September 11, 2020: Trump Lied, Americans Died

 

9/11/20: Some people believe in science. Some people believe in mythic creatures like Bigfoot and “Nessie” from Loch Ness. There are some who believe in “Q” of QAnon renown.

 

Me? I believe in the people at CDC, who do public health for a living. They report today that the U.S. had another 46,045 cases of coronavirus. The trend is downward, however. The seven day average is closer to 35,000.

 

A glimmer of hope.

 

*

____________________

 

Cadet Bone Spurs meets Cadet Germaphobe.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP? He believes in lying. He heads up the most dishonest administration in history, putting Warren G. Harding & Co. to shame.

 

On this nineteenth anniversary of the attacks on 9/11, Politico reports that political hacks at the Department of Health and Human Services told CDC they had “the right to review and seek changes to weekly … scientific reports charting the progress of the coronavirus pandemic.”

 

According to sources who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, Politico was told Trump appointees had tried “to intimidate” scientists and “water down their communications.”

 

“The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists,” Politico explains. They “serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk.” 

 

So, let’s imagine you wanted to know how dangerous the coronavirus actually is. You could listen to scientists.

 

Or you could ask Bigfoot.

 

As we have learned, to our chagrin, listening to Bigfoot would be more productive than listening to the president. At least Bigfoot wouldn’t lie. Tape recordings from journalist Bob Woodward – who recorded the president in a number of calls – prove Trump would. They fill in details of what he knew, and when he knew it, to use a Watergate construct. On April 10, Trump tweeted happy news. The coronavirus was almost licked. “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!”

 

Big stock market gains were ahead. “We have a great chance for the really big bounce when the Invisible Enemy is gone!”

 

He knew at that moment, as the tapes prove, that the coronavirus was not in “full retreat” and wouldn’t be anytime soon. Because he was lying, tens of thousands more Americans would soon be “gone.” He knew. We don’t need “Q” to provide the truth. Woodward has the president on tape.

 

On April 13, the following exchange takes place during one of their phone conversations:

 

TRUMP: This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.

 

WOODWARD: Yes, yes, exactly.

 

TRUMP: So this rips you apart.

 

WOODWARD: This is a scourge. And – 

 

TRUMP: It is the plague.

 

In the time of Black Plague.

Trump knew how deadly this virus was. Yet, just days after this exchange, he was tweeting wildly, calling on the governors of Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia to “LIBERATE” their states. He demanded that they end stay-at-home orders and let the American people come out and play.

 

You know – come out – and take a chance at the plague.

 

Trump? He wasn’t taking any chances himself. In that April 13 tape, he tells Woodward that the plague is “so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t believe it.”  

He goes on to relate his own reaction when faced with flying germs, similar to his cowardice when he thought he might face flying shrapnel in Vietnam. Cadet Bone Spurs meets Cadet Germaphobe. “I was in the White House a couple of days ago, meeting with 10 people in the Oval Office and a guy sneezed – innocently, not a horrible, you know, just a sneeze – the entire room bailed out, okay?” the president explained. “Including me, by the way.” 

Something tells me: Trump bailed first and fastest, despite his girth. 

In a recent interview with Steven Colbert, Woodward told the host that he once asked Trump what he thought the job of the president was. “To protect the American people,” Trump said. 

Woodward tells Colbert, the president failed. He failed to tell the American people “the truth.”

 

* 

NOW WE LEARN that the protection racket continues. This time the hacks Trump has appointed, for just such a purpose, are trying to silence the experts, or fuzz up what they’re saying. Scientists know, and Trump knows, too, that we’re all at risk. So, the hacks have a plan. 

Protect Cadet Germaphobe. 

 

“Reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself.”

 

That same April, when Trump was telling Woodward the virus was the plague, Michael Caputo, as loyal a Trump toady as ever mired in the Washington muck, was handed the job of spokesman for Health and Human Services. That meant Caputo had authority over CDC communications. Politico reports that “there have been substantial efforts to align the reports” CDC releases with Trump’s statements regarding COVID-19. So, if Trump said bathing in disinfectant would keep us safe from the virus, or banging porn stars had therapeutic benefits, Caputo’s job would be to get scientists to marshal information to support the president’s ludicrous claims.

 

Or Caputo could just make sh*t up.

