If the Justice Department investigates the Cuomo government’s refusal to deliver data on deaths in nursing homes, a major conflict will arise if the case is turned over to the powerful Manhattan federal prosecutor.
That’s because Audrey Strauss, the US attorney for the Southern District, is the mother of Cuomo’s top adviser, Melissa DeRosa, the figure at the center of the emerging scandal.
The outcry demanding an investigation into the cover-up of thousands of deaths has intensified after the Post reported DeRosa’s surprising admission that the Cuomo government hid information from state lawmakers over the summer because it feared federal prosecutors “would use it against us.”
The Justice Department in late August had launched an investigation into deaths in nursing homes in New York and elsewhere.
“And basically, we froze,” admitted DeRosa, who is secretary of the governor and his closest confidant, to state lawmakers on a conference call.
“We were not sure if what we were going to give the Department of Justice or what we were giving you and what we started to say would be used against us and we were not sure if there would be an investigation,” she told lawmakers in a conference call on Wednesday .
DeRosa’s admission led an observer to scoff “Did you freeze before or after calling your mother-in-law?”
Cuomo was severely criticized for his mandate at the start of the pandemic that poorly equipped nursing homes would accept patients in recovery with coronoavirus and hospital discharge, although the elderly are among the most vulnerable to the deadly disease.
Among those who called for a federal investigation on Friday were former governor George Pataki, who called the cover-up “reprehensible”.
State Congresswoman Elise Stefanik – DeRosa’s high school classmate – said that “Governor Cuomo, the governor’s secretary, and his senior team must be prosecuted immediately – by both the New York State Attorney General and the Department of Justice. from the USA.”
Strauss, 73, became the top prosecutor in Manhattan after President Trump said he was firing Geoffrey Berman in June 2020 and Berman agreed to resign as long as Strauss, who had been his deputy, became the incumbent U.S. attorney.
Berman called her “the smartest, most honest and most effective lawyer I’ve ever had the privilege of working with”.
DeRosa, 38, has been married to Strauss’s son Matthew Wing, 37, a former spokesman for Cuomo, since 2016.
While the Southern District prosecutes many high profile crimes, the case can be handled by the Northern District, which covers Albany.
Contacted by The Post, Cuomo spokesman Peter Ajemian declined to comment on the potential conflict of interest and instead issued a statement on the Cuomo government’s eventual release of information to federal and state lawmakers.
“We informed the legislature that we needed to pause the request for information while prioritizing a request from the federal DOJ,” he said. “We provided the federal DOJ with the information requested comprehensively, after which we were able to begin to respond to the request of the state legislature, to which we now respond.”
DeRosa did not immediately return messages asking for comment on Saturday.
James Margolin, a spokesman for the Southern District, declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Dana Kennedy