Andrew Cuomo’s worst nightmare

It would be a stunning fall from grace for any governor, much less one touted as his party’s potential presidential nominee at this time last year. And it wouldn’t have happened without one meteorologist, who began as a grieving woman just looking for answers, who refused to quit asking questions.

Mickey and Dee Newman, Dean’s in-laws, lived in the same Brooklyn walk-up for 50 years, until Dean and her husband Sean finally convinced them to move into a place with on-site care. Although both initially stayed in a nursing home, the goal, Dean says, was always to get them well enough to move to an assisted living facility. Dee, who couldn’t walk but was mentally “spry,” got well enough to move out, while Mickey, who suffered dementia and other health ailments, had to remain at the nursing home. Then, the pandemic hit, and Janice and Sean were unable to visit or help in person.

“He couldn’t talk to Sean because of his dementia, so we were trying to get regular updates from the aides that worked at the nursing home,” Dean told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “We didn’t even know he was sick. We got a call on a Saturday morning in late March, and the aide said he wasn’t feeling well. And three hours later, we get a call saying he was dead.”

On March 25, Cuomo signed his nursing home order barring facilities from denying “re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” Mickey, an Air Force veteran and former firefighter, died on March 29.

Janice and Sean were left mostly in the dark.

“We didn’t even know he had died of COVID until the death certificate,” Dean said of Mickey’s death. “We didn’t know there was even a March 25 order to allow COVID-positive patients in nursing homes at the time.”

Alone in an assisted living facility, Dee learned that her husband of more than half a century was dead.

“[Sean] was able to see her in the lobby of the assisted living residence, 6 feet apart with masks on; he couldn’t go over and hug her or, you know, comfort her,” Dean said. “He couldn’t stay there for very long. That was the last time he saw her.”

Dee sickened soon after. Upon admission to a hospital, she tested positive for COVID-19. Dee died of the virus on April 13.

It wasn’t long before enough questions emerged and Dean’s grief turned to rage.

For starters, although Dee had contracted the coronavirus in an assisted living facility covered by the nursing home order, the state counted her death as a hospital fatality. Before her hospitalization, the nurses had inexplicably moved her to a different floor, and Dee had noted to her family that some workers seemed sick and that health protocols weren’t properly followed. Furthermore, while the pop-up medical facility at the Javits Center and the USNS Comfort hospital ship deployed by the federal government remained virtually empty, Cuomo redirected thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients to nursing homes while they were still surely contagious.

“I remember I was texting Tucker Carlson about it because I felt like we should be reporting on this, and he said, ‘You know, this does sound like a story, and if you ever want to come on my program to talk about it, let me know,’” Janice said.

Dean’s entire brand is the sort of relentless optimism that has her perfectly coiffed and smiling on national television by 6 a.m. most mornings and devoid of the partisanship that infuses so much of broadcast news. Her husband was wary of her wading into the Cuomo discourse publicly, and as they were still grieving, Dean initially agreed.

“But it was the day after that, Chris Cuomo and Andrew Cuomo were on CNN with their infamous Q-tips, making fun of COVID tests, which weren’t allowed, by the way, in nursing homes,” Dean said. “When the infected patients were coming in, they weren’t allowed to test them. They weren’t allowed to give tests. So, when I saw that on CNN, I thought, ‘I’m done.’ And I went on Tucker Carlson the next night.”

If New York were a country, it would have the worst coronavirus death rate on the planet, with 1 out of every 383 residents killed by the pandemic. That figure doesn’t include the “deaths of despair” to which economically devastating lockdowns might have contributed. As of February, New York had an 8.9% unemployment rate, well above that month’s national unemployment rate of 6.2% and more than three times the rate of South Dakota.

When Cuomo decided to wrap up his pandemic briefings, sell Victorian-style posters declaring the pandemic defeated, and author a memoir of his “lessons in leadership” when the fight was only just beginning, it was clear the governor was intent on establishing an alternate reality and selling it to the media before anyone could bust the myth of Cuomo the savior.

