One of the top advisers in the Cuomo administration, who allegedly pushed to hide nursing home death data, is known as a “defense minister” and an “enforcer” for the embattled governor.
Linda Leswell, a loyal Cuomo aide who heads the State Department of Financial Services, is among those who reviewed the Health Department report in July and removed the COVID-19 deaths of nursing-home residents in hospitals Instructed. The Wall Street Journal reported.
The amendments reportedly led to around 3,500 deaths in the nursing-home.
Cuomo’s office claims the data was extracted because “it was not adequately verified.”
Unlike Melissa Derasa – Cuomo’s top aide, who has also been asked for DOH report amendments – Leswell’s public profile remains very low despite being the head of the governor’s COVID-19 task force.
The 57-year-old, who is not married, is said to be devoted to Singou.
“A former Cuomo aide said,” She lived her life around him and his administration.
Another source who worked with him in the past described him as being “very smart” as well as “a temperate problem”.
Luswell has been on behalf of Cuomo since his days as the state’s attorney general, when he worked as his special counsel. He then worked as a “Chief Risk Officer” for Cuomo when he became governor and led a program to establish “special counsel” in state agencies to look for ethical issues.
After a stint working for a cancer charity in California, Leswell returned to the Cuomo administration in 2017 and served as head of staff and counselor to the governor before being named Superintendent of the Department of Financial Services in 2019 . Cuomo also appointed him to the MTA. Board that year.
During the 2018 trial of former Cuomo colleague Joseph Percoco, who was convicted of taking a bribe of $ 300,000, Leswell explained why he is known as the “Minister of Defense”.
She said that Cuomo gave her the nickname, while Percoco was in charge of “crime”.
He said His job was “to protect the trust of the employees, the governor and the public.”
Leswell was once a prosecutor with the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, the same office that is now investigating the handling of the Cuomo Administration’s nursing home during the epidemic.
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