 

When the president touted the curative powers of hydroxychloroquine, scientists at CDC did what they could to push back. That meant it fell to Caputo (aided and abetted by the shills at Fox News) to bury a report, noting that there was no evidence hydroxychloroquine had any protective benefits. In fact, it sometimes causes harm. When the report finally surfaced – a month later – after it leaked – we learned that scientists had been clear. Trump’s magic elixir was a myth. “The potential benefits of these drugs do not outweigh their risks,” they said.

 

Caputo and Paul Alexander, another smarmy flunky, struck again when experts said it might not be safe to send children back to school. They insisted that the professionals were trying to “hurt the president” with their analysis. “CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening,” Alexander objected. “Very misleading by CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear.”  To follow the evidence and protect the children, maybe?

 

Alexander claimed the right of censorship, a Chinese communist style of running a government. “The reports must be read by someone outside of CDC like myself,” he announced, “and we cannot allow the reporting to go on as it has been, for it is outrageous. Its [sic] lunacy.”

 

No more reports should go out, he warned Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, “unless I read and agree with the findings how the CDC wrote it and I tweak it to ensure it is fair and balanced and ‘complete.’”

 

Caputo, himself,  sounded like “Q” at one point. He warned that the “Deep State” was at work inside CDC. “Our intention,” he announced, “is to make sure that evidence, science-based data drives policy through this pandemic – not ulterior deep state motives in the bowels of CDC.”

 

But he was lying, like the President of the United States. They knew the coronavirus was like the plague.

 

*

 

Another Trump appointee files a whistleblower complaint.

 

THE SAME DAY the story of Trump and Caputo and Alexander’s malfeasance broke, we learned that the hacks had struck again. Brian Murphy, a Trump appointee with honor still intact, filed a whistleblower complaint at the Department of Homeland Security. In his case, he claimed that other political appointees at DHS had,

  

o   Exaggerated, in 2019, the number of “terrorists” sneaking across our southern border, in order to support President Trump’s case for building a 100-foot-high wall.

o   Told intelligence experts to stop stressing the threat of Russian interference designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. 

o   Told them to stress Chinese and Iranian efforts to help Joe Biden’s campaign, instead. 

o   Downplayed the threat of domestic terrorism posed by white supremacist groups. (Kind of Trump’s base.)

 

A reporter for Vox, said he had sources who confirmed Murphy’s complaint. 

“That’s even been the instructions within the NSC [National Security Council],” a senior White House official told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “POTUS does not want to hear anything negative about Russia,” the official added, using an acronym for the president of the United States. A second source familiar with [NSC Adviser Robert C.] O’Brien’s directive also confirmed this. The White House denies this.

 

Of course, they do.

 

*

 

LUCKILY, the federal courts continue to operate, although in Trumpistan, if Trump wins a second term, they may be superfluous. A former federal judge and prosecutor named John Gleeson has issued a scathing denunciation of the Department of Justice’s decision to drop prosecution of a case against Gen. Michael T. Flynn. Flynn, you may remember, admitted to a charge of perjury. In return, he avoided several additional felony counts. Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the “Hack of Hacks,” the DOJ somehow decided it would be great if the entire case was dismissed.

 

 

“Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns.”

 

Siding with the trial judge who had refused to drop the case, Gleeson described the move by Barr and his minions as a “corrupt and politically motivated favor [emphasis added] unworthy of our justice system.”

 

According to Gleeson, calling the decision by DOJ to drop the Flynn case “highly irregular” would be “a study in understatement.”

 

Nor did Gleeson have any doubt where the push originated. “In the United States,” Judge Gleeson said, “Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty – twice, before two different judges – and whose guilt is obvious.”

 

 

FUN FACT – EVEN MORE RUSSIANS: To get a full sense of who Caputo is, remember. He’s the guy who set up a meeting with Roger Stone and a Russian, in the spring of 2016. That Russian was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton, but wanted $2 million to share it. Stone and Caputo both said later that they “forgot” the meeting. Stone lied to Congress and a grand jury and racked up seven felonies.

 

Caputo revised his testimony, avoided a perjury charge, and got a job in the Department of Health and Human Services. (See also: 9/13/20.)

 

FUN FACT – DERELICTION OF DUTY: Historian Allan Lichtman, professor of history at American University, and famous for accurately predicting presidential elections, responds to new revelations in Rage, Bob Woodward’s latest book. Trump’s refusal to face up to the danger represented by the coronavirus will be remembered, Dr. Lichtman says, as “the greatest dereliction of duty in the history of the U.S. presidency.”