If the Justice Department investigates the Cuomo Administration’s refusal to provide data on residency deaths, a huge conflict would arise if the case were handed over to Manhattan’s powerful federal prosecutor.
This is because Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, is the mother-in-law of Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, the figure at the center of the emerging scandal.
The outcry to demand an investigation into the cover-up of thousands of deaths has intensified after The Post reported DeRosa’s impressive admission that the Cuomo administration withheld information from state lawmakers over the summer because it was concerned that federal prosecutors “used it against us.”
By the end of August, the Justice Department had begun an investigation into the deaths of nursing homes in New York and elsewhere.
“And basically, we froze,” DeRosa, who is the governor’s secretary and his closest confidant, admitted to state lawmakers in a conference call.
“We weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you and what we started saying would be used against us and we weren’t sure if there would be an investigation,” he told lawmakers in a conference call Wednesday.
DeRosa’s admission caused an observer to say, “You froze before or after you called your mother-in-law.”
Cuomo has been widely criticized for his tenure at the start of the pandemic that poorly equipped nursing homes accept the recovery of patients with hospital-discharged coronoaviruses, even though the elderly are the most susceptible to the disease. mortal.
Among those calling for a federal investigation on Friday was former Gov. George Pataki, who called the cover-up “reprehensible.”
Northeastern parliamentarian Elise Stefanik, a fellow at DeRosa High School, said “Governor Cuomo, the governor’s secretary, and his senior team must be prosecuted immediately, both by the state attorney general of New York as by the United States Department of Justice “.
Strauss, 73, became Manhattan’s top prosecutor after President Trump said he would fire Geoffrey Berman in June 2020, and Berman agreed to resign as long as Strauss, who had been his deputy, became the state prosecutor. Units.
Berman called her “the smartest, most principled and effective lawyer I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.”
DeRosa, 38, has been married to Strauss’ son Matthew Wing, 37, a former Cuomo spokesman since 2016.
Although the southern district is prosecuting many high-profile crimes, the case could be handled by the northern district, which covers Albany.
In contact with The Post, Cuomo spokesman Peter Ajemian declined to comment on the potential conflict of interest and issued a statement on the possible dissemination of information from the Cuomo administration to the feds and state legislators.
“We informed the legislature that we needed to stop their request for information while prioritizing a request from the federal DOJ,” he said. “We provided the federal Department of Justice with the information they thoroughly requested, after which we were able to begin responding to the request of the state legislature, to which we have now responded.”
DeRosa did not immediately return messages seeking comment Saturday.
James Margolin, a spokesman for the southern district, declined to comment.
Additional reports from Dana Kennedy