The fantasy-hero governor’s team lies about lying. Why?
The fantasy-hero governor’s team lies about lying. Why?
T hey even lied about lying. That would be a fitting epitaph for Andrew Cuomo’s administration. An epitaph could be useful to have. We may end up needing one sooner rather than later.
The governor’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, recently confessed to state lawmakers that Cuomo had misled them about the true extent of COVID-related nursing-home deaths. Administration officials had done this, she said, because they “froze.” They were paralyzed by the prospect that Donald Trump’s Justice Department could politicize the information if it were revealed.
In admitting that the administration had lied, though, Cuomo officials were still lying.
Yes, they had indeed concealed their drastic undercounting of the death count. But it was not concerns about what the Justice Department might do that inspired them to deceive lawmakers and the public. No, they hid the information to serve the governor’s construction of a grandiose but fraudulent self-image: Cuomo, the progressive visionary, the Man of Science, who was conquering COVID while President Trump and Republican governors stumbled from error to catastrophic error.
Stop and ponder that for a moment.
What DeRosa told lawmakers had them aghast. Not only had Cuomo misled them; he had, in DeRosa’s telling, done it in order to keep relevant information hidden from U.S. investigators. If the latter were true, Cuomo administration officials could well be guilty of federal-obstruction and false-statements crimes. In other words, so shameful was their actual reason for covering up nursing-home deaths — namely, to make a wayward governor look like a fantasy hero — that Cuomo administration officials figured it was better to be seen as potentially felonious than to admit their crude political motivation.
As the New York Times reported on Thursday night, in the spring of 2020, DeRosa and other members of Cuomo’s inner circle, who have no public-health background, studiously purged the nursing-home death data from a report compiled by state health officials. The Justice Department was not eyeing them at the time. That happened months later, in August, when the feds began seeking information about the treatment of, and record-keeping about, COVID-stricken nursing-home residents by New York and three other states.
So what was going on at the time of the purge? Well — whaddya know! — it turns out that was just when Cuomo was quietly securing the state ethics approvals that would permit him to earn outside income from a book he’d decided to write. The book would inform the world about his unparalleled mastery of the COVID crisis — which, oddly enough, he contemplated as a work of nonfiction.
Simultaneously, the media remained spellbound by Cuomo’s daily pandemic briefings, which were — it’s still impossible to type this without chuckling — ultimately honored with an Emmy award. It hadn’t been that long since the governor was rocked by a corruption scandal. Yet, now he was ascendant, portrayed as a possible Biden administration attorney general, and a front-runner for the Democrats’ 2024 nomination if Biden were not elected or opted not to seek a second term.
It was an elaborate illusion.
In June, administration officials were aware that the accurate count of COVID-related nursing-home deaths was then 9,250. This far exceeded the 6,150 such deaths reported by New Jersey, the state with the second-highest total. But Cuomo officials habitually lowballed the figure by about 50 percent — stating in the report that it was 6,432. Indeed, they continued to undercount the true total for months afterward, until finally fessing up in January, when a state attorney general report spotlighted the administration’s sleight of hand. The number of nursing-home deaths now exceeds 15,000.
In the main, Cuomo officials hid the severity of the tragedy by omitting from their calculation residents who had contracted COVID-19 in nursing homes but died in the hospitals to which they’d been transferred. In July, when the state medical report was finally issued, the administration relied on such legerdemain, willfully concealing the accurate data.
By then, to the consternation of medical professionals at the state Department of Health, who’d thought they were writing a scientific analysis rather than a political brochure, the report had been rewritten by Jim Malatras, a longtime adviser whom Cuomo had brought back to help him grapple with the pandemic. The dumbing down of the scientists’ work was a significant cause of strife between the governor’s staff and state health officials — enough to lead to a Health Department brain-drain, with several top officials resigning in frustration.
You’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that, a month after the revised report was published, Malatras was suddenly appointed chancellor of the State University of New York (salary: $450K). It was a highly unusual appointment: the top public academic institution in a major state, without conducting a candidate search, naming as leader of its 64-campus system a political ally of the governor. But the SUNY board of trustees, which is controlled by Cuomo, decided after undoubtedly deep deliberation that our moment could be met by no one other than Jim Malatras.
To be fair, although he drastically overhauled the report, it was not Malatras who ultimately removed the accurate nursing-home death count from the final version published in July. A subject of intense internal discussions, the 9,250 figure was included in a close-to-final draft of the report. The Times explains that it was deleted from the published version only after its anticipated inclusion was made known to DeRosa and Linda Lacewell, another Cuomo aide with no public-health background (she is the state’s top financial-services official).
Though questions about the death count were still urgently pressed, Cuomo treated the publication of the report in July as if it had resolved any controversy over the nursing-home issue. As the Times observes, the report gave him a way “to focus on touting New York’s success in controlling the virus.”
Four days after the report’s release, Cuomo publicly stated, “I am now thinking about writing a book about what we went through.” But the book had already been in the works for weeks, while his administration was manipulating the data — the better to disappear the governor’s March 25 order that forced nursing homes to take COVID patients. That order was finally rescinded two months later. It may be responsible for over a thousand COVID deaths, according to a recent report by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a self-described independent think tank.
While the Times report is a bombshell, it should not be a complete surprise. The Empire Center’s senior fellow for health policy, Bill Hammond, told National Review over a week ago that DeRosa had lied to state legislators when she claimed that worries about Justice Department politicization had led Cuomo’s administration to mislead them. “As embarrassing as that was for her to say, I don’t think it was true,” Hammond observed. The Justice Department inquiry began in late August, “several months after many people had been asking this.” In other words, “Long before the Justice Department got involved, this was already an issue.”
The most consequential sentence in the Times report may be this one, buried in the middle and easy to miss: “An outside lawyer hired by the state has begun interviewing officials about the handling of nursing homes during the pandemic, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.”
We’ve spent over a week engrossed in Governor Cuomo’s sexual-harassment scandal, with allegations by two former staff members (not to mention a third incident involving a woman he met at a wedding), the customary Cuomo gamesmanship over control of the state’s independent counsel probe of those allegations, and, of course, a press conference — though one sufficiently logorrheic and self-serving that the governor won’t win another Emmy award for it . . . probably. The harassment claims are important because they relate to the atmosphere Cuomo created for service in his administration. But from a public-policy standpoint, they are not as consequential as the nursing-home scandal, the leading edge of a critical inquiry into how the pandemic was managed by New York’s government — a fiscal basket-case that, after Cuomo’s decade at the helm, now expects to be bailed out by taxpayers across America.
The Cuomo administration is now the subject of at least three federal investigations and a state investigation. The state legislature has finally proposed to strip the governor of his pandemic emergency powers. From across the political spectrum, there are grumblings that he should resign or be impeached. The Left and Right can’t agree on much, but Andrew Cuomo’s metastasizing scandals seem to be having a unifying effect.