By Brian Trusdell (NEWSMAX)
Federal investigators probing Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s management of nursing homes and patients infected with coronavirus have focused on whether the governor or his staff manipulated or falsified data given to the U.S. Justice Department, The New York Times reported Friday citing unidentified sources.
Documents have been subpoenaed from Cuomo’s office, FBI agents have contacted lawyers for Cuomo’s senior staff and interviewed high-level officials from the state health department, the Times said citing four people ”with knowledge of the investigation.”
The information sought pertains to submissions late last year to the Justice Department, which had requested data about COVID-19-related deaths and cases in nursing homes, the sources said. Knowingly supplying erroneous information could be considered a crime.
Reports by the Times and The Wall Street Journal earlier this month both said senior aides altered data regarding nursing home-related deaths.
The Times said a spokesman for the district attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York declined to comment on the paper’s latest report.
The attorney hired to represent Cuomo and his administration in the matter denied any wrongdoing.
”The submission in response to DOJ’s August request was truthful and accurate and any suggestion otherwise is demonstrably false,” lawyer Elkan Abramowitz said.
The issue surrounds Cuomo’s March 25 order last year that mandated nursing homes and long-term care facilities readmit patients that had been treated for COVID-19 at a hospital. Cuomo insisted that the order was based on guidance provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said in a March 13 memo that nursing homes should admit patients they would ”normally” admit, and that the facilities should dedicate a unit exclusively for patients returning from a hospital.
”Nursing homes should admit any individuals that they would normally admit to their facility, including individuals from hospitals where a case of COVID-19 was/is present,” it reads. ”Also, if possible, dedicate a unit/wing exclusively for any residents coming or returning from the hospital.”
New York initially only released the number of deaths suffered by nursing home patients if they died at the nursing home. Patients who contracted the disease, were transferred to a hospital and then died were not included.
The Cuomo administration defended the lower number by saying it didn’t include the hospital deaths because the information was incomplete and unverified.
The Times reported earlier this month that in June last year the Cuomo administration removed the hospital deaths from a report prepared by the health department that included the data. The health department report indicated approximately 9,200 COVID-19-related nursing-home deaths, about twice the number the government had released to the public. The most recent figure of nursing-home COVID-19 deaths is about 15,000.
Melissa DeRosa, one of Cuomo’s top aides, told state legislators last month during a conference call that the governor’s office complied fully with the Justice Department request last August.
”They sent a letter asking a number of questions and then we satisfied those questions,” she said, according to a transcript of the conversation released by the governor’s office.
