Governor Hochul Signs Warehouse Worker Protection Act Into Law

Table of Content

• Jared Kushner 'out' on Trump after Kanye West, Nick Fuentes dinner: report
• Governor Cuomo Announces Sweeping Nursing Home Reform Legislation as Part of 30-day Amendments
• The administration has been accused of covering up deaths
• Personal tools
• Trump Did Float Idea Of 10,000 Troops Jan. 6 — To Protect Him On Capitol March: Committee

Current and former law enforcement officials say investigators are in the very early stages of their probe and the possible investigative avenues could include false statements, any scheme to defraud the federal government of funds or any misuse of federal funds. Democratic staff members were offered an invitation by the Republican staff to attend. NBC News reported on DeRosa's leaked comments, saying they were the catalyst for the federal investigation. But one effect of the increasing scrutiny on Cuomo in recent weeks is that Democrats in the state legislature are more willing to challenge him. The legislature plans to strip Cuomo of the emergency powers it granted him at the start of the pandemic. In May, Murphy commissioned the consulting group Manatt Health to conduct a three-week assessment of the state’s management of the pandemic in nursing homes.

He claimed that New York state did not cover-up the number of deaths in nursing homes, but acknowledged that officials should have released the information earlier. At no time did anyone threaten to 'destroy' anyone with their 'wrath' nor engage in a ‘cover-up." In June, against the objections of public health officials, Cuomo’s aides lowered the nursing home death estimate in a report due to be issued by the state Department of Health, according to a New York Times report on Thursday.

Jared Kushner 'out' on Trump after Kanye West, Nick Fuentes dinner: report

Following the report's release, Andrew Cuomo held a press conference in which he stated criticism of nursing home deaths "has no basis in fact. It was pure politics and it was ugly politics. And now the report has the facts, and the facts tell the exact opposite story." In January 2021, Attorney General of New York Letitia James released a report finding that Governor Andrew Cuomo had understated the toll of COVID-19-related deaths in state nursing homes by as much as 50 percent. The scandal was made public on February 11, 2021, when the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, a secretary and aide to Cuomo, privately apologized to lawmakers for the administration withholding the nursing-home death toll in fear then-President Donald Trump would "turn this into a giant political football". According to earlier reports, a Cuomo aide admitted to some Democratic legislators, in January, that Cuomo’s office deliberately hid the number of nursing home deaths from the public. Early accounts of the meeting, indicate that Cuomo’s administration hid the numbers in order to avoid federal scrutiny.

Parts of his toes had to be amputated, according to the attorney general, and when he returned from the hospital to the facility, he died. The state attorney general’s office collected stories of alleged abuse and neglect from family members of residents of Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing & Rehabilitation in Woodbury. "While we cannot bring back the individuals we lost to this crisis, this report seeks to offer transparency that the public deserves," James said in a statement at the time. The International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, whose members include media and entertainment figures from over 60 countries and 500 companies, announced at the time that Cuomo was being honored with the academy’s Founders Award for using his briefings to inform and calm the public.

Governor Cuomo Announces Sweeping Nursing Home Reform Legislation as Part of 30-day Amendments

But on Wednesday, he lashed out at a critic from his own party, Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat who had said the governor had threatened him earlier. Now, the Democratic leaders of the State Senate are in the final stages of crafting a bill that would strip him of emergency powers granted during the pandemic. The Javits Center pictured on April 2, 2020, outfitted to care for patients with COVID-19. For state lawmakers, the lack of comprehensive data limited their ability to exercise oversight.

He has signed dozens of executive orders since then, mandating shutdowns and instituting quarantine requirements for travelers, among other actions. "FBI reportedly investigating Cuomo role in shielding donors from Covid liability". Regardless, in New Jersey, Murphy made a handful of decisions differently than Cuomo both during and after the peak of the crisis that moderately improved the state’s outcomes relative to New York, winning praise from advocates.

The administration has been accused of covering up deaths

New Yorkers are still adapting to the new normal nearly one year after the Empire State was effectively shut down – if not significantly slowed down – amid concerns surrounding the spread of the novel coronavirus. “No state is doing even close to an adequate job,” said Elaine Ryan, AARP’s vice president for state advocacy. The Villages of Orleans Health and Rehabilitation Center in Albion, N.Y., was sued by the attorney general at the end of November. The company is owned in part by Bernard Fuchs, who did not respond for a request for comment. New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing Rehabilitation in Woodbury for allegedly diverting over $22.6 million in Medicaid and Medicare funds to the owners' pockets.