Cuomo told then-President Donald Trump that New York no longer needed the Comfort hospital ship on April 22, by which point it had treated fewer than 200 patients. By the first of May, the Javits Center hospital administered by FEMA was mostly disassembled. It wasn’t until May 10 that Cuomo reversed the nursing home order, soon scrubbing it from the public record. By that time, New York had racked up more than 20,000 deaths. The state said that nursing home deaths accounted for around 5,000 of these. The true number was far higher.

Why did this happen? Why were COVID-positive seniors well enough for a hospital discharge not sent to the Javits Center? Why had Cuomo turned away a perfectly functional hospital ship while he was dooming seniors to their deaths in nursing homes? Progressive state Assemblyman Ron Kim doesn’t think it’s a coincidence.

“Look at the receipts and the billing of who actually made money doing that during this pandemic,” said Kim, who has found an unlikely ally in Dean. “So, COVID patients are Medicare recipients versus Medicaid, who were reimbursed at a much lower rate. So, we do think there were referrals inside these networks, and some of the special interest groups had the governor’s ear in driving these policies. That pushed up to 9,000 COVID-positive patients into these facilities, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of reimbursements for nursing homes, meaning people who are living in homes, went to the hospital, and then they were referred to a nursing home.”

Add in the fact that nursing home lobbyists were key Cuomo donors during his reelection campaign, and his move as governor to shield them from legal liability from coronavirus cases.

Putting personal gain over the public would prove no anomaly for Cuomo during this pandemic. When Mayor Bill de Blasio boasted that the federal government sent extra ambulances to New York City back in March — at the time, the epicenter of the pandemic — Cuomo reportedly demanded that the feds divert the assistance to the state instead.

Kim, a Democrat who chairs the Assembly’s Standing Committee on Aging, also lost a loved one in a nursing home, his uncle, to the coronavirus during the time frame covered by Cuomo’s order. At the beginning of the pandemic, Kim had actually vouched for Cuomo, agreeing to authorize more emergency powers and funding.

“But it was immediately clear, starting in April, week after week, month after month, that he was failing at the policies,” Kim said. “He made decisions to suppress life-and-death information. The data that we could have used back last year, in June, July, August, to legislate better — if we had the entire dataset in real time on what was going on in nursing homes, we could have offered solutions to repeal some of these bad policies. But he took that away from us because he ordered the Department of Health to deflate those numbers so he could go sell his book and be this hero of an image to the world.”

Cuomo’s briefings earned him an Emmy. By summer, he was a keynote speaker at the virtual Democratic National Convention, and his celebrity fans, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Colbert, helped popularize the term “Cuomosexual.” For a time, Cuomo was winning. But Kim and Dean were mobilizing their own army.

By summer, Dean was a regular, not just during Fox’s prime-time hours, but also in Albany. She had become the face of thousands of families seeking answers, joining a bipartisan push for an independent investigation into Cuomo’s handling of the nursing homes, and Dean posted protests she joined on her highly trafficked Twitter account. But no one in either the legacy media or Albany wanted to listen.

When Dean contacted the New York state Legislature to testify at an August hearing on the nursing home matter, Assemblyman Kevin Byrne vouched for her directly to his peers in emails obtained by the Washington Examiner. But ultimately, she was denied, with Assemblyman Richard Gottfried informing Byrne that “the Senate is not comfortable including her on the witness list.”

That Cuomo’s consiglieri likely banned her on the basis of her Fox News affiliation is not lost on Dean. Considering how many other allies Cuomo had in the media, Dean was far from shocked.

“I am so angry at mainstream media that ignored the story and actually just propped him up the whole time,” Dean said. “You know, CBS This Morning, and then there was that ABC interview with Amy Robach when she didn’t even go anywhere near the nursing home scandal. It was all about the ‘Love Gov.’ Oh my goodness, unbelievable.”

Of course her strongest words are reserved for CNN and Chris Cuomo, whom she calls “the biggest hypocrite of all time.”

