ms. Stefanik grilled Mr. Cuomo on the subject, as the families of men and women who died in nursing homes sat in the committee room watching.
“You’re known to be a micromanager who does briefings every day, ” Ms. Malliotakis said.
“It’s hard to believe that you did not know that this directive of such consequence went out,” she said, later adding, “I’m sorry. You showed no empathy. You showed no remorse. You showed no responsibility for the actions of your administration.”
The subcommittee chairman, Representative Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, said he was issuing new subpoenas for more pertinent documents related to the pandemic from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office. Her press secretary, Avi Small, said the administration intended to “comply with the law in this matter.”
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