For Jim - Andrew Cuomo re Nursing homes.

[PaulS]

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his top aides were facing new allegations on Friday that they covered up the scope of the death toll in the state’s nursing homes from the coronavirus, after admissions that they withheld data in an effort to forestall potential investigations into state misconduct.

The latest revelations came in the wake of private remarks by the governor’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and a cascading series of reports and court orders that have nearly doubled the state’s official toll of nursing home deaths in the last two weeks.

The disclosures have left Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, scrambling to contain the political fallout, as lawmakers of both parties call for censure, including stripping the governor of his emergency powers during the pandemic, federal and state investigations and resignations of Ms. DeRosa and other top officials.

In a conversation first reported on by the New York Post, Ms. DeRosa told a group of top lawmakers on Wednesday during a call to address the nursing home situation that “basically, we froze,” after being asked last summer for information by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice.

At the time, the governor’s office was simultaneously facing requests from the State Legislature for similar information.

“We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, and what we start saying, was going to be used against us and we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation,” Ms. DeRosa told lawmakers, according to a partial transcript obtained by The New York Times.

The news of Ms. DeRosa’s remarks sparked a flurry of angry denunciations, including from Mr. Cuomo’s fellow Democrats.

“This is a betrayal of the public trust,” State Senator Andrew Gounardes, a Democrat from Brooklyn, said on Twitter. “There needs to be full accountability for what happened.”

Condemnation was even louder from Republicans, who have seized on Mr. Cuomo’s performance on nursing homes — where more than 10,000 New Yorkers have died during the pandemic, but the state long stalled on releasing full data — as evidence of duplicity or even criminality.