A top aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “privately apologized to state Democratic leaders for withholding the state’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19,” reports the New York Post. Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor, told them “‘we froze’ out of fear the true numbers would ‘be used against us’ by federal prosecutors.”
Last month the New York attorney general’s office released a report saying that New York’s nursing home death count from COVID-19 was undercounted by as much as 50 percent. The Cuomo administration responded by blaming the Trump administration, even though the policy—and the cover-up—was entirely the Cuomo administration’s doing.
PJ Media has been calling out Cuomo’s deadly nursing home policy and his cover-up of the policy’s impact since the spring—as have other conservative media outlets. In July, I explained in detail how the cover-up was executed.
DeRosa admitted to the cover-up during a two-hour-plus video conference call, during which she also said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a request from the state senate in August for a full accounting of the death toll because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football.”
“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”
DeRosa “basically, we froze” after Trump directed the Department of Justice to investigate the nursing home deaths in New York.