Gov. Andrew Cuomo allegedly himself “edited” a state report that deflated New York’s COVID-19 death toll in nursing homes — which his top aides pressured health officials into releasing, despite knowing the issue would turn into a “great debacle,” according to the stunning results of an investigation by a US House committee.
Cuomo’s office “absolutely” signed off on the disastrous directive early in the pandemic forcing coronavirus patients back into nursing homes — leading to as many as 9,000 excess COVID deaths — the final congressional report and witness testimonies exclusively obtained by The Post show.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic conducted the probe and majority staff released the findings ahead of a public hearing with the 66-year-old ex-governor on Tuesday.
The investigators accused Cuomo in a memo Monday of making “demonstrably false” statements as part of a “cover-up,” citing conflicting testimony from his top aides.
“This is going to be the great debacle in the history books,” wrote Cuomo aide Stephanie Benton in a June 7, 2020, email about the nursing home death count. “Don’t u [sic] see how bad this is? Or do we admit error and give up?”
Four of Cuomo’s aides told the House investigators they believed the email from Benton was likely dictated by the governor himself.
“Within hours” of the missive, New York health commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker received “talking points” that were used to draft the audit on the nursing home deaths, which was released on July 6 and excluded out-of-facility fatalities.
The three-term Democrat and his inner circle “reviewed” and “edited” the state Department of Health report that vastly undercounted the fatalities, according to the documents.
According to Cuomo’s then-director of operations, Dr. Jim Malatras, who served as a member of the governor’s COVID task force, top aide Melissa DeRosa “laid out the points that she wanted to have touched upon in the report.”
“The report that I was editing had the total number of fatalities in all the charts until Ms. DeRosa intervened,” Malatras testified to the subcommittee.
“She was constantly editing it, Mr. Cuomo was editing it,” Malatras said in his testimony.
“It was largely around language,” he added, saying the governor’s aides would push to “refashion those sentences to be more less causal, less definitive, and work back in some of the language that DOH had originally.”
Malatras noted that his former boss had texted him to “check in” just days after he was invited to speak to the House committee, but “I did not respond.”
The subcommittee also found that Zucker “declined to testify” to a state legislative panel that the governor’s office “was not involved” in the nursing home mandate.
During a Zoom call with the New York State Senate in August 2020, he said that DeRosa sat off camera and at one point wrote a false statement on a whiteboard that he refused to repeat in his own testimony. It’s unclear what the suggestion was.
Zucker refused to repeat the claim as he remotely testified to the state Senate.
“It’s not true, and I was going to make a statement that it wasn’t true,” he testified to the House committee.
DeRosa admitted to being in the room but said she didn’t remember writing the message and that there was “no malintent” in the suggestions to Zucker.
Cuomo appeared for a combative transcribed interview with COVID panel members in June, during which he blamed federal and state health officials for the nursing home directive and accused Republican and Democratic committee staff of promoting a “conspiracy theory” by asking tough questions about his office low-balling the fatalities for nearly a year.
“We could not have been more transparent,” he claimed.
The March 25, 2020, “must admit” order included language that left senior care facilities in the state with no choice but to accept COVID patients from hospitals, leading to fierce backlash at a press conference the next month.
Cuomo and DeRosa told the House COVID subcommittee the order had been drafted by a “midlevel” New York Department of Health staff member based on guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The order apparently “surprised” Cuomo and DeRosa when both were asked about it at an April 20, 2020, press conference. It was taken down from the state health department website nine days later but remained operable for another month.
“I do not recall reviewing,” Cuomo testified. “I don’t recall seeing it.”
But Bradley Hutton, former deputy health commissioner, told the House committee that the governor’s office had “absolutely” signed off on the order.
The Greater Hospital Association of New York had made a direct request to the governor’s office on a phone call that prompted the order, the House COVID panel said, citing Zucker’s testimony.
At the time, Bolton-St. Johns, the firm of DeRosa’s father, Giorgio DeRosa, was lobbying for the hospital trade association.
Cuomo denied ever receiving a call. Both he and DeRosa also testified that she had recused herself from dealing with any of her father’s clients.
“As the report acknowledges, Ms. DeRosa was not involved in the March 25 advisory and didn’t learn about it until the end of April,” said her attorney, Greg Morvillo, in a statement. “As she testified, when she did become aware of it, Dr. Zucker explained that the advisory had been drafted by DOH — a point corroborated in testimony given by DOH staffer Brad Hutton. While Ms. DeRosa has no recollection of the incident regarding a white board, the sentiment reflects Ms. DeRosa’s belief that the DOH drafted and implemented the advisory, and there is no one that the committee interviewed who has said otherwise.”
Of the 10 New York officials interviewed by the subcommittee, none could recall any consultation with CDC or CMS guidelines, which used non-compulsory language such as “can” and “should,” before issuing the order.
Former White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx had earlier testified to the panel when it was controlled by the Democratic majority in 2021 that New York’s order also “violated” CMS guidance.
“There was no national policy. It was left to the states,” Cuomo himself testified after having allegedly divulged to then-White House senior adviser Jared Kushner that putting the patients in nursing homes would “be like fire through dry grass.”
Cuomo eventually revoked the order, however, on May 10 after at least 9,000 recovering COVID-19 patients had been either admitted or readmitted — without requiring testing — to nursing homes.