Cuomo later changed tactics, arguing instead that the directive couldn’t have been responsible for the COVID-19 deaths in the nursing homes because it was employees, rather than patients, who spread the virus. But advocates for nursing home residents have warned for years that regulators rarely enforce the law, allowing facilities to fill more beds without the legally required investments in staff, personal protective equipment and other resources. Ambulance workers pick up an elderly man in March 2020 from Cobble Hill Health Center, one of the nursing homes in New York City that registered an alarming number of COVID-19 deaths.

Tom Winter is a New York-based correspondent covering crime, courts, terrorism and financial fraud on the East Coast for the NBC News Investigative Unit. "There are other investigative avenues but these make sense based on what little we know at this point," said Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and NBC News legal analyst. Spokespeople for the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and the FBI declined to comment Wednesday night. According to a recent survey conducted by the Society of American Florists, over 80 percent of respondents reported an increase in holiday sales compared with 2019. The industry’s success at the retail level has revealed our zealous, if not slightly despairing, need to nurture relationships from a distance.

The legislation also protects workers from adverse employment actions, such as disciplinary action or firing, exclusively because of a failure to meet undisclosed speed quotes or quotas that do not allow for proper breaks. More severe restrictions came March 20, when Cuomo ordered all nonessential workers to stay home, barred gatherings of any size and instructed anyone out in public to stay at least 6 feet from other people. A state Health Department spokeswoman added the state is not tracking how many COVID-infected patients were admitted to nursing homes under the directive but homes should not take on new patients if they are “not medically prepared” to meet their needs.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the owners of a Long Island nursing home who also have stakes of dozens of other facilities nationwide. It is the third suit she has filed in six weeks alleging financial fraud and abuse of nursing home residents. President Donald Trump, with Vice President Mike Pence, watches a clip of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at the daily coronavirus briefing. Trump's Department of Justice was accused of politicizing the pandemic when it targeted nursing home data in four states with Democratic governors, including New York. Trump’s Department of Justice indeed politicized the nursing home deaths in several states with Democratic governors to distract from Trump’s own mishandling of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing health equity and access to care issues among all communities, however, the State's minority communities and older adults have been disproportionately affected. These reforms would make permanent the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to improve the health and safety of nursing home residents, as well as the quality of services in nursing home facilities. The report faults the “absoluteness” of the DOH directive, which required nursing homes to admit “medically stable” COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals, and says it “was commonly read” as overriding a regulation for the facilities to only accept patients for whom they could properly care.

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The scope of the letter, sent to just four prominent Democratic governors, elicited widespread charges in the legal community that the Department of Justice was engaged in a partisan witch hunt. And it is unclear whether any nursing homes in the state successfully objected to the admission of a discharged hospital patient. “Though the timing of inquiries in the months before the election raised red flags about their political nature, we took it seriously. We responded appropriately, and continued to report data in an accurate and timely manner,” said an official in New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, which has received higher marks for its handling of the pandemic. On top of blocking health officials from telling the truth, senior staffers also quashed a scientific paper that reported the true fatality total, The New York Times reported.

U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik from New York's 21st congressional district called for a federal investigation into the Cuomo administration as early as May 2020. Representative Nicole Malliotakis from New York's 11th congressional district began to circulate a petition calling for Cuomo to resign. Representative Antonio Delgado from New York's 19th congressional district also called for an investigation into Cuomo, saying those who lost loved ones "deserve answers and accountability". Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York's 14th congressional district stated, “I support our state’s return to co-equal governance and stand with our local officials calling for a full investigation of the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes during COVID-19."

nursing homes

State health officials contend that asymptomatic nursing home employees, not recovering COVID-19 patients, were the driving factor in nursing home outbreaks. And they have repeatedly noted that by law, nursing homes weren’t supposed to accept anyone they couldn’t adequately care for. A top aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tells leading state Democratic lawmakers that the administration had reportedly withheld data on COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes to avoid federal scrutiny; Laura Ingle reports. New York has faced particular scrutiny for a March 25 state health department directive requiring nursing homes to take recovering coronavirus patients. A separate report, drafted by health officials, concluded that “pproximately 35 percent” of all COVID-19 deaths at that point in the pandemic “were nursing home residents” — a startling number. On March 11, 2021, the New York legislature launched an impeachment inquiry into Cuomo, both for his role in undercounting nursing home deaths and for several sexual harassment allegations recently reported against him.

At that point, 59 Democrats within the Senate and Assembly had signed onto a statement demanding Cuomo's resignation. Prior to the report released by New York Attorney General Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo had received the International Emmy Founders Award from the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his COVID-19 press briefings. On August 24, 2021, the Academy revoked his award, due to sexual harassment allegations, however, and not due to the nursing home scandal. As politicians, health experts and federal investigators called for complete figures for the deaths of nursing home residents, the Cuomo administration continued to delay the data’s release, saying more time was need to compile and verify it.