MSNBC’s Ari Melber Slams Cuomo for Comments About Nursing Home Deaths: ‘An Incriminating Defense’
MSNBC’s Ari Melber dove into the scandal surrounding New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over nursing home covid deaths on Monday night.
Cuomo held a press conference Monday responding to the serious criticism he’s received over the number of nursing home deaths, particularly — as Melber referenced multiple times — after the New York state attorney general’s office released a report last month finding that numbers were undercounted.
Melber brought up that report and the new allegations from a Cuomo aide of withholding the data, before reminding viewers how Cuomo “used to emphasize that kind of transparency” in briefings and interviews he did early on. He showed a montage of Cuomo’s public comments, including some of his many briefings and one of his interviews with his brother on CNN.
“The issue here is that only full transparency appears to have come to the light under pressure,” Melber said. “What’s striking is after this partial report revealed these problems with counting the deaths, then the state responded by actually changing the numbers of deaths from nursing homes.”
As he clarified to viewers, “What was at issue was the evidence of an allegation that maybe things were being deliberately misconstrued to play down the nursing home death rate problem. And the facts matter. Everyone needs facts, especially in a live emergency of a public health care crisis like this.”
He showed a clip of the governor remarking “who cares?” in comment last month before commending New York AG Letitia James for showing her independence with the release of that damning report.
As for Cuomo’s “who cares?” comment a few weeks ago, Melber added this:
“Governor Cuomo said who cares about the numbers. That is the kind of defense that can sound compelling because you say, well, yeah, if the total number was right, who does care? But it’s also a little bit of an incriminating defense because if nobody cares and there were no differences, you could have released all the accurate category numbers to begin with. What it appears and what people now from inside the Cuomo administration are saying is: ‘Who cares? They did.’ And they wanted to downplay the fact there was a nursing home problem.”
You can watch above, via MSNBC.
