NEW YORK — A pair of damaging reports to the Cuomo Administration emerged Thursday night with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both reporting that Governor Andrew Cuomo's senior advisers pushed state health officials to rewrite a July report on nursing home deaths.

Both papers say Cuomo's aides altered that report to deliberately undercount the number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19. 

The report initially included the fact that more than 9,000 nursing home residents had died by the time the report had been written in June.

Aides to the governor reportedly saw that number and altered it, lowering the number to 6,400 deaths.

That way, only deaths at nursing home facilities would count toward the total, and not those that happened at hospitals. 

An order given by the governor on March 25th prevented nursing homes from turning away residents who were discharged from hospitals after being treated for COVID-19.

The undercount is now the subject of a federal probe by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn.

The governor's office put out a response from his special counsel and senior adviser saying, “The out of facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified – this did not change the conclusion of the report, which was and is that the March 25 order was ‘not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities."