House investigation reveals how Trump aides bullied CDC staff to downplay Covid-19 threat

A damning new report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus investigating the Trump administration’s response to the Covid crisis unearthed new details that describe how top aides in the White House bullied Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff in service of the former president’s political goals.

“Evidence obtained by the Select Subcommittee documents how Trump Administration officials usurped control of CDC communications and blocked public health officials from providing accurate information about the coronavirus to the American people,” the report released on Monday by the committee, which is being led by Democratic Rep Jim Clyburn, began.

In its third investigation into the government response to the coronavirus pandemic, the panel also uncovered evidence that showed how the Trump administration systematically, and oftentimes with great success, attempted to stifle the scientific integrity of the federal agency tasked with handling the public health response.

The committee outlined how this included, among other issues: the instalment of “political operatives who sought to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic and retaliated against career officials who contradicted Trump Administration talking points”; overruling scientists in order to undercut the guidance being issued by the CBC to further political goals; attempts to change and manipulate the reports being published by the CBC and further attempts to quash any evidence that revealed this coverup; and reallocated money from the federal agency in order to prop up pro-Trump messages about the vaccine campaign.

In sum, the third inquiry into the former president’s administration and its conduct while handling the massive public health crisis has revealed, in the words of Rep Clyburn, an “unprecedented campaign of political interference in the federal government’s pandemic response”.

“As today’s report shows, President Trump and his top aides repeatedly attacked CDC scientists, compromised the agency’s public health guidance, and suppressed scientific reports in an effort to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus,” said the Democrat in a statement attached to the report, titled, ‘It Was Compromised’: The Trump Administration’s Unprecedented Campaign to Control CDC and Politicize Public Health During the Coronavirus Crisis.

The South Carolina congressman went on to further eviscerate the Trump administration by emphasising how outsized a role politics played while the nation’s death toll continued to climb into the hundreds of thousands.

“This prioritization of politics, contempt for science, and refusal to follow the advice of public health experts harmed the nation’s ability to respond effectively to the coronavirus crisis and put Americans at risk,” he wrote, adding that the upshot of the report underscored how the priority for lawmakers now is to “continue to work to safeguard scientific integrity and restore the American people’s trust in our public health institutions.”

The 91-page report highlights key moments from the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, with evidence scoured from more than 200,000 pages of documents, more than 100 hours of interviews with more than a dozen senior officials directly involved in executing the pandemic response at various federal agencies, including the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House.

In one of the more stunning examples unearthed by the subcommittee, it details how the one-term president installed Michael Caputo – a campaign aide who was also a known confidant of GOP provocateur Roger Stone – as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HHS. In this role, the untrained public health official steered Covid-19 messaging to fit with Mr Trump’s narrative and was accused by CDC personnel of using “bully-ish behavior” to make those in the agency “feel threatened.”

At one point during his tenure, which began in April 2020, Mr Caputo informed personnel that he was “very displeased” with the statements made by a top scientist during a June 2020 telebriefing, noting that they were “too alarming.” That scientist, Deputy Director of Infectious Diseases Dr Jay Butler, told the subcommittee that his presence “was not really asked back” afterwards.

For his part, Mr Caputo has pushed back against the conclusions drawn in the report, claiming to The Independent that the report was the by-product of “misinformation”.

“I was not invited to interview for this garbage report. They also have all my emails including exculpatory messages which prove they are lying,” Mr Caputo claimed in an emailed statement, adding that his “testimony and emails” were also excluded from the report.

The former assistant secretary for public affairs also insisted that he does not know Mr Butler, emphasising that he “couldn’t pick him out of a lineup”.

“Perhaps one of my staff offended him, but I don’t know him from Adam.”

In a separate finding, the report outlines how vital public health reports from the CDC were blocked or stymied from being released after an initial report from February 2020 was found to “anger” then-president Trump, who asked that all future messaging be run by the Office of the Vice President.

In an interview with the subcommittee, CDC Director Dr Robert Redfield confirmed this order of events and noted how it created an unnecessarily layer of confusion to an already tense situation. During this time, he said, “none of our briefings were approved”, despite the agency believing that the public had a right “to have heard from the public health leaders.”

The administration was allegedly also responsible for manipulating some of the public health information that was being distributed through the CDC and other federal agencies tasked with researching and understanding the, at the time, still little-understood virus that causes Covid-19 to spread among people.

The administration reportedly attempted to not only change the publication process of scientific reports, the subcommittee wrote, but also manipulate and even in some cases block the dissemination of at least 19 reports thought to be politically dangerous for Mr Trump.

In one instance, the report details how documents showcase how officials from HHS successfully attempted to alter a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) about the early spread of the virus.

“HHS political appointees were ultimately successful in altering or delaying the release of at least five scientific reports, as well as pressuring CDC to change the editorial process of the MMWR,” the report reads, adding that “HHS Secretary Alex Azar directed CDC to change the MMWR editorial process in May 2020, because he and other Trump Administration officials were ‘not happy’” that the findings weren’t a “politically advantageous” conclusion desired by the officials.

“If the CDC would not get in line, then HHS would take control of approving the publication of the MMWRs,” CDC Chief of Staff Kyle McGowan and Deputy Chief of Staff Amanda Campbell said to the Select Subcommittee about Secretary Azar.

This latest report released by the House subcommittee is the third instalment, with the previous two reports also detailing the insidious policies and actions carried out by the Trump administration that sought to undermine the work of public health officials during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.