Chairman Wenstrup [COVID Hearing w/Cuomo]: I want to tell you that this subcommittee has been threatened twice, this congress. Once, through the Chines Communist Party, through it's embassy, for examining the origins of COVID-19. And the second time, by you [Cuomo], through your council, for examining the handling of COVID-19 in nursing homes.
Chairman Wenstrup: Your directive [Cuomo] was not consistent with federal guidance, nor consistent with medical doctrine. You do not put highly contagious patients in with vulnerable patients [nursing homes] subject to infection, and in this case, death.
The hearing is about how Governor Cuomo mishandled the pandemic response, especially regarding nursing homes. Ruiz, as usual, is blaming President Trump.
Chairman Wenstrup just presented Cuomo with a subpoena for documents, and says that, "the current governor [Hochul] is improperly withholding documents from Mr. Cuomo's time, that are responsive to our requests."
Cuomo: I often vehemently disagreed with President Trump, because from day one, he willfully deceived the American people…his lies and denial delayed our response, let the virus spread, and this country never caught up….and then Trump weaponized the Department of Justice, starting investigations against New York and three other democratic states.
[Cuomo PANIC]
Cuomo: Our hospital system nearly collapsed, and Trump was threatening to send federal troops to blockade New York so no one could leave.
[President Trump sent hospital ships that you refused to use for the sick]
Chairman Wenstrup: In fact, I don't believe I'm aware of any other state besides yours [Cuomo] that expressively prohibited a nursing home from testing returning or newly admitted residents. Only in New York.
Cuomo: As the republicans started this nursing home scandal theory…
Cuomo: President Trump was accusing me of overcounting the number. He said I was inflating the number to make him look bad. That there were actually fewer deaths, and I was inflating the number.
Ruiz: Let me just ask you directly, and let me remind you that you are under oath, governor; did you direct you staff to make the number of nursing home related fatalities lower than they actually were?
Cuomo: No, we said these were the numbers without the out-of-facility death numbers, which we will add when they're accurate, which will reduce the hospital count number, but the total death number remains the same…the only reason the republicans were asking these questions about nursing home deaths was to further their conspiracy theory that there were massive deaths in nursing homes, which in my opinion, was a pure diversion from the federal malpractice that was going on, because everybody knows that COVID did not get into nursing homes from admissions or re-admissions, it came in from community spread.
Raskin: The broader and authentic context for this hearing is of course, the spectacular failure of Donald Trump's reckless and incompetent pandemic response.
[hearing about Cuomo, so he blames President Trump]
Raskin: After watching the bodies piling up outside the hospitals and morgues, Trump then announced he had magical cures. He gave quack advise that hydroxychloroquine or disinfectant might be effective treatments for COVID.
["hydroxychloroquine has been shown to have consistent clinical efficacy for COVID-19 when it is provided early in the outpatient setting"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7534595/]
Stefanik: This investigation found that you, former governor and your most senior aids, made a deliberate decision to exclude certain COVID-19 related nursing home deaths to hide and miscount the actual mortality rate in nursing homes. And for the public, governor Cuomo changed the methodology of counting nursing home fatalities to exclude out of facility deaths. To undercount those…there is a reason why you are the former governor of New York state, and you will never hold elected office again.
Malliotakis: Exactly one month after the New York attorney general exposed that you [Cuomo] under reported the nursing home deaths by fifty percent, your chief told democrat lawmakers in New York that; she admitted that the true toll was withheld to avoid attracting prosecutors. That, Governor Cuomo, is a cover-up.
Chairman Roy [Border Crisis; non-citizen voting hearing]: This year, the foreign-born population hit a record of over fifty million, 15.6% of the total population, the highest level in US history. Conservative estimates show non-citizens make up about thirty million of that population, but it very well could be much higher. Non-citizens will vote in the 2024 election, because our system not only makes it easy to do, but incentivizes doing so.
Marjorie Greene: On March 25th, you signed a directive to put COVID-19 patients into nursing homes. On March 30th, President Trump sent the Comfort ship, and you did not put COVID patients in the Comfort ship, you didn't send them to the Javits Medical Center, that President Trump had built, which was a field hospital, you didn't send them there, you put them in nursing homes, which is murder. That's murdering people.
Marjorie Greene: Are you either the dumbest tool of the Chinese government, or did you know for a fact that you were being used by the Chinese spy that was working for you?
Cuomo: She was a junior member of my team; I wouldn't recognize her if she was in this room today. I think it is a serious matter. I don't think this was just in New York, I think there is an infiltration of Chinese, maybe Russian operatives…the federal and the state government should work together on it.
Not sure, but I think the early stories about Springfield were about how a town of sixty thousand, suddenly has twenty thousand Haitians living there.