https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/17/politics/cuomo-ron-kim-nursing-home/index.html
Cuomo said 'he can destroy me': NY assemblyman alleges governor threatened him over nursing homes scandal
By MJ Lee and Mark Morales, CNN
Updated 1917 GMT (0317 HKT) February 17, 2021
https://twitter.com/newsmax/status/1362154549889404931?s=19
TONIGHT : 45th President of the United States Donald Trump joins Greg Kelly Reports to discuss the passing of Rush Limbaugh and beyond.
7:00PM ET. WATCH LIVE on Newsmax TV: https://t.co/VlT7z8drtO https://t.co/KdovZs9O48
Kentucky County GOP Chair Calls on McConnell to Resign Since Area 'Overwhelmingly' Supports Trump
Don Thrasher, the chairman of the Nelson County Republican Party in Kentucky, called on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to resign on Tuesday.
"Given that the county party that I represent supports President Trump overwhelmingly, and your complete and total disdain for the will of your constituents here in Nelson county I am formally demanding you immediately resign your leadership position within our party's caucus in the United States Senate," Thrasher said in a statement, referring to McConnell.
"The overwhelming number of Republicans in Nelson County are not on your side on this issue, and I speak on their behalf," Thrasher continued, adding that McConnell's "leadership in the US Senate does not represent the Republican voters that put our faith in you in the last primary election."
McConnell has faced backlash from Republicans after he became a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump.
McConnell voted to acquit Trump in the Senate on the impeachment charge of inciting the mob riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on January 6. The Kentucky senator, however, said he only voted to acquit because he did not believe the Senate can constitutionally convict a president no longer in office.
In a speech on the Senate floor following the vote, McConnell blamed Trump for starting the riot, saying that "there's no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day."
Trump has since issued a scathing statement against McConnell on Monday, calling him "a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack"
"If Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again," Trump said of McConnell in his statement. "He will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our country."
Thrasher told The Washington Post that McConnell "stirred up the hornets' nest even worse" with his floor speech, adding that the speech only made more people mad.
"There are people that are more mad now because it just seems kind of duplicitous to a lot of people," Thrasher said. "He is trying to straddle the fence, and he is not making anybody happy doing that."
McConnell has seen his approval rating drop 29 points among Kentucky constituents following the November election and his subsequent fallout with Trump, according to a Tuesday Morning Consult survey.
Only 41 percent of Republican voters in Kentucky now approve of McConnell—down from 70 percent before the November election.
Newsweek reached out to the Nelson County Republican Party but did not hear back in time for publication.
https://www.newsweek.com/kentucky-county-gop-chair-calls-mcconnell-resign-since-area-overwhelmingly-supports-trump-1570025?piano_t=1
"Gov. Cuomo called me directly on Thursday to threaten my career if I did not cover up for Melissa [DeRosa] and what she said. He tried to pressure me to issue a statement, and it was a very traumatizing experience," Kim said. Cuomo proceeded to tell the assemblyman that "we're in this business together and we don't cross certain lines and he said I hadn't seen his wrath and that he can destroy me," according to Kim.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/17/politics/cuomo-ron-kim-nursing-home/index.html
POTUS making a comeback tonight?
GAME ON
FBI
@FBI
The #FBI has brought to justice many of the participants in the violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Help us find others who remain at large. Do you recognize this person? Submit a tip at http://tips.fbi.gov. Remember to reference photo 222.
https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1362129842456690690
Leonardo Di Caprio?
Donald Trump Jr.
@DonaldJTrumpJr
Gov. Cuomo is threatening retribution against Dems demanding answers about underreported COVID deaths and his effort to help an industry group shield nursing home execs.
Cuomo-gate: A Nixonian Scandal Is Engulfing New York
https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1362175292589105155
Cuomo-gate: A Nixonian Scandal Is Engulfing New York
Gov. Cuomo is threatening retribution against Dems demanding answers about underreported COVID deaths and his effort to help an industry group shield nursing home execs.
The biggest political scandal in America right now is playing out in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo is in a lot of trouble — and rightly so. The Democratic governor did not merely wildly mismanage his state’s response to the COVID emergency, while netting himself a lucrative book deal and an Emmy. He did something worse.
In the middle of a public health emergency, he used his office to help one of his largest political donors shield itself from legal consequences as 15,000 nursing home residents died from COVID — and then he and his administration underreported that death toll, helping the same donor.
The Daily Poster had been covering the story for months before it exploded this week. The scandal is a cautionary tale of hubris, megalomania, and corruption that left a literal mountain of preventable COVID deaths in its wake. Now we are about to see whether a blue state’s democratic institutions can hold wrongdoers accountable, or whether America’s culture of impunity can once again protect the powerful from facing any consequences at all.
Amid a cacophony of demands for Cuomo to resign, the governor and his aides are frantically trying to cover up the basic facts of what happened, and that includes launching a Nixonian campaign of intimidation and retribution against Democratic lawmakers who have for months been sounding the alarm.
Two national news outlets today detailed Cuomo’s new campaign of retribution against one lawmaker in his own party who dared to ask questions about constituents and family members who died under Cuomo’s nursing home policies. Cuomo held a press conference to publicly berate the same Democrat, while another New York news outlet reported that other lawmakers are now facing threats.
For months, these legislators’ questions were ignored by a national media that has seemed far more interested in valorizing Cuomo than in reporting inconvenient facts. But those facts are worth reviewing, because they illustrate the direct link between the underreporting of nursing home deaths and the push for corporate immunity.
They also spotlight the very real human carnage that can result when an imperious, out-of-control politician is unwilling to engage in any contrition, self-reflection, or reform.
