New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his lieutenants had good reason to lie in writing last year about the number of China Virus deaths in nursing homes.
He was about to ink a $4 million deal for his leadership lessons book, American Crisis, that detailed his masterful handling of the crisis, the New York Times reported today.
Cuomo’s “leadership,” of course, was anything but “masterful.” His order to put China Virus patients in nursing homes had killed almost 10,000 of the residents by the time he was telling everyone that he was the China Virus Terminator. That figure is what he lied about.
Even worse, the disgraced governor, who faces sex-assault or harassment allegations from nine women, might have broken the law when he was writing the book. He ordered state employees to help him with it.
Big Bucks on the Taxpayer’s Dime?
The latest new charge that state legislators can add to their impeachment inquiry, the Times reported, is that Cuomo ordered employees to help edit and get the book deal for which Cuomo collected a cool $4 million.
And the staffers he ordered to help weren’t just low-level gophers and interns. “Mr. Cuomo leaned on his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, for assistance,” the newspaper reported. “She attended video meetings with publishers, and helped him edit early drafts of the book. But there was also another, more pressing edit underway at the same time.”
But Cuomo also turned to other employees:
Mr. Cuomo also utilized the resources of his office — from his inner circle to far more junior personnel — to help with the manuscript. In late June and early July, for example, a top aide to the governor, Stephanie Benton, twice asked assistants to print portions of the draft of the book, and deliver them to Mr. Cuomo at the Executive Mansion in Albany, where he lives.
An aide to Cuomo told the Times that she and others typed or transferred notes for the book, “which he composed in part by dictating into a cellphone.”
Benton e-mailed an underling to ask her to “print this too and put in a binder,” then “drop at mansion.”
But more disturbing is DeRosa’s role as de facto editor, the Times reported:
DeRosa … was particularly involved with the development of the book, and was present during some online pitch meetings with Mr. Cuomo. The July 5 request, in fact, was to print a 224-page draft entitled “MDR edits” — a reference to Ms. DeRosa, who had sent the draft to Ms. Benton on July 4, according to the emails. The staffers communicated via personal Gmail accounts, not official governmental email addresses.
State law prohibits using public resources for personal gain.
Cuomo’s spokesman said DeRosa and Benton volunteered to help on their free time and what they did was “permissible and consistent with ethical requirements of the state.”
Virus Report
Maybe that’s true, but Cuomo’s top people edited not only his book but also the virus report. If it told the truth about virus deaths, it might ruin Cuomo’s chance to look like the man who saved the state.
Revisions to the report, the Times reported, “occurred as the governor was on the brink of a huge payoff,” meaning the $4-million book deal. One of “Benton’s directives” about the book “came on June 27, the same day that Ms. DeRosa convened an impromptu teleconference with several other top advisers to discuss the Health Department draft report.”
DeRosa and her editing crew scrubbed the real number from a published report and replaced it with a much lower one, the Times reported:
Critical changes had been made to the final version of the Health Department report, after concerns were raised about the data by Ms. DeRosa and a second Cuomo aide, Linda Lacewell, according to interviews and documents.
In two earlier drafts of the report, which were both reviewed by The Times, the second sentence said that “from March 1, 2020, through June 10, 2020, there were 9,844 fatalities among NYS nursing home residents with confirmed or suspected COVID-19.”
The earlier drafts were written by Eleanor Adams, a top state epidemiologist, and Jim Malatras, a former Cuomo aide who now serves as chancellor of the State University of New York system. The 9,844 death total was far higher than the 6,432 nursing home deaths used in the state’s final report, which continued the state’s practices of omitting the deaths of nursing home residents who died at the hospital.
In other words, the real number of deaths was 53-percent higher than the figure in the report.
Publisher Scrapped Book
As The New American reported in early March, Cuomo’s publisher, Crown Publishing Group, dumped him and his book after the Times revealed the big lie in the China Virus report.
“Pending the ongoing investigation we have paused active support of ‘American Crisis’ and have no plans to reprint or reissue in paperback,” the publisher said.
The book sold 48,500 copies.
