Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) called for an investigation Wednesday into New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) over the number of deaths in the state’s nursing homes during the coronavirus pandemic.
A transcript of Van Drew’s conversation with Newsmax’s John Bachman is as follows:
REP. JEFF VAN DREW: I don’t know if [Murphy] will be exactly the same fate [as Cuomo]. Obviously, Governor Cuomo has an awful lot going on.
JOHN BACHMAN: By fate I should mean be under investigation — a federal investigation — the attorney general of New York looking at Cuomo for this.
REP. VAN DREW: That’s appropriate because, really, many of us never understood at the time why you would take people that are already debilitated, already somewhat sick, already have problems, mix them with other people who are very weak and aren’t doing well. You know that you’re going to have issues if you do that. Even then, we knew that much about COVID, and we know that much about diseases in general, and we know that much about the aging process.
It always seemed like a bad idea. It’s strange how it happened, and people were very uncomfortable with it and we saw that in the beginning the huge number of deaths that we had in New Jersey, the majority of them were from that very situation. A lot of people died because of what the governor did, and I think when it comes to human rights, it deserves a thorough investigation, it deserves due diligence to find out why it was done, how it was done, what the reasonings were and I think that is going to happen. I would hope it would.