Tag: Trump trying to weasel out of blame for COVID-19 deaths

Tensions flare over GOP’s Obama probes

The Hill logoTensions are flaring in the Senate as Republicans prepare to ramp up their investigations into Obama-era officials.

Amid public and private pressure from President Trump, GOP senators are increasingly embracing calls to use their congressional power to investigate some of Trump’s biggest grievances stemming from the Obama administration, including the origins of the Russia investigation, the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Hunter Biden.

Democrats argue Republicans are using their committee gavels to probe Trump’s political enemies, an effort they say is designed to hunt for political fodder against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, while inadvertently spreading Russian misinformation. Continue reading.

Trump’s new bombshell in the ‘Obamagate’ farce turns out to be another bust

AlterNet logoIn an apparent Senate and Team Trump effort to something something a new Trump-demanded Obama “scandal,” the Trump administration has declassified an additional portion of a previously disclosed email from Ambassador Susan Rice to herself documenting an Obama meeting with FBI Director James Comey and other top officials over the potential national security threat posed by Trump transition member Michael Flynn’s “frequent” private contacts with the Russian ambassador.

What’s the new disclosure show, then? That intelligence leaders were extremely alarmed by Flynn’s behavior, with Comey informing Obama that Flynn “potentially” represented a security risk severe enough that the Obama administration should avoid passing him sensitive information. While Obama wanted law enforcement and intelligence communities to handle their concerns “by the book,” Obama told Comey to “inform him” if anything came up that “should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team.”

The declassified portion can be found at Politico: Continue reading.

Add to list Trump describes medical researchers as enemies because he doesn’t like their results

Washington Post logoThe team that studied the coronavirus in veterans found no positive effect from hydroxychloroquine

There was a specific reason for President Trump’s sudden announcement on Monday that he was taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. His goal was to undermine a whistleblower who had raised questions about the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a whistleblower who claimed that it was his skepticism about the utility of the drug that led to his firing. How could hydroxychloroquine be as dangerous as former top vaccine official Rick Bright suggested, Trump offered, given that he himself was using it?

The revelation quickly prompted reporters to ask what evidence Trump had that the drug was at all efficacious in addressing the virus and disease it causes, covid-19. Simple, Trump replied: Lots of people called him and said it worked.

“The only negative I’ve heard was the study where they gave it — was it the VA?” Trump said, referring to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “With, you know, people that aren’t big Trump fans gave it.” He then went on to express surprise at this perceived disloyalty from VA, given the legislation he had signed to support it. (The legislation he mentioned was in fact first signed by President Barack Obama.) Continue reading.

Fact-checking Trump’s letter blasting the World Health Organization

Washington Post logoIn previous administrations, a letter to an international organization signed by the U.S. president generally would have been carefully vetted and fact-checked. But President Trump’s May 18 letter to World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus contains a number of false or misleading statements. Here’s a sampling, as well as a guide to some of his claims:

“The World Health Organization consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal. The World Health Organization failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts, even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself.”

Richard Horton, the Lancet’s editor in chief, said no such study existed. “Dear President Trump — You cite The Lancet in your attack on WHO,” Horton tweeted. “Please let me correct the record. The Lancet did not publish any report in early December, 2019, about a virus spreading in Wuhan. The first reports we published were from Chinese scientists on Jan 24, 2020.” Continue reading.

Add to list Asian American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus

Washington Post logoAcross the country, Asian Americans have reported a sharp increase in verbal abuse and physical attacks

Lucy Li tries not to let fear dictate her interactions with patients as she makes the rounds in the covid-19 intensive care unit. But the anesthesiology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital cannot erase the memory of what happened after work at the start of the pandemic.

A man followed the Chinese American doctor from the Boston hospital, spewing a profanity-laced racist tirade as she walked to the subway. “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?” Li recalled the man shouting. “What is wrong with you? Why the f— are you killing us?”

Stunned at first, then relieved she was not physically attacked, Li is now saddened and angered by the irony that she spends her days and nights helping save lives. Her work inserting tubes in patients’ airways has grown riskier since the coronavirus emerged — each procedure releasing droplets and secretions that could carry viral particles. Continue reading.

Trump: U.S. funding freeze to WHO could be permanent

He says the World Health Organization “is so clearly not serving America’s interests.”

President Donald Trump threatened to permanently end funding to the World Health Organization and pull out of the international body altogether in a letter blasting its coronavirus response and accusing its head of “political gamesmanship.”

The letter, which Trump revealed in a tweet Monday evening, listed a number of criticisms of the WHO’s initial response to the novel coronavirus in the early days of the outbreak in China.

He claimed the WHO “ignored credible reports of the virus” and accused the organization of acting too slowly and bowing to pressure from the Chinese government. Trump said that had Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus followed the example of the WHO during the SARS outbreak in 2003, during which it strongly criticized Chinese attempts to cover up the spread of the virus, “many lives could have been saved.” Continue reading.

The Lancet rebuts Trump’s coronavirus claims in WHO letter

The president’s statements about China and the coronavirus are “factually incorrect,” the general medical journal responded in a statement.

LONDON — A British medical journal Tuesday rebutted claims by President Donald Trump that the World Health Organization had consistently ignored reports of the virus spreading in China in early December, including ones featured in its publication.

In a letter published Monday, Trump excoriated WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying the organization had “failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts.”

“This statement is factually incorrect,” The Lancet, a general medical journal, responded in a statement. “The Lancet published no report in December, 2019, referring to a virus or outbreak in Wuhan or anywhere else in China.”

Acting DNI Deploys Pseudo-Document To Promote ‘Obamagate’ Melodrama

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump, provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance. Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.

Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way — or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.

We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy. Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign. He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own. But pro-Trump partisans — particularly at Fox — have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public. Continue reading.

A Sitting President, Riling the Nation During a Crisis

New York Times logoBy smearing his opponents, championing conspiracy theories and pursuing vendettas, President Tru​mp has reverted to his darkest political tactics in spite of a pandemic hurting millions of Americans.

Even by President Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistle-blower who was telling Congressthat the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael T. Flynn.

And Mr. Trump lashed out at Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a sympathetic columnist, Mr. Trump smeared him as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Mr. Trump’s campaign mocking Mr. Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline.

That was all on Thursday. Continue reading.

Trump administration sends list to Congress of Obama officials who ‘unmasked’ Flynn

The Hill logoThe Trump administration has sent Congress a list of dozens of Obama administration officials who they say asked for documents that led to the identity of former national security adviser Michael Flynn being “unmasked” from intelligence reports between the 2016 election and President Trump’s inauguration.

A copy of the list obtained by The Hill includes a who’s who of Obama-era officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, former FBI Director James Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan.

Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell declassified and then sent the list of names to GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) on Wednesday. Continue reading.