NY Rep. Malliotakis: AOC should have joined the call to investigate Cuomo 'sooner'

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., had should have called out Gov. Andrew Cuomo sooner for his mishandling of the coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., said Saturday.

"Honestly, I didn't think there'd be an issue where Alexandra Cosio-Cortez and I would agree so soon. I do think that she should have done it sooner," Malliotakis told "Fox & Friends."

The FBI and the Department of Justice are reportedly already investigating and have been since August, when an inquiry was initially sent to the governor. 

"So this should have come sooner from her, but I'm glad that she's joining the calls because the reality is these families do deserve justice, New Yorkers do want answers," Malliotakis said.

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Meanwhile, an Albany-based watchdog group says that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's nursing home directive was likely responsible for more than 1,000 additional resident deaths during the coronavirus pandemic, despite numerous denials by the administration that their order was heavily to blame. 

Cuomo's office has been silent on the contents of the report released by the nonprofit Empire Center for Public Policy on Thursday and reviewed by Fox News, which relies on the information provided to them by the New York State Department of Health (DOH). The governor is facing intense backlash over the scandal, including a federal probe into his administration's handling of the crisis. 

The focus on Cuomo comes as liberal CNN and the governor's brother, host Chris Cuomo, have given the Democrat's controversies little to no airtime. Previously, the network gave Chris Cuomo free rein to conduct friendly, comical interviews with the governor, who wrote a book about successfully handling the pandemic in the middle of the pandemic.

The watchdog group's analysis, which compared the death rates at facilities that admitted COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals to the rates at others that didn’t, suggests the controversial mandate by Cuomo is "associated with" more than one in six of 5,780 nursing deaths statewide between late March and early May.

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Malliotakis ripped Cuomo for claiming his underreporting of the coronavirus-related deaths was misinformation. 

The congresswoman claimed that the only misinformation came from the Cuomo administration when they "underreported the deaths by 50 percent and they underreported the number of coronavirus infected patients that were put in nursing homes by 40 percent." 

"We now know 99,000 individuals that were positive were put in 107 nursing homes around the country."

Malliotakis added: "He's been the one stonewalling this information. So only the legislature, the media, and of course, we have his chief of staff admitting to a cover-up because they were afraid of the Department of Justice."

Fox News' Vandana Rambaran contributed to this report.