New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s book publisher is halting its promotion of the book he wrote about his handling of the coronavirus pandemic following the announcement of a federal probe into the Cuomo administration’s disastrous nursing home policy.
Crown Publishing Group said this week it has no intention of reprinting or reissuing Cuomo’s memoir, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, which was released last October, according to the New York Times.
The moves by the publisher resulted from “the ongoing investigation into [New York’s] reporting of Covid-related fatalities in nursing homes,” Gillian Blake, publisher of Crown Publishing Group, said in a statement.
Cuomo’s administration has been embroiled in scandal ever since one of the governor’s top aides, Melissa DeRosa, admitted to Democratic state lawmakers that Cuomo intentionally withheld the true number of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes to avoid a federal investigation.
Further reporting confirmed that Cuomo’s administration purposefully under-counted the number of deaths by nearly 50%.
Cuomo, a Democrat, was heralded by many in the leftist media last year as a “true” leader in contrast to the pandemic response by then-President Donald Trump.
He held regular press conferences scheduled opposite the daily White House briefings and even made frequent appearances on his brother‘s CNN show, where the two engaged in fraternal banter as other New York families perished.
The decision to publish a triumphant book during the middle of the coronavirus pandemic was heavily criticized by both Republicans and Democrats, but Cuomo defended his book, arguing it offered a “blueprint for going forward.”
He has continued to defend his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including its policy requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients. He has blamed the federal government for the policy.
In his book, Cuomo claimed Republicans and Trump’s administration had manufactured outrage about his nursing home policy.
“Republicans needed an offense to distract from the narrative of their botched federal response—and they needed it badly,” Cuomo wrote in the book. “So they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for nursing home deaths.”
Cuomo argued later in the same chapter that “the facts totally defeated the Republican claim.”
