Washington – The Department of Justice is carrying out a criminal investigation into former governor Andrew Cuomo, a leader in the New York City Mayor’s career, about his testimony to Congress last year, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The Republicans of the House of Representatives had requested a federal investigation into Cuomo, a Democrat, arguing that he lied to the House Supervision Committee last year when he said he had not been involved in reviewing a report from the State Health Department on the management of the state of the Coronavirus pandemic when he was governor.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment on Tuesday night. The New York Times first reported the investigation.
Rich Azzopardi, spokesman for Cuomo, questioned the moment of the news.
“We have never been informed of any issue of this type, so why would someone filter it now? The answer is obvious: this is the law and simple and simple electoral interference, something that President Trump and his senior officials of the Department of Justice say they are against them,” Azzopardi said in a statement.
He also defended the testimony of the Cuomo Congress.
“Governor Cuomo sincerely testified the best of his memory about the events of four years before, and offered to address any monitoring question of the subcommittee, but from the beginning this was transparently political,” said Azzopardi.
The committee led by the Republicans said that he had questioned Cuomo about whether he knew people outside the health department who played roles in the writing or editing of the review; Cuomo indicated that he did not.
A former Cuomo executive assistant had testified that the notes written in a draft report seemed to be in his letter, the committee said. He also presented an email of June 2020 aimed at employees in the governor’s office that the “Editions of the Governor are attached for review.”
Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021 after the office of the state attorney general Letitia James published a report that discovered that he had sexually harassed multiple women, including the previous assistants, and the State Assembly launched a political trial investigation. Cuomo has denied the accusations in the James report.
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The United States Prosecutor’s Office for the Columbia district launched the investigation against former Fox News presenter Jeanine Pirro, replaced Ed Martin as an interim prosecutor of the United States, according to the person familiar with the matter.
Martin, who revealed on his last day in the position that faces an investigation by the Washington Disciplinary Advisor Office, said last week he planned to “embarrass” the people to whom the Department of Justice did not charge with crimes, a great deviation from the protocol of the Department of Justice.
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, several officials of the Department of Justice resigned from the management of a federal case against the Mayor of New York, Eric Adams, a Democrat who seeks re -election as an independent.
Trump administration officials wanted the case of corruption against Adams to fall after it began to cooperate with the Trump administration on the application of immigration. The deputy attorney general of the action of the action, Emil Bove, said that criminal investigation was hindering Adams’s ability to address “illegal immigration and violent crimes.”
Last month, a federal judge permanently dismissed the charges against Adams, saying that possible future positions could not be used as “leverage” on him.