Fact 1: Cuomo’s Machine Raked In $2 Million From Industry Group
Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), its executives, and its lobbying firms. The health care industry group also funneled more than $450,000 to members of the New York legislature in 2020.
The money that flowed from the group to these public officials in the middle of the pandemic was a significant increase from prior years.
Fact 2: Cuomo Helped Industry Group Shield Nursing Home Execs
Amid New York’s exploding COVID death toll in April 2020, Cuomo’s budget included a provision shielding hospital and nursing home executives from legal consequences if their corporate decisions killed people during the pandemic.
GNYHA said it “drafted” the provision, which did not merely shield frontline health care workers from lawsuits, but also extended such liability protection to top corporate officials who make staffing and safety decisions.
Critics argued that shielding hospital and nursing home executives from the threat of lawsuits would remove a deterrent to cost-cutting, profit-maximizing decisions that endanger lives. They were ignored.
Fact 3: Cuomo’s Corporate Immunity Law Went National
Cuomo’s corporate immunity provision was quickly copied and pasted into other states’ laws and into Senate Republican legislation, in near word-for-word fashion. The liability shield spread from New York to other states, even as New York Assemblyman Ron Kim released a report showing that states with liability shields were reporting higher nursing-home death rates during the pandemic.
To date, 27 states have now shielded nursing homes from lawsuits.
Cont.
Fact 4: Cuomo’s Immunity Law Endangered Lives, According to AG
While nursing home executives were enjoying their liability shield, Cuomo’s office was vastly underreporting the number of COVID nursing home deaths, according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is considered a Cuomo ally. That report found that Cuomo administration data had undercounted nursing home deaths by 50 percent.
James’ report also linked the high rate of nursing home casualties directly to Cuomo’s corporate immunity law.
“The immunity laws could be wrongly used to provide any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives,” noted the report, adding that the provisions “provide financial incentives to for-profit nursing home operators to put residents at risk of harm by refraining from investing public funds to obtain sufficient staffing to meet residents’ care needs, to purchase sufficient PPE for staff, and to provide effective training to staff to comply with infection control protocols during pandemics and other public health emergencies.”
Fact 5: Cuomo’s Top Aide Admitted Withholding Info
Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitted that Cuomo’s administration not only withheld information about nursing home deaths, but did so in order to preemptively avoid political and legal consequences.
“We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to (state legislators), and what we start saying, was going to be used against us,” Cuomo’s top aide Melissa DeRosa told New York legislators last week.
DeRosa’s father, brother, and sister are employed at one of the lobbying firms that represents GNYHA, the health care industry group that funneled millions to Cuomo’s political machine and spearheaded the corporate immunity law.
***
Cont.
In the last few days, Cuomo has refused to apologize or support any serious effort to fix things. Instead, he is deploying his political machine against Democratic legislators who have been bravely demanding answers.
For instance, when Democratic State Sen. Alessandra Biaggi said she was concerned about a potential link between GNYHA campaign cash and Cuomo’s corporate immunity law, Cuomo deployed his spokesperson to attack her.
"Immunity during the pandemic for hospitals and nursing home workers was passed in the budget with a majority of the senator's senate and assembly colleagues voting for it, many of them taking contributions from the health care interests that were affected,” said the Cuomo staffer. “While she is damning her fellow legislators with wild assertions, the governor is not influenced by contributions and has never been. On the merits, different immunity laws were passed by states all over the country, as well as the federal government."
Left unsaid: Cuomo’s own immunity legislation became the basis for other states’ own immunity laws.
Similarly, both CNN and the New York Times are now reporting on allegations that Cuomo made enraged threats against Kim, the Democratic lawmaker who chairs the New York Assembly’s Committee. And CNN reports that “threats were made against those who are considering a vote (for Kim’s legislation) to strip Cuomo of his emergency powers” after recent revelations of Cuomo withholding casualty information from government officials. (A senior Cuomo advisor has now released a statement denying those threats and questioning Kim’s credibility.)
Kim’s uncle died of presumed COVID in a nursing home. He told The Daily Poster that the public must understand that the undercounting of nursing home deaths and the corporate immunity law are not two separate issues — they are part of one large scandal in which New York’s governor prioritized protecting his political sponsors rather than the public interest.
Noting that lawmakers were considering legislation in August to rescind corporate immunity, Kim said Cuomo’s moves to hide information deprived lawmakers of necessary information at precisely the time they could have reformed the law to hold nursing home companies accountable.
“If they shared all the data, we would have passed different policies,” Kim said. “We would have went in a different direction. We could have repealed legal immunity entirely. If we had the full data set, I think we had a much stronger argument to repeal.”
But the data was not forthcoming. It was hidden, which ended up serving the interests of the lobby group that dumped more than $2 million into Cuomo’s political machine. That machine is now being deployed to vilify Kim, Biaggi, and other Democrats who dare to demand answers about their constituents who were killed by COVID.
This burgeoning scandal and cover-up evokes memories of Nixon’s enemies list, and his infamous declaration that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Four decades later, the Biden Justice Department, state law enforcers, and Albany legislators will now decide whether that same ideology of lawlessness and impunity will continue to extend not only to nursing home and hospital executives who’ve avoided consequences for a gruesome COVID death toll, but also to the state governor who helped them get away with it.
https://www.dailyposter.com/p/cuomo-gate-a-nixonian-scandal-is
Clay Travis
@ClayTravis
Nine New York Democrats have publicly accused Governor Andrew Cuomo of criminal behavior relating to his cover up of nursing home deaths in the state:
https://twitter.com/ClayTravis/status/1362169660230291457