Did Steinhardt flip-flop on COVID investigation into nursing home deaths?

By Rubashov

Whoever convinced Doug Steinhardt to enter the gubernatorial race by announcing that “I’m not a politician, at all”, has a lot to answer for, because it moved up the internecine self-immolation of Republican-on-Republican from the Spring of 2021 to December 2020.  As a preparation for this year’s race against Democrat incumbent Phil Murphy, it makes as much sense as Bridgegate did for the 2016 presidential race.  Perhaps both share the same author?
 
Steinhardt, the former NJGOP Chairman, seems genuinely surprised when people don’t get in line with the obvious lie that he is “not a politician, at all”.  To make matters worse, after the guffaws over that howler subsided, Steinhardt insisted that he – a partner with former Governor Jim Florio, a Camden County political boss, and the far-Left Mayor of Hoboken – is not part of the same Trenton swamp and somehow “different” from “the same Trenton insider politicians who run for governor”.  Just how many pissed themselves with laughter over that incredible, brazen bit of utter bullshit we’ll probably never know.
 
Why lie when the truth would do just as well?  Doug Steinhardt is a smart man.  He has a story worth telling.  So why has he allowed his campaign to be hijacked by those who insist on telling his story their way?  Why the suspension of reality?  It’s not supposed to be a Kafka novel.

The level of Steinhardt’s discomfort over the situation he’s been bundled into by his team was indicated by a New Year’s Eve attack launched against… no, not the incumbent Democrat, but rather on his Republican opponent. That attack claimed that the opponent didn’t support Trump for President in 2016. Well, neither did Steinhardt. Not at first, anyway. He supported Chris Christie for President… the same Chris Christie who was, himself, quite critical of Donald Trump. And he remains so.

Both Christie and Trump are evolutionary politicians. This is an old story in American politics. Most of our Founders started out as monarchists but ended as republicans. You can only add to your story – evolve – you cannot take away from it, insist that what is, never was. That is called lying. To accuse someone of flip-flopping, of a change of mind, this is one thing. To lie… that’s something else.

So the 2021 contest for the Republican gubernatorial nomination is underway and threatening to obscure the real contest – and that is to defeat the Democrat incumbent and his disastrous, reactionary policies. The GOP candidates in this drama don’t matter so much as their consiglieres do and we humbly suggest they keep it about Phil Murphy.

Steinhardt’s principal consiglieri seems set on making the Republican primary about Donald Trump – turning it into the kind of “purity spiral” that mirrors the “woke” identity politics at work in society today. Instead of addressing real issues that impact voters, it offers an outbidding process that provides platitudes instead of solutions. A tribute band instead of a new act.

Perhaps the New Jersey GOP would benefit from a discussion about purity – but before it begins such a discussion, the NJGOP might want to formally adopt the National Republican Party platform as its own. That’s the 2016 platform… because under the direction of Steinhardt’s consigliere (and Trump’s Democrat-turned-Republican son-in-law), the national party went without a platform this election, scrapping the planks put there by Ronald Reagan (whose own re-election effort won 49 states, including New Jersey).

Perhaps knowing what one stands for – a declaration of principles – might have helped. It certainly did for our Founders. That “WE… The People” thing was sure better than making it about General George Washington – as undoubtedly great a man as he was. Writing it down – as in the Declaration of Independence or the Reagan Platform or the Contract with America – sure beat the heck out of a few consiglieres popping up on social media to assure us all was cool.

The “leader” obsession being promoted by some is unworthy of a major political party in a country that calls itself an advanced Western democracy. Ideas last longer than men. Besides, there are other issues that are just as important as who loved Trump first… or best… or longest. These other issues should not be neglected. One such issue is all those families of all those dead people at all those nursing homes in New Jersey. What about them? While politicians are pulling out their willies in endless comparison, will those families be forgotten?

Half the COVID-19 deaths in New Jersey came from long-term-care facilities like nursing and veterans’ homes. Sussex County was hit particularly hard. So, it was natural for the county government to want to ask questions, to get to the bottom of why their people died.

A big part of the fault lay with the Murphy administration and the Governor’s Executive Order 103, which sent COVID-19 into nursing and veterans’ homes. In a March 31 letter, Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli told hospital and nursing home administrators that patients could not be denied admission to post-acute care facilities because of a positive COVID-19 diagnosis:

“On March 9, 2020 Governor Philip D. Murphy issued Executive Order No. 103, declaring a Public Health Emergency in New Jersey as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to respond to the increase in positive cases there is an urgent need to expand hospital capacity to be able to meet the demand for patients with COVID-19 requiring acute care. As a result, this directive is being issued to clarify expectations post-acute care settings receiving patients/residents returning from hospitalization and for accepting new admissions.

The New Jersey Department of Health directs hospital discharge planning staff and post-acute care facilities to carefully review this guidance with all staff directly involved in patient/resident admissions, transfers, and discharges.

