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Michael Caputo had gotten used to life in lockdown in East Aurora, a picturesque village outside of Buffalo, New York. He sat at home with his wife and six- and eight-year-old kids watching Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily news conference, then Trump’s daily news conference, taking notes when something seemed important. Caputo was especially freaked out about catching COVID-19. He went grocery shopping in a mask and goggles, and when he returned home he stripped down in the mudroom and put his clothes in a plastic bag so he wouldn’t risk the contagion spreading among his family. He would tell neighbors, “If you’re not wearing a mask, you’re part of the problem.”
Caputo cut an unusual figure as a public health evangelist. A former conservative radio commentator, he was a longtime fixture in Trump World, having started as Trump’s driver and worked on Trump’s 2014 bid to buy the Buffalo Bills, before becoming a communications adviser on his 2016 presidential campaign. Caputo, who had personal and business ties in Moscow, had been ensnared as a witness in the Russia investigation.
One day in early April, Caputo was sitting at his kitchen table eating lunch when his phone rang. It was the president.
“I need help,” Trump said. “Do you want to join the administration?”
“Well, sure,” Caputo replied.
“Johnny’s right here,” Trump said, referring to Johnny McEntee, the twenty-nine-year-old director of presidential personnel whom Trump had empowered to root out his perceived enemies from government and to seed the bureaucracy with loyalists. “We want to know if you want to be assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS and help with the communications on COVID. They’re all fucked up.”
“Sure,” Caputo said.
“The sound that you hear is my pen to paper, so pack your bags,” Trump said.
McEntee then texted Caputo, “We’re counting on you,” and a week later Caputo was in the White House being sworn in, with McEntee standing at his side. The location of Caputo’s swearing-in symbolized the fact that he was Trump’s choice and would have personal access to the president. In fact, Caputo’s boss, Azar, had no role in hiring him and was surprised by the appointment.
At the time, Azar was taking incoming arrows from several administration officials, and in particular from Grogan. Azar quickly began to confide in Caputo and seek his help trying to hold on to his job and rehabilitate his image. In huddles with Caputo, Azar would lose his temper about Grogan and complain about negative news stories as “a Grogan trap” or “a Grogan hit piece,” convinced that his West Wing rival was leaking damaging information about him to reporters. When he got especially worked up, Azar would talk like a hen, bobbing and pecking his head, his voice growing ever higher and louder.
“Fuck this,” Azar would tell Caputo, pacing back and forth in his office. “This is the end. I can’t believe this is happening. This is so fucking unfair. Fucking Grogan.”
Caputo figured Azar would become the fall guy for the administration’s early failure to control the virus. This was reinforced by Trump’s comments. The president would call Caputo and ask, “How’s Alex doing? What do you think of Alex?” This was a tell tale sign that Trump was losing confidence.
But Caputo tried to stick up for Azar. “He’s on board with your program,” he told Trump. “He’s always going to be throwing punches for you.” And Caputo would try to get positive comments about Azar into stories in the five newspapers he knew Trump read in print: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News.
Even if it put him at odds with Trump, Caputo believed one of his missions at HHS was to help share public health information, and he thought the best messengers were the doctors—first and foremost, Fauci. So he tried to cultivate a partnership with Fauci, who had him at his home near American University in Northwest Washington for breakfast early in his tenure. It was 6:30 a.m., and Fauci welcomed Caputo to his deck, where they removed their masks, sat overlooking a leafy backyard, and had scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee.
They got to talking about Trump, and Fauci surprised Caputo when he said, “I have nothing personal against the president. I certainly don’t dislike him; in fact, he has some things about him that are attractive.”
“The coronavirus task force is a battle of ideas,” Fauci said. “There’s a lot of disagreement on the task force and we try to reach consensus by the end of the meetings.”
* * *
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By early April, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and had his sights set squarely on Trump. Out of the makeshift television studio he built in the basement of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, the former vice president assailed Trump’s management of the pandemic. Polls showed Trump had lost the small bumps in job approval he saw in February and March following his acquittal in the impeachment trial and the early outbreaks of the virus. Now, Trump trailed Biden, in whom voters had greater confidence to steer the country out of the converging health and economic crises.
Trump’s campaign advisers test-drove lines of attack against Biden, which ranged from hinting that at the advanced age of seventy-eight there were signs of senility in Biden’s behavior, to suggesting his son Hunter was corrupt, to criticizing his background as a lifelong career politician. None seemed to move the needle much, so long as the president failed to manage the crises of the day. Still, Brad Parscale believed the key to a Trump victory would be a relentlessly negative assault on Biden.
