Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean slammed Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s performance at a press conference Monday in which he tried to downplay his administration’s withholding of data about nursing home deaths from state lawmakers.
“He’s a bully,” Dean told “The Story” host Martha MacCallum, adding the governor “cannot be empathetic at all.”
Both of Dean’s in-laws died in New York nursing homes last year after Cuomo signed an executive order ordering patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 to be brought to long-term care facilities rather than kept in hospitals.
Dean described Cuomo to “The Story” host Martha MacCallum as “a broken record” who passed blame rather than accepting accountability.
CUOMO ADMITS NURSING HOME DATA DELAY WAS A MISTAKE, CREATED ‘VOID’ FOR ‘CONSPIRACY THEORIES’
Cuomo and his administration have been forced to play defense after the New York Post reported that one of Cuomo’s top aides admitted that nursing home death data was withheld from Democratic state lawmakers over fears that such information would be used against the administration in subsequent investigations.
The governor claimed Monday that the state legislature’s request for data on nursing home deaths had been “paused” while his administration “voluntarily complied with the DOJ request for information to very different things.”
However, Dean told MacCallum she had recently spoken with a high-ranking Justice Department official who denied having ever received any information from Cuomo’s administration.
Dean also took issue with Cuomo attempting to establish empathy with grieving families by mentioning th 2015 of his own father, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.
“His father did not die in a nursing home alone because his son had an executive order to put over 9,000 COVID positive patients in nursing homes,” she said.
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Dean, who has called for an investigation into Cuomo’s handling of the COVID crisis, demanded that both New York and federal lawmakers seek answers.
“This is why we need an independent, bipartisan investigation,” she said. “He didn’t follow the science. You don’t put infected patients into nursing homes. That is the bottom line, governor.”
