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- “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem,” Kushner reportedly said, according to Vanity Fair.
- At the time, Cuomo was taking to the airwaves with his daily press briefings to implore the federal government to stop the bidding wars.
- White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Vanity Fair’s account “inaccurate and disgusting.”
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
In addition to his “free market” comments that were jarring enough to spawn leaks from the March Situation Room meeting first reported by Vanity Fair, Jared Kushner also had harsh words for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem,” Kushner reportedly said, according to Vanity Fair.
Kushner was pushing back against those arguing for President Trump to use the Defense Production Act to help get PPE to states.
States were outbidding each other and exacerbating the shortage, which persists today, particularly among nurses.
At the time, Cuomo was taking to the airwaves with his daily press briefings to implore the federal government to stop the bidding wars.
"That's the CNN bulls---," Kushner said, according to Vanity Fair. "They lie."
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany denied the report in a statement to the magazine.
"This story is another inaccurate and disgusting partisan hit job. President Trump has consistently put the health of all Americans first."
While Cuomo took a star turn in the early stages of the pandemic with his briefings and saw a sizable bump in his approval rating, the governor has come under scrutiny more recently on three fronts.
First, state lawmakers told Insider they worried about Cuomo taking on "dictatorial powers" ceded to him by the legislature to handle the coronavirus.
Subsequently, Cuomo's handling of nursing homes became a major focus, particularly among Republicans who felt the governor was getting a free pass from mainstream media outlets.
An Associated Press investigation found New York State's internal study of nursing home deaths to be scientifically deficient, while others continued to take issue with Cuomo not providing clarity on an executive order that required nursing homes to accept recovered COVID patients from hospitals.
And most recently, a comprehensive Wall Street Journal investigation into Cuomo's approach to the virus in the winter and early March found that he "delayed the shutdown of the nation's biggest city and slowed the reaction time as the virus spread in nursing homes, contributing to the nation's highest death toll."
New York has lost 33,070 people to coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University of Medicine.