“We’ve got to make Biden look bad and make the country see him as a good ole Uncle Joe,” Parscale advised Trump. “We should make him look like a pedophile, womanizing, senile guy who can’t keep his wits together.”
Trump thought that line of attack was fruitful. In fact, the president had long ago nicknamed Biden “Sleepy Joe” and routinely cast doubt on his mental acuity. He enjoyed when his campaign used images of Biden that made him look old and ugly. But Trump did not want his campaign spending much money on advertisements about his challenger. He wanted the advertising budget to primarily be spent promoting himself. Trump wanted the election to be a referendum on himself and what a great job he was doing as president. Besides, Trump thought he could count on Bill Barr to fire the magic bullet. For all of 2019, the attorney general had been the president’s golden boy. As Dan Scavino once explained to Barr, “In the Cabinet, you’re up here and everyone else is down here.” Scavino raised an arm above his head before lowering it. Trump liked Barr’s smarts, toughness, and willingness to fight on his behalf.
Two moves stood out for Trump: Barr’s suggestion to the public that Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation had found no evidence of obstruction of justice by the president, when in fact the opposite was true; and his subsequent appointment of prosecutor John Durham to investigate the origins of the FBI’s 2016 probe of the Trump campaign. The president thought that the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation had been launched by a corrupt FBI to frame him. He assumed Durham would produce evidence proving it and perhaps prosecute former FBI director James Comey, former CIA director John Brennan, and other top Obama administration officials. Trump hoped this would give him an edge in his reelection.
On April 8, 2020, Barr made the unusual prediction that Durham’s far-from-finished investigation would prove the FBI engaged in gross misconduct and abused their power in their pursuit of Trump. “What happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr told Laura Ingraham in a Fox News interview. “Without any basis, they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign—a whole pattern of events while he was president . . . to sabotage the presidency—or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”
Many prosecutors and Justice Department alumni felt their skin crawl. Here he goes again, they said, Barr trying to use the department�
�s powers to give Trump some political ammunition. Normally prosecutors didn’t breathe a word about an ongoing investigation. Comey had endured a public tarring from Republicans and Democrats alike for violating that norm as FBI director when in 2016 he had discussed the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email system for her government work.
Trump had been antsy to see Durham’s findings—and by giving him the false hope that it might wrap up soon, Barr had made a tactical error. The attorney general had wanted to put the “pedal to the metal” on this probe, as he told aides, and release findings well before the election. But two things dramatically slowed Durham’s progress. The Connecticut prosecutor had to hold off on much of his work while the Justice Department’s inspector general finished an overlapping investigation in December 2019. Then came the coronavirus, which made convening grand juries and traveling the world to interrogate witnesses rather difficult.
But Trump didn’t let up. He repeatedly pressed Meadows to ask Barr what was going on with the Durham investigation. Though he did not direct Barr to indict anyone specifically, the president frequently brought up the probe during their Oval Office meetings that spring. His questions were frequently some version of, “When do you think something might come out of that?” Barr didn’t feel comfortable responding with details and tried to manage the president’s expectations. He would provide responses like, “Mr. President, whether or not John Durham indicts somebody is not going to affect this election outcome.”
“It makes us look weak,” Trump often grumped. Bringing his enemies “to justice,” the president argued, showed strength.
* * *
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By mid-April, as U.S. deaths from the coronavirus topped thirty thousand, Trump faced a political imperative to find someone to blame. Trump’s search for a scapegoat fit a pattern of his presidency. “He’s never at fault for anything,” explained David Lapan, a former senior official in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security. “It’s Fauci’s fault. It’s China’s fault. It’s Obama’s fault. It’s always someone else, somewhere else. He doesn’t want to hear the bad news. He doesn’t take responsibility for the bad news and wants to gloss over it and change the subject.”
Trump decided to use his trademark hyperbole to draw a bull’s-eye for the American people around the real villains: China and the World Health Organization. On April 14, he formally announced he was suspending U.S. funding to the WHO while his administration conducted a review of the group’s “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus.” He argued that the WHO failed to call out China’s lack of transparency about the Wuhan outbreak, although he had repeatedly praised China’s handling of the virus in January and February. Trump’s blame game was easily chalked up to a preelection push to sidestep his own role in failing to protect Americans. But in several corners of government, many career experts agreed with the facts behind Trump’s critique. Officials who vehemently disagreed with each other on other coronavirus decisions were aligned in finding fault in the WHO for parroting China’s lies and shielding it from scrutiny.
