IN THE NEWS: WHY CUOMO COOKED THE BOOKS ON NURSING HOME DEATHS, FOR THOSE OF US FOLLOWING THE ESCALATING NURSING HOME SCANDAL ETC.

The fantasy-hero governor’s team lies about lying. Why? By Andrew McCarthy

They even lied about lying. That would be a fitting epitaph for Andrew Cuomo’s administration. An epitaph could be useful to have. We may end up needing one sooner rather than later.

The governor’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, recently confessed to state lawmakers that Cuomo had misled them about the true extent of COVID-related nursing-home deaths. Administration officials had done this, she said, because they “froze.” They were paralyzed by the prospect that Donald Trump’s Justice Department could politicize the information if it were revealed.

In admitting that the administration had lied, though, Cuomo officials were still lying.

Yes, they had indeed concealed their drastic undercounting of the death count. But it was not concerns about what the Justice Department might do that inspired them to deceive lawmakers and the public. No, they hid the information to serve the governor’s construction of a grandiose but fraudulent self-image: Cuomo, the progressive visionary, the Man of Science, who was conquering COVID while President Trump and Republican governors stumbled from error to catastrophic error.

Stop and ponder that for a moment.

What DeRosa told lawmakers had them aghast. Not only had Cuomo misled them; he had, in DeRosa’s telling, done it in order to keep relevant information hidden from U.S. investigators. If the latter were true, Cuomo administration officials could well be guilty of federal-obstruction and false-statements crimes. In other words, so shameful was their actual reason for covering up nursing-home deaths — namely, to make a wayward governor look like a fantasy hero — that Cuomo administration officials figured it was better to be seen as potentially felonious than to admit their crude political motivation.

As the New York Times reported on Thursday night, in the spring of 2020, DeRosa and other members of Cuomo’s inner circle, who have no public-health background, studiously purged the nursing-home death data from a report compiled by state health officials. The Justice Department was not eyeing them at the time.  Read more at  https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/why-cuomo-cooked-the-books-on-nursing-home-deaths/

***********************************************

UPDATED:

CUOMO, ASSORTED SCANDALS, THAT PANDEMIC BOOK, THE NY POST, NEW YORK TIMES

#1, NY POST -New details emerged Wednesday about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pandemic memoir, including how he enlisted government staffers to help with the book — for which he was offered more than $4 million, according to a new report.

Top aides Melissa DeRosa and Stephanie Benton as well as junior staffers assisted the governor with drafts of “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which was published in mid-October, The New York Times reported. READ MORE FROM THE NY POST HERE.

#2, THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE REFERENCED ABOVE https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/nyregion/cuomo-book-nursing-homes.html

AND

ALBANY - The Cuomo administration's reporting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes drew another round of criticism late Thursday after it was revealed the total death count was stripped from a state report last July.  The report released by the Department of Health last summer had long been criticized for not including the number of nursing home deaths that occurred in hospitals, leading to a drastic undercounting.

Now the reason is more clear: The Cuomo administration pressured the health department to not include the full death count attributed to nursing homes in the report, according to The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. MORE AT LOHUD https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2021/03/04/cuomos-rewrote-report-nursing-homes-conceal-death-count/4588843001/?csp=chromepush

TO THE ANONYMOUS COMMENTER(S) WHO CONTINUES TO INSIST THAT THEY WILL BELIEVE ALL THIS WHEN THEY SEE IT IN MORE MAINTSTREAM MEDIA....PERHAPS THE ABOVE WILL SUFFICE......