House Republicans are accusing former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of intimidating a witness and senior staff member to interfere with the congressional investigation into COVID-19 nursing home deaths in the Empire State.
A new timeline of events published by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Wednesday confirms that Cuomo made several attempts to contact former Executive Chamber official Jim Malatras.
Malatras was the only member of Cuomo’s senior staff to testify to the subcommittee that the former governor was directly involved in drafting a report published on July 6 by the New York State Department of Health that deflected blame for thousands of nursing home resident deaths due to COVID in early 2020.
The Cuomo administration has been under investigation by the subcommittee for several years following the former governor’s denial of involvement in the production of the March 25, 2020, directive, which mandated that nursing homes admit COVID-positive residents.
Initial drafts of the NYSDOH report investigating the March 25 policy placed the number of nursing home-related deaths at less than 10,000, but evidence obtained through multiple investigations outlines that there may have been as many as 15,000 deaths connected to the mandatory-admit policy.
After not having spoken since 2021, text messages published by the subcommittee on Wednesday show that Cuomo contacted Malatras less than 24 hours after the subcommittee announced its first public hearing on the nursing home death scandal in May 2023.
“I always knew politics was a nasty business but the level surprised even me. I hear you are doing well and if there’s anything I can ever do to help you, of course I will,” Cuomo wrote to Malatras in May 2023.
Malatras did not respond to Cuomo’s message, which lamented Cuomo’s role as “the lightning rod that hurt [Malatras].”
On February 18, 2024, Cuomo again contacted Malatras via text. This was within 48 hours of the subcommittee publicly announcing their request for testimony from Malatras.
Malatras told the select subcommittee in September that he interpreted this communication from Cuomo “as a type of flare–or a signal—alerting me that he was aware that the House Select Subcommittee had requested that I testify.”
Malatras also informed the select subcommittee that Cuomo called him to speak about the nursing home death issue on July 15, the date that Cuomo and his lawyers had agreed on the date for Cuomo’s public hearing which took place on September 10.
The call, according to Malatras, only lasted approximately half an hour, but he said the exchange made him “uncomfortable.”
“I only listened and did not respond to his discussion on nursing homes,” Malatras told the subcommittee, “because I was uncomfortable having to potentially contradict or disagree with Gov. Cuomo on the call, or somehow prejudicing the upcoming Select Subcommittee hearing by discussing it at all.”
Spokesman for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, told the Washington Examiner that the accusations from the subcommittee are baseless, characterizing the communication between Cuomo and Malatras as “perfectly allowable and appropriate.”
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“This attempt to miscast the governor’s communications with a longtime former aide is more of the same from this MAGA clown committee who to date have a documented history of misrepresenting the truth and lying to the press — the fact is that the governor and Mr. Malatras did not speak until AFTER Jim’s testimony out of respect for the sub committee’s work,” Azzopardi said.
The Republicans on the subcommittee said in the closing of their memo published Wednesday that they are “evaluating all avenues at [the subcommittee’s] disposal to hold former Governor Cuomo accountable.”