New York Governor Threatens Legislator Over Deaths in Nursing Homes
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – A state lawmaker says New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has threatened to “destroy” him if he doesn’t help contain the damage over Cuomo’s “cover-up” of many nursing home deaths from COVID-19.
Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim from Queens in New York City said Governor Cuomo made a threatening phone call to him last Thursday night.
Kim has been among Cuomo’s most outspoken critics since his uncle, Son Kim, died in a nursing home in April after suffering symptoms of COVID-19.
The uncle was among thousands who died after Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals, regardless of test results, officials say.
A damning report by Attorney General Letitia James also found that Cuomo’s administration underreported the number of home deaths. Families have been grieving for more than 13,000 seniors who health authorizes say died in New York of COVID-19 related causes.
Amid the scandal, Kim introduced legislation Tuesday to strip Cuomo of his pandemic-related emergency powers. He also sent a letter — co-signed by eight Assembly Democrats — accusing Cuomo of violating the federal law against obstruction of justice.
CUOMO FURIOUS
Cuomo was furious about these actions, recalled Kim in an interview. “At first, there was a silence on the phone,” Kim told The New York Post newspaper. “Then the governor says, ‘Mr. Kim, are you an honorable man?’”
During the conversation, Kim added, Cuomo warned him, “You have not seen my wrath. I have been biting my tongue for months.”
“I can tell the whole world what a bad person you are, and you will be finished,” Kim recalled Cuomo saying. “You will be destroyed.”
Cuomo was so angry, Kim told The New York Post, that “my wife could hear the governor yelling into the phone.” At one point, Cuomo — a former state attorney general — reportedly asked Kim if he was a lawyer, which he is not.
Kim — who said he was “in the middle of bathing my kids” —claimed Cuomo asked him to draft a statement. It would “say that [Cuomo’s secretary] Melissa DeRosa said there was a federal investigation, and they had to deal with that first.”
After that call, “we were devastated. My wife didn’t sleep at all,” Kim was quoted as saying. Cuomo’s office didn’t respond to the allegations.
The governor’s reported phone call came after aid DeRosa tried to explain the Cuomo administration’s decision to rebuff a legislative request for the death tally in August.
TRUMP FOOTBALL
It wasn’t given because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald J. Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” DeRosa told Democrats, according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting.
DeRosa admitted Cuomo’s administration withheld death data for fear it would be “used against us” by federal prosecutors. COVID-19 deaths in New York nursing homes were 50 percent higher than claimed, a probe showed.
Last year President Trump condemned Governor Cuomo for not better utilizing the makeshift military hospitals deployed by the administration to New York City during the coronavirus outbreak’s peak.
Trump claimed Cuomo “didn’t use” either the Javits Center or the USNS Comfort ship at the pandemic’s height. In fact, both were used somewhat during their operation — albeit not to capacity.
“So we do apologize,” DeRosa said in the recent video conference. “I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.”
Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried, a Democrat from Manhattan, immediately rejected DeRosa’s expression of remorse, according to the recording.
And the political fallout was just beginning with growing calls to strip Governor Cuomo of his emergency powers.
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