… all post-acute care settings must comply…

No patient/resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the post-acute care setting solely based on a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. Persons under investigation for COVID-19 who have undergone testing in the hospital shall not be discharged until results are available. Post-acute care facilities are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized patient/resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

Senator Joe Pennacchio noted: “New Jersey has continually cited testing as a way to identify and respond to COVID-19. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense that we would specifically not want to test patients who would enter isolated nursing homes containing our most vulnerable population.”

The population of nursing homes makes up less than 0.7% of the state’s population, 50% of New Jersey’s COVID-19 deaths have occurred in nursing homes. New Jersey leads the nation in COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes.

he State of New Jersey has direct regulatory oversight over nursing facilities and direct oversight over veterans’ homes. In Sussex County, whistleblowers started coming forward with talk of how state oversight was lax and nursing home practices suspect. Did that mean that in addition to making matters worse with Executive Order 103, the Murphy administration was doubly at fault for being negligent as well?

We may never find out. The Sussex County Freeholders (now Commissioners) brought in special counsel Doug Steinhardt to help them structure an inquiry into the nursing homes. Freeholders Josh Hertzberg and Herb Yardley, a career county health officer, were pushing for answers. But then reports came through that Steinhardt had changed his mind on the inquiry and that he warned the Freeholders they could be held personally liable for even looking into the suggestion that the deaths might, in part, be due to nursing home administration negligence. Reportedly, Freeholder Director Sylvia Petillo threatened to quit. As the death toll mounted, county government beat a hasty retreat. The inquiry was dropped and never talked about again.

Meanwhile, private civil lawsuits have replaced abortive legislative investigations and county inquiries as the best hope of getting to the bottom of why over 7,000 New Jersey residents died of COVID-19 in the state’s nursing and veterans’ homes. The media is assisting these efforts through its news coverage – even though powerful forces are working to suppress it. ABC News Nightline highlighted the victims of just one of the nursing facilities involved. This facility, in Andover Township, Sussex County, saw dozens of deaths…

At about the 9:35 mark in the video, a letter appears from a managing director at Mercury, LLC, a political consulting/ lobbying/ media relations firm that boasts as its partners the former Chiefs of Staff of both New Jersey’s United States Senators and the chief political strategist to a former New Jersey Governor. Like so many similar firms these days, Mercury is a mix of Democrats and Republicans. Like true denizens of the insider swamp, in their world there is no Red or Blue… only green.

Yes, Mercury is handling “crisis management” for the owners of the nursing home where all those victims – the “blessed souls” Governor Murphy refers to at his COVID press conferences – died in horrible circumstances. They claim nothing unusual happened to cause all those deaths, nothing to see here, move on, bury the dead, shut-up. And they just might get their way.

They’ve brought in a powerhouse New York City law firm – the same firm that Governor Murphy used to defend his administration in the Katie Brennan rape inquiry. The attorney defending the Andover facility is New Jersey’s former Attorney General… and the state’s investigation into what happened and who is at fault is being conducted by New Jersey’s current Attorney General. How many current investigators and lawyers in the state A.G.’s office today were around just a few years ago, when their old boss was running the show? How many are thinking about careers in corporate “crisis management”?

All these high-powered Trenton insiders raises the profile around questions into why now-gubernatorial candidate Doug Steinhardt advised county government to drop their inquiry. Candidate Steinhardt raised the issue himself, last week, when he committed to naming a special prosecutor to launch an independent probe of deaths in state-run veterans’ homes. The New Jersey Globe noted:

“Steinhardt made his pledge one day after New Jersey Veterans of Foreign Wars State Commander Brian Wiener bashed Gov. Phil Murphy for failing to protect the safety of nearly 200 veterans who died from COVID-19 complications this year.”

Senator Mike Testa also called for a probe: “The decisions that impacted veterans’ homes and nursing homes must be scrutinized and evaluated by outside investigators. This is not the time to cover-up flaws in the system, it is time to identify them and make corrections.”

In May, Steinhardt asked the Democrat-controlled Legislature to investigate COVID deaths in long-term care facilities, which went nowhere. He followed this up in June by asking the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Murphy administration’s handling of long-term care facilities during the pandemic. How this request will be handled under a Biden administration is questionable. In between those actions and last week’s call for an investigation, the families of those who died lost their best opportunity to get answers from whistleblowers and others – who could have then passed that information along to federal regulators and investigators. That was through the inquiry that Sussex County wanted.

If Doug Steinhardt wants to place the focus back where it belongs – on the Murphy administration and the Democrat incumbent – and if he wants to give his campaign a big boost while helping all those families and getting justice for all who died, he should go back to the Sussex County Freeholders, now called County Commissioners, and lead the way on that inquiry. It’s the right thing to do and it’s the smart thing to do. So what’s standing in the way?

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

George Orwell

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