A House subcommittee has referred former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, accusing him of lying to Congress about his involvement in a state Covid report on nursing home deaths.
Mr. Cuomo was accused of engaging in a “conscious, calculated effort” to avoid accountability for his handling of nursing homes where thousands of people died of Covid, according to the referral from the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The referral, which was sent Wednesday night to the Justice Department, was signed by the subcommittee chairman, Representative Brad Wenstrup, Republican of Ohio. No other committee member, including the ranking Democrat, Representative Raul Ruiz of California, signed the referral letter, in a potential sign of political partisanship.
The referral centers on closed-door testimony Mr. Cuomo gave to the committee, when he asserted that he had not reviewed a State Health Department report that deflected blame for the deaths of people in New York nursing homes in early 2020.
The New York Times reported last month that Mr. Cuomo had reviewed the report and had personally written portions of early drafts, according to a review of emails and congressional documents.
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said that the former governor testified that he did not remember having any role in the report, and rejected assertions that Mr. Cuomo had lied.
“This taxpayer-funded farce is an illegal use of Congress’s investigative authority,” Mr. Azzopardi said. “The governor said he didn’t recall because he didn’t recall. The committee lied in their referral just as they have been lying to the public and the press.”
The referral comes at a pivotal moment for Mr. Cuomo, who is widely viewed as a potential and formidable candidate in next year’s New York City mayoral contest, although it is not clear if he will run if Mayor Eric Adams stays in the race.
Mr. Adams was indicted by a federal grand jury on five counts of bribery and corruption, sending New York City into turmoil and creating an opening for Mr. Cuomo, who resigned as governor in August 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations that he denies.
The subcommittee’s criminal referral of Mr. Cuomo carries no legal weight; Congress has no enforcement power and no formal say in what the Justice Department does.
It is also not clear if the results of the presidential and House elections will have any bearing on the potential investigation. Nonetheless, it may further complicate the narrative of the ambitious former governor, whose daily news conferences during the pandemic briefly won him national acclaim.
But Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic has since been under constant re-evaluation.
He was ordered to return a $5 million advance on his memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic,” after the state ethics board ruled that he had used state resources to write it. (Mr. Cuomo denied this and refused to repay the advance, successfully suing the ethics board on the grounds that it was created in a way that violated the State Constitution. That decision is under appeal.)
And several state and federal entities, including the Justice Department, have looked into the March 2020 guidance from the New York State Department of Health directing nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for coronavirus.
In testimony before Congress, Mr. Cuomo said the nursing-homes guidance followed federal guidelines, and pushed back on the assertion that his administration was to blame for nursing home deaths.
The state Health Department report, issued on July 6, 2020, was an early effort to beat back blame. The Times reported in 2021 how top aides to Mr. Cuomo pushed to hide the number of deaths in state nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic.
Mr. Cuomo has maintained that data around coronavirus deaths was unreliable in the pandemic’s early stages in 2020, and that his administration was focused on releasing numbers people could trust. If the reported number of deaths was later found to be inaccurate, the state planned to correct the number and issue an explanation.
In his letter addressed to Merrick Garland, the attorney general, Mr. Wenstrup said the committee found evidence Mr. Cuomo had falsely said “he did not have any discussions about the July 6 report being peer reviewed” and “that he did not know whether the July 6 report was reviewed by persons outside” the State Department of Health.
“Mr. Cuomo provided false statements to the select subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote in the referral letter, which was reviewed by The New York Times. “The Department of Justice should consider Mr. Cuomo’s prior allegedly wrongful conduct when evaluating whether to charge him for the false statements described.”
Hours before the panel sent its referral, Mr. Cuomo’s legal team sent its own letter to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into the subcommittee for potential abuse of power.
Mr. Cuomo accused the subcommittee of misusing government resources to “‘investigate’ a matter beyond its jurisdiction, apparently in service of a private lawsuit.”
Mr. Cuomo’s counsel, Sarah A. Sulkowski, accused Mr. Wenstrup and other committee members of colluding with Janice Dean, a Fox News personality whose husband was among those suing Mr. Cuomo over his handling of the nursing home crisis. The lawsuit was dismissed earlier this month.
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