Disgraced former New York. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is reportedly plotting a political comeback.
Forced to resign by the fallout of multiple sexual harassment allegations, Cuomo, a Democrat, is gearing up to challenge his former lieutenant governor, and now current Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul, according to Fox News.
Fox reported that a recent poll showed Cuomo is just four points behind Hochul.
Richard Azzopardi, Cuomo’s chief spokesman, told CNBC that the allegations against Cuomo – which prosecutors found credible but not able to be pursued in court – “was the weaponization of politics to do what couldn’t get done at the ballot box, and it’s important to him and his family that the record get set straight and efforts to rewrite history don’t succeed.”
But The Washington Times on Wednesday recalled the real Cuomo scandal and the devastating effect it had on so many of his constituents.
According to the Times, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released an audit on Tuesday that found Cuomo’s administration undercounted 4,071 COVID-19 deaths between April 2020 and February 2021.
Cuomo’s administration reported 9,076 when the actual number was 13,147. The audit noted that the “incorrect data led to an inflated perception of New York’s performance against other states,” and occurred during a time when Cuomo “was trumpeting his response to the virus.”
That response led Cuomo to write a book about leadership during the pandemic and earned him an Emmy for his televised briefings – in which the liberal media held up the Democrat as a counterweight to former President Donald Trump.
Cuomo infamously issued a directive to return COVID-sick elderly patients to nursing homes, where the virus proliferated among those most vulnerable to the virus.
Cuomo then masked the truth by saying only those patients who actually died in nursing homes were counted as deaths in those facilities – as opposed to adding those sent to hospitals just before their demise.
“The pandemic was devastating and deadly for New Yorkers living in nursing homes. Families have a right to know if their loved one’s COVID-19 death was counted, but many still don’t have answers from the state Department of Health,” DiNapoli said of the audit’s findings, according to the Times.
“Our audit findings are extremely troubling. The public was misled by those at the highest level of state government through distortion and suppression of the facts when New Yorkers deserved the truth.”
The audit also uncovered that New York plodded in responding to a Trump administration directive to survey infection-control problems in nursing homes. Cuomo’s state inspected just 20 percent of those facilities between March 23 and May 30, 2020, while other states were above 90 percent.
Cuomo’s team defends this as essentially dead is still dead, regardless of where they died.
But as the website StatNews.com noted in February 2021, when the wheels came off for Cuomo, the issue was an Associated Press report that revealed more than 9,000 recovering COVID patients were transferred from hospitals to nursing homes – a number that was 40 percent higher than Cuomo’s administration acknowledged.
The New York Post followed that with a story that a top Cuomo aide claimed the governor’s team hid the data on those nursing home deaths to avoid “political retribution” from Trump.
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Cuomo, “What difference does it make?”