The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation of Andrew M. Cuomo, a front-runner in the New York City mayoral race, after Republicans accused him of lying to Congress about decisions he made during the coronavirus pandemic as governor, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The inquiry, begun about a month ago by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, comes after senior Justice Department officials in February demanded the dismissal of an indictment of the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, on corruption charges.
That puts the Trump administration in the unusual position of having ended a criminal case against the leader of the nation’s largest city — Mr. Adams, who is running for re-election as an independent — and opened one into his chief rival, Mr. Cuomo, who is leading the Democratic primary field in the polls, in the span of a few months.
The existence of the investigation is sure to fuel further criticism that President Trump and his administration are wielding the Justice Department as a cudgel to achieve political ends and punish his perceived enemies.
Mr. Trump routinely calls for criminal inquiries of political foes and people who have crossed him, often based on what legal experts say are flimsy claims of wrongdoing. His appointees at the Justice Department have increasingly signaled a willingness to use their investigative and prosecutorial powers to carry out Mr. Trump’s wishes.
The people familiar with the details of the investigation into Mr. Cuomo spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it. A spokesman for the Justice Department and a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment, citing a general policy of not confirming or denying investigations.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, questioned the basis of the investigation. “We have never been informed of any such matter, so why would someone leak it now?” he said. “The answer is obvious: This is lawfare and election interference plain and simple — something President Trump and his top Department of Justice officials say they are against.”
Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Azzopardi continued, “testified truthfully to the best of his recollection about events from four years earlier, and he offered to address any follow-up questions from the subcommittee — but from the beginning this was all transparently political.”
Trump administration officials have insisted that it was the prior, Democratic administration that misused the Justice Department, “weaponizing” it for political ends. They have added that the leaders of the department are following facts to establish a “one-tier” justice system.
It is unclear what effect, if any, word of a federal criminal investigation by the Trump administration may have on Mr. Cuomo’s chances in the primary, which will be held June 24. On the campaign trail, Mr. Cuomo has called the president “a bully” and pledged to stand up to him, and it is possible that Democratic voters will view an investigation emanating from Mr. Trump’s administration as a badge of honor for the former New York governor.
The investigation raises the potential for the Justice Department to become even more enmeshed in city politics and further disrupted by internal disputes. When a senior department official ordered subordinates to drop the charges against Mr. Adams, who was elected as a Democrat, a host of career prosecutors objected and were either fired or quit in protest.
The senior official, Emil Bove III, said at the time that it was more important to have the mayor’s cooperation with federal deportation efforts. Career prosecutors viewed that reasoning as deeply suspicious, amounting to a kind of quid pro quo that traded away an important corruption case for political gain. Mr. Adams was charged with bribery and wire fraud, accused of trading city government favors for special treatment from Turkish officials. Those charges were dismissed last month.
The new investigation revisits a particularly tumultuous time of Mr. Cuomo’s tenure as governor. Early in the pandemic, in March 2020, his administration issued a directive that required nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients from hospitals. While that decision was later criticized as having put vulnerable populations at greater risk, the Cuomo administration insisted it had followed federal guidance at the time, as did many other states.
About a month ago, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, then led by Ed Martin, opened the investigation, the people said, in response to a longstanding referral by House Republicans. Mr. Martin left the job this month after failing to win enough support from Senate Republicans to be confirmed for the job.
In his four months in office, Mr. Martin announced investigations of Democrats and public institutions, frustrating many career prosecutors who worked in his office and questioned the legal rationale of those cases. He is now the subject of an ethics review by the District of Columbia bar.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington is now run by Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News host and prosecutor who has publicly accused Mr. Cuomo of criminal conduct surrounding the coronavirus in nursing homes.
In a 2021 segment on Fox News, Ms. Pirro excoriated Mr. Cuomo for what she said were criminal acts, saying he had given seniors “a death sentence.” She argued state prosecutors should investigate him for manslaughter and negligent homicide.
“You cannot escape the consequences of your intentional and reckless acts!” she said, angrily pointing at the camera. “You cannot escape your intentional coverup.” The two have a long history in New York politics — in 2006, Ms. Pirro unsuccessfully ran against Mr. Cuomo for state attorney general.
The new investigation stems from a referral made last year, and renewed this year, by Representative James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who is the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Mr. Comer publicly complained that Justice Department officials during the Biden administration had declined to pursue a case against Mr. Cuomo for what Mr. Comer has said were false statements to a subcommittee investigating New York’s coronavirus response.
Mr. Comer has argued that Mr. Cuomo lied when he denied editing or drafting a New York State Health Department report on nursing home deaths because of the pandemic. In his testimony, Mr. Cuomo said he wasn’t involved, but added that it was years ago and did not remember doing so.
In 2021, Mr. Cuomo resigned as governor amid a sexual harassment scandal and the looming threat of impeachment.
The federal investigation has been kept under wraps since its inception, and the Justice Department has traditionally sought to avoid taking overt, unnecessary investigative steps in the days leading up to an election.
This is not the first time the Justice Department under Mr. Trump has taken aim at Mr. Cuomo.
In the first Trump term, Justice Department officials began an investigation into coronavirus deaths at nursing homes in New York and other Democratic-run states. In that case, an inspector general report made public this year found that senior Justice Department officials had violated agency rules just before the 2020 election by divulging details of the inquiry.
In the earlier investigation, a later review by the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found that three department officials disregarded the department’s confidentiality and news media policy by “leaking to select reporters, days before an election, non-public” details of an open investigation involving nursing home deaths.
According to the report, on Oct. 17, 2020, a senior Justice Department official in the press office texted that the release of the information “will be our last play on them before election, but it’s a big one.” The Hatch Act bars federal employees from using their government positions to help a candidate or campaign.
Conservatives have long charged that the Cuomo administration deliberately obscured the number of coronavirus cases in nursing homes.
The inspector general found that Justice Department employees had been told to focus on New York and New Jersey, despite data showing that nursing homes in other states, like Texas and Indiana, had worse track records on patient care.
A separate review of how New York handled coronavirus data, conducted by the state attorney general, later found that nursing home deaths because of the coronavirus had been significantly undercounted, possibly by as much as 50 percent.
In the wake of the federal inspector general’s report, Mr. Azzopardi said that the findings confirmed that the Trump administration had “corrupted and misused the Department of Justice to influence the 2020 presidential election — and in the process weaponized the real pain of those who lost loved ones to Covid in a nursing home for their own craven electoral gain.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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