Accusing Gov. Andrew Cuomo of "playing three-card Monte with grandma" and "injecting the virus right back into nursing homes," Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called out Democrats' failures during the pandemic compared to Florida's successes.
"You really do see in New York and Florida a tale of two governors, a tale of two states," Gaetz told Fox News' "Justice w/Judge Jeanine"
Gaetz told host Judge Jeanine Pirro that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis permitted the younger, healthier residents to live their lives while protecting the vulnerable.
"Whereas in New York, they destroyed small business, they've destroyed education, they hindered the development of young people – and then the people they were supposed to be taking care of the most, they put in the most peril," Gaetz added of Gov. Cuomo's early pandemic mandate of ordering nursing homes to take COVID-19 positive patients.
Gov. Cuomo is facing scrutiny for allegedly covering up nursing home death totals to avoid a Trump administration Justice Department investigation.
"I would add obstruction of justice to the potential violations of federal criminal law," Gaetz said. "Here you had Gov. Cuomo potentially destroying records that evidenced this scheme that was a very deadly one."
And "the media is absolutely culpable in advancing this mythology of Cuomo," he added.
"The facts keep getting uglier and uglier both for the governor of New York and the media," he continued. "Now, it wasn't just Ron DeSantis they were smearing. At the time we were going through a presidential election, while they were promoting Andrew Cuomo as the great oracle of response to the coronavirus, they were conducting the flu d’etat against our president, acting as though everything he was doing was causing this virus to be more deadly.
"The reality is 45th president put us on the path to the fastest, safest vaccine development the world has ever known."
Gaetz added, "we're only starting to unearth the extent to which Gov. Cuomo cost lives."
"So someone could get infected in a nursing home and die in a hospital, but they cooked the books to make that a death in a hospital and not a nursing home death," Gaetz said. "And they were doing it to cover up the choices that they made that put blood on their hands."
Gaetz finished with a statement of "no confidence" in the Biden administration Justice Department in holding Gov. Cuomo accountable.
"That has become an institution of political hackery," he said. "There is a longstanding tension, though, that exists between attorneys general in the state of New York and governors, and Andrew Cuomo knows that well. He rather famously bristled and had conflict with the governor when he was attorney general. So, I am actually more confidence in the state of New York pursuing this than I am the U.S. Department of Justice.
"You've already seen Joe Biden give Gov. Cuomo the warm embrace at the White House. That was a signal to his Department of Justice that for the sake of politics they do not want criminal accountability in this case."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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