Documents reviewed by The New York Times show that Andrew Cuomo rewrote parts of a New York State report that deflected blame for nursing home residents who died of Covid.
Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times

Emails Suggest Cuomo Undersold His Role in Altering Covid Report

Andrew Cuomo said he could not recall seeing or revising a New York State Health Department report on how the state handled the early stages of the pandemic.

by · NY Times

Earlier this summer, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo squared off for a closed-door interview with seven members of a Republican-led congressional subcommittee investigating how New York handled the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Cuomo was asked repeatedly about a State Health Department report that deflected blame for the thousands of people who died of Covid at nursing homes in early 2020. Mr. Cuomo stood by the report and said he certainly did not review it and insisted he had no memory of seeing it before its release.

But a review of emails and congressional documents appears to show how Mr. Cuomo not only saw the report, but personally wrote parts of early drafts.

“Governor’s edits are attached for your review,” Mr. Cuomo’s assistant Farah Kennedy wrote in an email sent to several members of the ex-governor’s senior staff on June 23, 2020. “The smaller text in the beginning is from your original document. He replaced your paragraph on page 3 beginning with ‘But, like in all fifty states, there were Covid-positive cases.’”

Mr. Cuomo apparently inserted language to underscore how “community spread among employees or possibly visitation by family and friends were relevant factors” that contributed to nursing home deaths.

“The larger text,” Ms. Kennedy noted, “is what he added.”

The email exchange among Mr. Cuomo’s aides, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was one of many sought by the Justice Department and a law firm retained by the State Assembly as it prepared to impeach Mr. Cuomo in 2021.

In another example cited in congressional documents, one of Mr. Cuomo’s top aides wrote an email on June 29, 2020, asking for someone to “please print two copies and drop at mansion,” referring to the State Health Department report and Mr. Cuomo’s Albany residence. A week later, the report was released with some of Mr. Cuomo’s revisions included.

Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the early stages of the pandemic initially brought him national attention and widespread praise, and became fodder for his memoir, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the Covid-19 Pandemic.”

But as months passed, the state’s response began to draw critical scrutiny, with the more than 15,000 Covid-related deaths among nursing home residents emerging as a focal point. The Times reported in 2021 how top aides to Mr. Cuomo pushed to hide the number of deaths in state nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic.

Mr. Cuomo has defended his administration’s actions, saying at a hearing last week before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic that certain deaths were kept out of the report because the data was unreliable and being delivered at a chaotic moment in the middle of the pandemic.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, asserted that Covid “was spread in nursing homes by asymptomatic staff.” He characterized the House panel as a “MAGA committee” said that its members did nothing to undermine the notion that New York followed the Trump administration’s nursing home policies.

“Governor Cuomo was fully cooperative with the committee over two separate days, relayed everything he remembered about events that happened four years ago in the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Mr. Azzopardi said.

The renewed focus on the state’s pandemic response comes at what may be a politically sensitive moment for Mr. Cuomo, who is said by some to be weighing a run for mayor of New York City next year.

Those rumors have intensified as controversies have surrounded the current mayor, Eric Adams. Last week, the city’s police commissioner, Edward Caban, and Mr. Adams’s counsel, Lisa Zornberg, both quit after federal investigators sought information from or searched the homes of several top officials and seized their phones, including Mr. Caban’s.

Mr. Cuomo, who resigned in August 2021 amid sexual harassment allegations that he denies, has said he has “no plans to run for anything.” Still his sizable political war chest and tendency to weigh in on politically hot topics such as congestion pricing or the war in Gaza has been interpreted by some as him laying the groundwork to either run for mayor next year or for governor in 2026.

How Mr. Cuomo and other leading Democrats handled the pandemic has the potential to be a political liability, a scenario that the Republican-led subcommittee has tried to take advantage of in its hearings.

Before Mr. Cuomo’s testimony to the panel in Washington last week, the committee released a 48-page report that criticized State Health Department guidance, issued in March 2020, that directed nursing homes to readmit patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus.

That guidance, the report said, had “predictable but disastrous consequences.”

Mr. Cuomo told the panel that this guidance conformed with federal guidelines and said the decisions of his administration weren’t to blame for increased deaths in nursing homes.

More scrutiny and criticism surrounded the July 2020 State Health Department report, which the committee found “was heavily edited by the executive chamber to show more causality and was not a scientific nor peer-reviewed publication.”

During Mr. Cuomo’s private questioning, a lawyer representing the committee’s Democratic members noted that one top aide had testified that Mr. Cuomo had reviewed a draft before it was released. “Is that true?” the lawyer asked.

“I did not,” Mr. Cuomo replied, according to a transcript of the questioning. “Maybe it was in the inbox, but I did not.”

Mr. Cuomo said he did “not recall seeing the July 6 report” before it was issued, adding that Howard Zucker, then the state health commissioner, bore responsibility for it.

“He then presented it numerous times,” Mr. Cuomo said of Mr. Zucker. “I then spoke to it numerous times, because it came up at every press briefing afterwards.”

Mr. Cuomo was later asked again if he either reviewed, edited or spoke about the report with his aides.

“Not that I recall,” he replied. “I may have been, because it’s a very interesting finding. They probably came to me and said do you want to hear something interesting.”

Mr. Cuomo did not send or receive the emails referred to by the committee; he is known not to use email to communicate, saying once: “I don’t want to say that I’m a sort of old-fashioned, telephone guy, but a little bit I am.”

One of the ex-governor’s top aides, Jim Malatras, told the congressional committee that “edits were communicated in a number of ways. Sometimes people received handwritten notes back on the printed-out piece of paper.”

Mr. Malatras, who declined to comment beyond referring The Times to his testimony, told the panel that some of Mr. Cuomo’s edits would also be relayed through top aides like Stephanie Benton, Mr. Cuomo’s longtime executive assistant.

“Can we drop at mansion for him pls FW:Nursing Home report,” Ms. Benton wrote in one email to top aides.

Ms. Benton sent this request on June 22, 2020. The next day, Mr. Cuomo’s edits were sent back to the group, according to an email obtained by The Times.

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