A former New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, has been subpoenaed by the House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, the panel announced on Tuesday. Mr. Cuomo — should he choose to appear — will have to answer for his nursing home mandate policies that led to the unnecessary death of senior citizens.

“Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo implemented nursing home policies that had deadly consequences for New York’s most vulnerable population,” the chairman of the select subcommittee, Congressman Brad Westrup, says. 

“Not only did the former Governor put the elderly in harm’s way, but he also attempted to cover-up his failures by hiding the true nursing home death rate. It appears that politics, not medicine, was responsible for these decisions,” he added. “His testimony is crucial to uncover the circumstances that led to his misguided policies and for ensuring that fatal mistakes never happen again. It is well past time for Cuomo to stop dodging accountability to Congress and start answering honestly to the American people.”

The subpoena demands that the former governor appear for a private deposition on May 24. 

On March 25, 2020, Mr. Cuomo issued an executive order that forced nursing homes to take in patients regardless of whether or not they were infected with Covid. Thousands of senior citizens who lived in these nursing homes later died of the disease, and a report by the state attorney general Letitia James — a fellow Democrat — found that the governor’s office engaged in a cover-up after the fact. 

One of the governor’s top advisors, Melissa DeRosa, later told Democratic leaders in the state that the governor’s office withheld nursing home fatality data in August 2020 in order to protect themselves from a possible investigation by the Justice Department and to keep President Trump from weaponizing the issue during the 2020 campaign. 

“We froze because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you guys and what we start saying was going to be used against us, and we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation,” she said, according to audio obtained by the New York Post.