BROOKLYN, NY – Peter Arbeeny and his brother Daniel, who lost their beloved father Norman in a nursing home, Janice Dean, whose mother-in-law and father-in-law died in a nursing home, and Vivian Zayas and Alexa Rivera from Voices for Seniors, which was born out of the loss of grandparents, parents, siblings, and spouses in nursing homes during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, regarding the DOJ Office of Inspector General’s April 7, 2025 letter regarding the serious mistakes with the December 2024 release of the Biden Administration’s OIG report titled “An Investigation of Alleged Misconduct by Senior DOJ Officials for Leaking Department Investigative Activities Concerning COVID-19 in Nursing Homes to Members of the News Media in October 2020.”
The Arbeenys, who also spoke on behalf of the other relatives, said, “The OIG’s response missed the point. We were not raising allegations of waste, fraud or abuse. We were pointing out serious factual errors in the OIG’s report. The gaslight governor continues to weaponize the Biden DOJ IG report against the nursing homes families, which he did in a recent New York Times article.”
“As nursing home advocates, our focus is the 15,000 residents of New York nursing homes who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we demand that the truth be told without a partisan lens,” said Peter Arbeeny. “The Biden OIG report was gravely flawed, with so many obvious mistakes that it makes us wonder if it was written to fit a partisan narrative. Among other factual errors, it stated that the Cuomo administration’s March 25, 2020 directive, which sent 9,000 COVID- positive patients into ill-prepared nursing homes, was ‘largely consistent’ with federal guidelines. This is clearly untrue, as we showed in our original letter.“
“We hope you see, based on the evidence presented in our letter, that the OIG’s 2024 report was completely and factually wrong and needs to be corrected,” stated Daniel Arbeeny.
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