Report: FBI and DOJ investigating Cuomo administration’s nursing home policies during pandemic

The Times Union reported that the probe is focusing on the senior members of the governor's task force. Listed on the task force headed by Linda Lacewell were 13 initial members of his coronavirus task force, which included state health Commissioner Howard Zucker, Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa and Beth Garvey, counsel to the governor.

In January, New York State Attorney General Letitia James released a report detailing the investigations her office conducted into the Governor’s nursing homes policies and actions during the pandemic. The report showed that the nursing home deaths in New York State were likely undercounted by up to 50 percent.

The investigation, ongoing since March, when Governor Andrew Cuomo issued his directive to send COVID patients back to nursing homes following hospitalizations, began due to allegations of "patient neglect and other concerning conduct," according to The Post-Journal.

Cuomo has consistently and repeatedly denied that his policies had any negative impact on nursing home deaths in the state. Last week, Melissa DeRosa, top aide to Cuomo apologized to New York Democratic lawmakers on a Zoom conference for withholding the state’s nursing-home coronavirus death totals. She told them that the administration's staff "froze," fearing the real numbers would "be used against us" by federal prosecutors, according to The New York Post.

Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the Governor, confirmed the investigation. "As we publicly said, DOJ (Department of Justice) has been looking into this for months. We have been cooperating with them and we will continue to."

Since the confirmation, Azzopardi has been retweeting anyone praising the administration’s response to the pandemic and anyone defending them against the allegations of wrong doing.

Three weeks after task force was announced, the New York Department of Health issued an order directing nursing homes and other long-term care facilities that they were required to accept residents who were being discharged from hospitals even if they were still testing positive for COVID-19. The order was rescinded less than two months later.

According to the Times Union, its unclear whether the federal probe by is related to two letters that Cuomo's administration "received from a civil division attorney at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, last year seeking information on the state's nursing home policies and data."

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), issued a statement Wednesday calling on President Joe Biden to have Antoinette Bacon, the US attorney for the Northern District of New York, who previously served as Justice Department’s national elder justice coordinator and who currently has jurisdiction over federal public corruption crimes in the state, to be assigned to investigate Cuomo administration's policies, noting that the US attorney in New York's Manhattan-based Southern District, Audrey Strauss who has jurisdiction, is the mother-in-law of DeRosa and should not be involved in the investigation.

At a press conference earlier this week, Cuomo would not apologize for his administration's handling of nursing homes' fatality data. "Apologize? Look, I have said repeatedly, we made a mistake in creating the void. When we didn’t provide information it allowed press, people, cynics, politicians to fill the void. When you don’t correct this information you allow it to continue and we created the void."

Republicans and Democrats at every level of the state’s government have repeatedly called for independent investigations of the controversial nursing home policies and directives during the outbreak and ongoing pandemic.