It now appears that members of the Cuomo administration falsified reports on nursing home deaths from Covid-19, one would assume to give their boss some political cover.
Falsifying official government documents is a crime, and you can be pretty dam sure that hizzonner knew.
The response to this news should be the AG opening a criminal investigation:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report’s production.
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The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.
No, they falsified their reports.
That is a very different. and quite illegal, thing.
State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.
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Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn asked the Cuomo administration in February for information about nursing-home deaths, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Federal prosecutors expressed interest in the July report, people familiar with the matter said.
Cuomo has aided and abbeted corruption as a way to further his power for over a decade, see the convictions of New York House Speaker Sheldon Silver and New York Senate leader Dean Skelos for corruption, as well as his actions to shut down his own anti-corruption commission, the Moreland Commission, when it too close to him and his.
In response to questions from the Journal, administration officials said Thursday that Mr. Cuomo’s advisers advocated against including data on out-of-facility deaths because they had concerns about its accuracy.
Concerns about accuracy, my ass. This was a coverup to maximize Cuomo’s political advantage as he attempted to sell himself to the American public as “Governor Covid”.
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State lawmakers from both parties have said the out-of-facility death data was critical for them to evaluate nursing-home policies that could prevent future fatalities. They said the Cuomo administration’s decision to delay its release constitutes a coverup of data the governor knew would be damaging to his political stature.
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The Justice Department, through its Civil Rights Division, began requesting information about nursing-home deaths from New York and other Democratic-leaning states in August.
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The initial version of the report submitted to Mr. Cuomo’s team for review included both data on deaths of nursing-home residents in hospitals and deaths of residents inside nursing homes, people familiar with the report’s production said.
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In January, a report by the New York Attorney General said the state had undercounted nursing-home deaths and said the governor’s directive may have spread the disease.
It’s corruption all the way down, and I really would like to see Governor Cuomo become defendant Cuomo.