This was hardly Dean’s first time trying to stand up to a man abusing his power. Early in her career, she suffered cruel workplace treatment by Don Imus, and at Fox, she accused Roger Ailes of harassment. With Ailes, it took a cacophony of voices speaking out all at once.

“I thought I was going to be fired when I went in to the lawyers of Paul Weiss and I told them my story of what had happened early on in my career with Roger,” Dean said of speaking out during Fox’s internal investigation into Ailes. “That was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, but had I not had that experience, I don’t know that I would have had the courage to do what I’m doing now.”

After nearly a year of screaming into the void, Dean thought she was done, but her courage would help her hold out just in time for Attorney General James to release the state’s findings.

The state Department of Health, James found, undercounted nursing home deaths by 50%, in large part by refusing to count those who, like Dee, died in a hospital after contracting COVID-19 in a facility covered by the nursing home order. Just as Dee had warned her family, James found that the nursing homes really were failing to comply with infection control protocols and lacked the protective equipment to treat patients safely. By February, the tally of nursing home deaths had been revised up to 15,000, or some 30% of the state’s total death toll. The New York Times revealed on April 28 that Cuomo and his team knew all along and were engaged in a massive campaign to suppress the numbers and shelve scientific reports as the virus raged.

In February, top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa clandestinely disclosed to state Democrats what skeptics had begun to suspect, that Cuomo’s administration had intentionally withheld the true number of nursing home deaths to evade investigation from the Trump administration and deny him a political point for his reelection bid. The day after DeRosa’s confession, Cuomo reportedly called Kim, who had been in attendance at the virtual meeting. When the New York Post broke the scandal, Kim went on the record to corroborate it — and then dish on Cuomo’s threats.

“Gov. Cuomo called me directly on Thursday to threaten my career if I did not cover up for Melissa and what she said,” Kim said on CNN. “He tried to pressure me to issue a statement, and it was a very traumatizing experience.”

By the next week, Boylan had come forward with the full story of Cuomo’s harassment, and in the coming weeks, new accusers backed by contemporaneously corroborating witnesses and photographs echoed her complaints. Like his old nemesis Trump, Cuomo could face impeachment.

Cuomo’s short temper was no secret in Albany, but as evidenced by the deluge of women who eventually came forward, staffers were terrified of retribution. Cuomo, for his part, has remained in relative hiding since issuing a piecemeal denial of the first allegations, and that a number of the accusers are proud Democrats doesn’t exactly help his case. In late April, he finally held a press conference in which he claimed he didn’t do anything wrong.

Cuomo can ride it out, but even if the Legislature fails to impeach him, he’ll enter whatever political battle he tries next badly bruised. The Justice Department declined to answer the Washington Examiner on whether it will continue the investigation into Cuomo’s nursing home handling that began during the Trump administration. Even if it doesn’t, Cuomo faces not just a separate FBI investigation into his nursing home handling but also inquiries into his alleged sexual harassment and the burgeoning question of whether he violated the law in having government staff help ghostwrite his book.

The governor’s press office failed to respond to any of the inquiries and requests for comment sent by the Washington Examiner.

Cuomo wasn’t the only governor with costly early missteps in the pandemic. But his decision to cover it up instead of correct it, and then strut over his state’s Potemkin “success,” caught up to him.

“Had I not seen him and his brother on TV doing their stupid comedy show, had I not seen him writing a book in the middle of a pandemic, when he should be writing condolence cards, and had he come out and said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ which he’s never done before, had he spoken with some of the families, had he had a town hall with grieving family members, had he called some of us on the phone,” it might have gone differently, Dean reflected. “Had he said to us in the beginning, ‘I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to right this, I made such a terrible mistake.’ But it was his ego and his quest for wanting more power that truly brought him down. So, I’m actually grateful for his gross comedy hour with his brother, and I’m grateful for his disgusting book. And his, you know, his terrible interviews, you know, puffing himself up to be this — this homecoming king? If it weren’t for that, you would have gotten away with it.”

Tiana Lowe is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner, as well as an on-air contributor for The First on Pluto TV.