Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will likely be "evasive" while testifying publicly next week to the House Subcommittee on the thousands of nursing home deaths in his state during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said Thursday on Newsmax.
"He'll try to dodge a lot of the questions as he did during our closed-door testimony," the New York Republican, a member of the subcommittee, said on "Wake Up America."
Cuomo testified behind closed doors in June for seven hours to House Republicans, who said they pressed him about a state Health Department directive from March 25, 2020, requiring nursing homes in the state to accept COVID patients from hospitals.
The disease spread through nursing homes, killing more than 15,000 people by June 2021.
"The bottom line is the governor did not follow the CDC guidance [which said] it was an option for patients to go back to nursing homes," Malliotakis said. "What the governor did was issue a mandate that said that no nursing home could deny an individual based on a COVID-positive result, which was ludicrous knowing that our seniors were our most vulnerable individuals. "
Cuomo said she still doesn't know who approved the nursing home directive, calling it "unconscionable."
"This deadly directive went out with his name and Howard Zucker's name, the health commissioner at top, yet [Cuomo] doesn't know about it," said Malliotakis.
Cuomo then claimed that "some low-level staffer" at the Department of Health approved the orders, she said.
"That's not how you run a state," Malliotakis said. "I think that would be very negligent for that directive to go out without the governor or at least the health commissioner's approval. We want to know who approved that and what was the governor's role in it."
Cuomo in 2020 claimed that the Trump administration was staging a conspiracy on the deaths by statements that nursing home patients were dying in Democrat-run states, but Malliotakis on Thursday said that is the truth about where most of the deaths occurred.
"In New York, in particular, which is my focus, I will tell you it is a result because of that directive," she said. "The governor is trying to blame everybody from the Trump administration to the CDC, to the nursing home staff, to this unknown low-level staffer."
Malliotakis said she also wants to know why patients were sent to nursing homes when there were so many alternatives, including then-President Donald Trump sending the U.S. Navy comfort ship to New York City.
"That is irresponsible, it's negligent, and the families do deserve answers," Malliotakis said. "It's not politics trying to seek transparency and accountability and answers for my constituents who lost loved ones and thousands of others across the state."
Malliotakis also on Thursday discussed the news that Linda Sun, a former aide to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, was charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government.
"This is a Chinese spy that was in the highest ranks of New York state government for a very long period of time and they were working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party," said Malliotakis. "Really, the question I have is how widespread is this, and throughout the country? We need the intelligence community to brief Congress on what they know."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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