House Oversight Chair James Comer is asking the Department of Justice to prosecute former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for lying to Congress as part of its investigation into New York State’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Comer, a Kentucky Republican, accused Cuomo, a Democrat now running for New York City mayor, of making “making criminally false statements” around the state’s management of the pandemic in nursing homes. Former Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the chair of the now-disbanded House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, had previously referred Cuomo to former Attorney General Merrick Garland for prosecution — a request that the Biden administration appeared to ignore.
But Comer’s decision to return to the referral suggests the Trump administration may now be willing to engage.
In a statement, Comer demanded Cuomo be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”
“Andrew Cuomo is a man with a history of corruption and deceit, now caught red-handed lying to Congress during the Select Subcommittee’s investigation into the COVID-19 nursing home tragedy in New York,” he said. “This wasn’t a slip-up—it was a calculated cover-up by a man seeking to shield himself from responsibility for the devastating loss of life in New York’s nursing homes.”
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
“This is nothing more than a meritless press release that was nonsense last year and is even more so now,” Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi responded Monday in a statement. “As the DOJ constantly reminds people, this kind of transparent attempt at election interference and law-fare violates their own policies.”
Cuomo, who built a national profile with his daily briefings to reassure the public during the early days of the Covid pandemic, is now the frontrunner in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. But the scandal around nursing home deaths throughout 2020 — paired with sexual harassment allegations that forced him to resign as governor in 2021 — are haunting his comeback attempt.
Cuomo has sought to direct blame elsewhere for his March 25, 2020 nursing home directive, which required elder care facilities to accept Covid-positive patients. Yet his rivals in the mayoral primary to challenge sitting Mayor Eric Adams have banded together to highlight Cuomo’s decision to expose a vulnerable population to the deadly virus, and accuse him of undercounting the deaths in elder care facilities that occurred as a result.
Cuomo defended himself at a congressional hearing last year, telling lawmakers that “all credible studies now say that COVID came into nursing homes through community spread and infected staff, not hospital admissions or readmission.”
But now Cuomo will find himself having to relitigate the allegations waged by House Republicans during that time. The original prosecutorial referral sent by Wenstrup, who is now serving on President Donald Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, alleged that Cuomo lied to Congress during a transcribed interview with the select panel. Cuomo claimed he was not involved in a New York State Department of Health report on the nursing home crisis, but the Republican-led panel concluded Cuomo did, in fact, seek to alter the report as part of an effort to cover up the fallout.
The Trump administration has also struck an unlikely alliance with Adams, who is now running as an independent. Administration officials earlier this year moved to drop federal corruption charges against Adams, who was accused of accepting bribes from Turkish officials, after the mayor said he would allow Immigrations and Customs Enforcement back onto the city’s Rikers Island jail complex.
Adams also appeared before Comer’s committee at a March hearing on so-called sanctuary cities with three other Democratic mayors and received a noticeably warmer reception from House Republicans compared to the mayors of Denver, Boston and Chicago.
“I must comment that you have … publicly stated that you were willing to work with ICE on detaining the most criminal illegals,” Comer said to Adams. “And I want to publicly thank you for that.”