The Justice Department has opened an investigation into Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor and a top candidate for New York City mayor, following a referral from congressional Republicans who accused Cuomo of lying during an investigation of his administration’s Covid-19 response, a person briefed on the matter said.
The nascent inquiry follows an earlier request to the Biden administration that didn’t result in an investigation.
It also comes after Justice officials ended a separate corruption prosecution of Eric Adams, the current New York mayor who is one of Cuomo’s rivals for the job. That move prompted upheaval in the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office after prosecutors refused to drop the case as ordered. Adams has vowed to assist the Trump administration’s immigration efforts.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the Cuomo investigation, reported earlier by The New York Times.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the Democratic former governor, said that they had not been informed of the federal investigation and defended Cuomo’s testimony to Congress.
“We have never been informed of any such matter, so why would someone leak it now? The answer is obvious: This is lawfare and election interference plain and simple—something President Trump and his top Department of Justice officials say they are against,” Azzopardi said in a statement. “Governor Cuomo testified truthfully to the best of his recollection about events from four years earlier, and he offered to address any follow-up questions from the Subcommittee — but from the beginning this was all transparently political.”
A Justice official defended the timing of the moves on Adams and Cuomo, saying “This Department of Justice has ended the weaponization of government and will continue to follow the facts in every case in order restore one tier of justice for all America.”
The investigation comes as Cuomo is attempting a political comeback after he resigned as governor in 2021 amid a sexual misconduct scandal. Cuomo has denied the allegations that he sexually harassed 11 women, which were outlined in a report by New York attorney general Letitia James, who is also under investigation by the Trump administration.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer in April referred Cuomo to the Department of Justice for potential prosecution over his testimony to Congress after a similar referral from a GOP-led panel investigating the Covid-19 pandemic last year did not result in an investigation.
At issue is Cuomo’s truthfulness regarding his role in the writing and review of a state health department report from June 2020 that underestimated the nursing home death count by nearly half.
A 2021 investigation by James, a Democrat, found that the New York State Department of Health undercounted Covid-19 deaths among residents of nursing homes by approximately 50%, essentially by leaving out deaths of residents who had been transferred to hospitals. A 2022 audit by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli concluded that Cuomo’s health department failed to report roughly 4,100 deaths between April 2020 and February 2021.
CNN’s KFile has also found that Cuomo downplayed lags in nursing home patient and death data and defended his administration from allegations of wrongdoing, according to a review of his daily press conferences from spring 2020 in which nursing homes were mentioned.
Cuomo has consistently pushed back on allegations on wrongdoing – with his legal team filing its own referral letter in October, requesting the Department of Justice investigate an alleged abuse of power by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Azzopardi, the Cuomo spokesperson, told CNN at the time that the GOP-led committee was engaged in a “pre-election Maga exercise and affirmatively chose to act unethically in order to help their masters score cheap political points.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Mark Morales, Jake Tapper and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn contributed to this report.
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