FBI, an American lawyer in Brooklyn probing the Cuomo administration on retirement homes

Last March, as the virus began to spread in New York City, Cuomo issued a press release listing the first 13 members of his coronavirus task force, which was led by Linda Lacewell, a lawyer and former chief of staff. by Cuomo. Lacewell is the superintendent of the State Department of Financial Services. Other members of the task force include State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker, Secretary to Governor Melissa DeRosa and Beth Garvey, attorney for the Governor.

“As we have said publicly, the DOJ (Department of Justice) has been studying the matter for months,” said Richard Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the governor. “We have cooperated with them and we will continue to do so.”

Azzopardi did not disclose whether members of the administration had been questioned or received subpoenas.

John Marzulli, a spokesman for the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn, said Wednesday afternoon that he could not “confirm or deny” whether the office had opened an investigation.

Almost three weeks after the governor’s task force announced last year, the state’s health department issued an order ordering nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to accept the residents who were discharged from hospitals even though they still tested positive for the infectious disease, as long as they could care for them properly.

That directive, which was rescinded less than two months later, was the subject of a storm of criticism directed at Cuomo’s administration, including allegations that the order – which the governor said was based on federal guidelines – had contributed to the high death toll. residents of nursing homes in New York. This claim was widely dismissed in a report from the Ministry of Health released in July.

Attorney General Letitia James’ office last month released a scathing report which concluded the practice may have increased the risk of COVID-19 infections at community facilities and that the Cuomo administration had delayed reporting that thousands more nursing home residents had died in hospitals after being infected in their residential facilities.

It is not known whether the federal investigation by the Office of Acting U.S. Attorney Seth D. DuCharme is linked to two letters the Cuomo administration received from an attorney in the Civil Division of the Department of Justice in Washington. , DC, last year, researching information on state nursing home policies. and data.

The controversy resumed last week when DeRosa, in a closed-door meeting with key Democrats in the state legislature with the power to subpoena and investigate the governor’s administration, told the group that the administration had withheld information lawmakers had requested on nursing homes for months because of the Justice Department’s investigation.

DeRosa, in the private meeting that was subsequently leaked, called the Justice Department official who sent the letter, Jeffrey Clark, an attorney who headed the department’s civilian division, “a hack. political “which, according to her, had continued the investigation. at the request of President Donald J. Trump.

“Basically we froze because then we were in a position where we didn’t know if what we were going to give to the Justice Department or what we are giving you and what we are starting to say is going to be used against us and we didn’t know if there was going to be an investigation, ”DeRosa told Democratic lawmakers.

In an official statement a day after his remarks leaked, DeRosa said the administration had fully cooperated with the Department of Justice.

The recent investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn is not the first time that New York-based federal prosecutors have launched an investigation in the Northern District of New York, which stretches from Kingston to the Canadian border with headquarters in Albany and Syracuse. A large fraud and corruption case involving Cuomo’s key associates in Albany has been prosecuted by the US attorney’s office in Manhattan; the prosecution of NXIVM co-founder Keith Raniere and other high-level members of his organization has been taken up by the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a statement on Wednesday urging President Joe Biden to allow Antoinette Bacon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, to be tasked with investigating the administration of Cuomo as part of his report on nursing home deaths.

Grassley noted that the American attorney for the lower Manhattan neighborhood of New York, Audrey Strauss, is DeRosa’s stepmother and should not be involved in any investigation.

Bacon, who was appointed acting U.S. attorney at Albany in September, is among dozens of U.S. attorneys who could be dismissed by the Biden administration. Bacon had recently been the Department of Justice’s National Seniors Justice Coordinator and was the National White Collar Crime Coordinator on the Executive Office of U.S. Lawyers.

She is a highly decorated prosecutor and has received special awards from the IRS, US Postal Service, and the Department of Justice “for her prosecutions of fraud, waste, abuse and corruption,” according to her professional biography.

But the investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn apparently does not involve the Northern District.

Earlier this week, Cuomo stopped apologizing for his administration’s handling of nursing home death data, repeatedly noting that they had created a “vacuum” by not providing the information requested by state legislators.

“Sorry? Look, I’ve said it over and over again, we made a mistake in creating the vacuum,” he said. “When we didn’t provide information, it allowed the press, people, cynics, politicians to fill the void. When you don’t correct that information, you allow them to continue and we created the void.”

Republicans at all levels of the New York government spectrum, along with many Democrats, have repeatedly called for independent inquiries into state nursing home policies and guidelines during the ongoing pandemic. Some of these critics have also raised the question of whether there are any links between political decisions and hospitals or other special interests that have affairs before the state or are subject to its regulatory bodies.

State lawmakers have also been pushing for subpoenas to be used to compel key officials, including Zucker, to respond.

Lawmakers who attended the briefing with DeRosa included MP John McDonald, D-Cohoes, chairman of the Assembly’s Monitoring, Analysis and Investigations Committee, and Senator James Skoufis, a Democrat from the Orange County who chairs the Senate Investigation and Government Operations Committee. Skoufis and Committee on Aging Chair Rachel May, who were both present at the meeting, were urged by Republicans to step down from their chairmanship by Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins ​​as they did not alert their legislative colleagues to what had been said.

Skoufis had previously been criticized by Republican lawmakers for not immediately issuing subpoenas for the information they requested from the health commissioner last summer. Skoufis said he would use the power if necessary, but would decide that matter after Zucker appeared before the Legislative Assembly’s Joint Budget Hearing Committee.

In a statement following last week’s meeting with DeRosa, Skoufis did not mention his remarks on the administration’s decision to withhold the data in the face of the Justice Department’s Civil Division investigation. He said it was “unacceptable for it to take so long”.

“To be clear, we’ll definitely have more questions as we look at this information,” Skoufis said of the data that was passed to state lawmakers last week. “While some of our Republican colleagues in the Legislature continue to shamefully play politics in the face of the tragedy that has unfolded in nursing homes across our state, we are instead committed to getting answers, to holding them accountable. stakeholders and to advance legislative solutions in a sober and thoughtful manner. “

Cuomo said this week that he doesn’t think there should be an outside investigation into his administration’s handling of nursing homes during the pandemic or his delay in reporting the number of deaths.

“The State of New York (Department of Health) has always publicly reported all deaths from COVID in nursing homes and hospitals. They’ve always been fully reported, ”Cuomo said Monday. “I don’t think there is anything to clarify here. … There is nothing to investigate.