The governor received fawning coverage — and later an Emmy award — for his press conferences in the early months of the pandemic, but the following month, DeRosa and other members of Cuomo’s team began a “very active” counter-narrative about the senior care facility deaths.
Two days after the subcommittee invited Malatras to testify, Cuomo texted his onetime adviser.
“Hello Jim, now that the dust has settled, and the truth is being revealed, I wanted to check in with you and see how you are doing,” the ex-governor wrote in a Feb. 18, 2024, message. “I am sure that you will do well because quality and talent always wins in the end. All the best, Andrew.”
The two hadn’t spoken since early 2021.
“The latest time he texted me was February 18th of this year, I believe, just to say I hope you’re doing well, things like that,” Malatras said.
“I did not respond,” he added.
Cuomo maintained he was unaware of Malatras’ invitation to testify.
“This is just a nice note to a person,” he said when confronted with the text message by the subcommittee. “I don’t ask to speak with him. I don’t suggest anything. It’s just a nice note.”
Malatras said DeRosa specifically pushed for the removal of out-of-facility deaths in a June 27, 2020, phone call because she did not “trust the numbers,” though he pushed back and said they should’ve been included.
“As early as April of 2020, the DOH and Executive Chamber staff acknowledged the out-of-facility numbers being reported by nursing homes were wrong — the only question was how wrong they were,” Morvillo added in a statement. “As the report states, that Ms. DeRosa’s only concern was with the accuracy of the numbers being reported, a concern that was validated in the report stating that an audit conducted in August 2020 found an error rate of 600, or 20%, in the out-of-facility death data reported by nursing homes.”
Malatras also pointed out that Cuomo does not use email at all. The governor confirmed in his own June testimony that since he “got into trouble” as the US housing and urban development secretary “for emails that were sent to me that I never saw,” he hasn’t maintained an email address.
Zucker, Malatras and Dr. Eleanor Adams, a special adviser to Zucker, testified that they ended up working on two reports: first, the official one; second, the one commissioned by the governor’s aides.
The first was not peer-reviewed, Adams testified. The second report was finally released just days after a damning audit by New York Attorney General Letitia James in January 2021 found Cuomo may have deflated the nursing home death count by more than 50%.
When Zucker released the full internal data, the official COVID death count shifted from 8,711 to 12,743, a roughly 46% increase.
The Post reported in March 2021 that Cuomo officials had undercounted the number of nursing home deaths in the July 2020 report.
Throughout his June testimony, Cuomo maintained that nursing homes could have chosen not to abide by his directive if they were unable to provide adequate care.
“States that didn’t do readmissions have a higher death rate,” he also noted, blaming nursing home staff for being the main vectors of infection. “Nursing homes that didn’t do readmissions have a higher death rate. It was not coming from these noninfectious people.”
“That’s odd because I mean, I can speak for myself dealing with the local nursing homes they were extremely concerned,” Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said of the mandate.
“Their impression was they did not have the ability to deny a patient. They thought this was very clear, and there’s nothing in the language that says — although you cited this other law — there’s nothing in here that says that they could reject it if they didn’t have the capacity, and that was the concern of the nursing home,” she said.
“The theory was these were noninfectious people who needed the services of a nursing home,” Cuomo answered. “If your premise was right or if that was the operating principle, these people are still infectious, then I can see your argument.”
Tragically, Cuomo also acknowledged in his testimony that the moving of the patients from hospitals to senior care facilities was unnecessary.
“I never needed the hospital beds,” he said. “We were afraid we might, but we never did.”
Fellow New York Republican Rep. Nick Langworthy pointed out that a provision tucked into the state budget and approved by Cuomo gave long-term care facilities immunity from lawsuits, leaving no one liable for the catastrophic move.
“The immunity granted really prevents any families from having any sort of recourse in this terrible situation,” Langworthy told the former governor during his transcribed interview.
“Yes, the states, I take responsibility,” Cuomo relented at one point during his testimony when asked about his responsibility for the nursing home mandate. “But I think 90 percent of it was on the federal government.”
The House COVID panel combed through 550,000 pages of internal records and interviewed at least 10 New York officials with direct knowledge of the nursing home order, state health department COVID-19 fatality report and discussions within the governor’s office.
But the panel claimed in its Monday memo that New York still “is withholding documents vital to this investigation that could inform legislative solutions to ensure this tragedy never happens again.”
“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19,” said Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio). “Today’s memo holds Mr. Cuomo and his team accountable for their failures and provides the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of New York’s pandemic-era wrongdoing.”
“The Select Subcommittee has heard more than 50 hours of testimony with high-ranking, former Cuomo Administration officials and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents — all of which paint a clear picture that the former Governor and his team issued disastrous, unscientific guidance on March 25, 2020, and have since attempted to deflect their actions,” he added. “We hope that this memo provides clarity to the American people who deserve answers and accountability to the families and friends of the victims who especially deserve honesty from Mr. Cuomo and his former staff.”
Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said in a statement: “This MAGA caucus report is all smoke and mirrors designed to continue to distract from Trump’s failed pandemic leadership and is predictably sloppy, half baked partisan screed built upon uncorroborated, cherry picked testimony and conclusions not supported by evidence or reality.”
More than 84,000 New Yorkers died of COVID-19 during the pandemic, according to the CDC, at least 15,000 of whom perished in nursing homes.
The Post has reached out to an attorney for Zucker for comment.
