- The Secretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, has resigned the day after giving a speech to the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt in which he blasted their former captain for leaking a letter to the media. In the letter, the captain expressed grave concerns that not enough was being done to protect the crew from the coronavirus. Mr. Modly attacked Captain Crozzier’s character, which was not received well by the crew.
- Director of the National Trade Council, Peter Navarro, said his economics PhD qualified him to read statistical data about chloroquine in response to a question of why he thought he knew more about the drug’s efficacy than Dr. Anthony Fauci who has spent decades studying infectious diseases. Despite Navarro’s claim, there is still no evidence the drug is useful in treating Covid-19.
- Navarro wrote a memo in late January circulated in the White House predicting that the coronavirus could turn into a devastating pandemic, costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of dead. The president is now claiming both that no one could have predicted such a thing and that he never downplayed the seriousness of the virus. It was nearly a month after Navarro wrote his memo that Trump said there were only 15 cases that would soon be going down to zero.
- Trump met with Fox News host Laura Ingraham and two doctors who appear on her show to talk about using chloroquine to treat Covid-19, despite there being no evidence it works.
- Days after firing an Inspector General for properly turning over the Ukraine whistleblower report, Trump has removed Inspector General Glenn Fine from the committee overseeing the disbursement of stimulus funds to businesses. He’s also been attacking Inspector General Christi Grimm who recently issued a report which was highly critical of the government’s Covid-19 response. In a tweet today, the president criticized Grimm for not examining the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak. This was odd as Grimm was not Inspector General at the time. In fact, the HHS IG did issue a lengthy report about the Swine Flu outbreak.
- Kayleigh McEnany will replace Stephanie Grisham to become Trump’s fourth press secretary. McEnany recently said that because of Trump we would not see Covid-19 come to the US which she welcomed as a great change from the “awful Obama administration.” She has lied repeatedly in service of the president and like Trump and his new Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, McEnany is a birther who has championed the disproven conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