Mike Pompeo, Robert O’Brien, and Matt Pottinger repeatedly stressed to the president that the WHO had blood on its hands. “I believe the whole world is the collateral damage of the way China handled this episode,” Pottinger told colleagues.
Redfield, too, was increasingly convinced Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had stonewalled him in trying to get a CDC team into China early on. He told confidants he had to conclude the WHO had not been an honest broker.
Some administration officials homed in on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a prestigious Chinese lab recognized for its expertise on bat coronaviruses. Pottinger, Pompeo, and other top national security officials had been urging government investigators and intelligence officials to look more deeply into a theory percolating among Chinese-based scientists and right-wing U.S. media figures that the Wuhan lab had either accidentally or intentionally leaked the novel coronavirus—SARS-CoV-2—into the world. The claim resembled the plot of a sci-fi thriller, but at least one part of it was firmly rooted in real risks at the lab. No serious person believed this was an intentional leak of a manufactured bioweapon by the Chinese, but several national security and intelligence officials believed an accident was possible and even likely.
This was not the first time U.S. officials had concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which China had designed as a world-class research facility to study some of the deadliest pathogens, especially coronaviruses. In early 2018, after State Department science diplomats had toured the lab, they warned U.S. officials that the lab suffered a serious shortage of staff with adequate containment training and needed help to meet the very high safety standards for the dangers they were handling. They also warned that a team led by Dr. Shi Zhengli, the well-known head of the lab’s bat virus research, was working with SARS-like coronaviruses they found could interact with human cell receptors and might easily transmit to people. Known as China’s “Bat Woman,” Shi had been studying how coronaviruses could infect humans and manipulating the spike proteins that the virus used to enter human cells.
After the outbreak in Wuhan, some argued it was just too much of a coincidence. The epicenter of the virus was in the same city that boasted one of the world’s largest repositories of coronavirus specimens. Perhaps the virus accidentally infected lab staff. Shi has angrily dismissed the idea that her lab had anything to do with the novel virus. But Trump’s intelligence officers reported that they had credible information indicating some Wuhan lab workers had suffered COVID symptoms in the fall of 2019. If true, they would have been the earliest known cases of infection. The intelligence community briefed Trump in late March that it had revised its classified assessment from early January that “the outbreak probably occurred naturally.” Now they were adding the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged “accidentally” due to “unsafe laboratory practices” at either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or its partner lab near the Wuhan market.
Trump found it hard to keep this new intelligence to himself. He brought it up with campaign advisers, domestic policy aides, and health officials.
On April 18, Trump confirmed at a White House coronavirus press briefing that intelligence agencies were digging into evidence that suggested an accident or shoddy conditions at the Wuhan lab were connected to the outbreak. “A lot of people are looking at it,” he told reporters. “It seems to make sense.” But the assessment was greeted with deep suspicion in the scientific community and in the media. Trump and some of his allies were looking for a scapegoat, and a Chinese lab screw-up provided a convenient one.
Critics of the Wuhan lab theory discounted the warnings from Pottinger, who was well known as a skeptic of nearly everything the Chinese government claimed, as a China-hawk fever dream. But Pottinger knew from past experience not to automatically buy what Beijing was selling. When he was a reporter in Beijing, the Chinese government covered up a 2004 accident at a Beijing lab studying SARS and similar coronaviruses, which led to an outbreak that infected nine people and killed at least one.
To try to suss out the likely sources of the virus, Pottinger consulted with doctors and other experts he had met while covering the 2003 SARS outbreak. Pottinger also got a summary from the NSC’s virology expert, Philip Ferro, about how zoonotic diseases typically jumped from animals to humans and spread through a population. Sifting through the information he received from SARS experts, intelligence reports, and Ferro, he was taken aback by three key facts. What Pottinger didn’t know at this early stage was that the director of the CDC was zeroing in on those same facts with increasing conviction that a lab leak was the likely source of this unusually lethal and contagious virus.
First, COVID-19 had in a few weeks’ time become a zoonotic pathogen that boasted one of the most rapid and efficient transmissions of any virus in modern human history. That was not normal for zoonotic viruses that jumpe
d from animal to human. An animal host of the virus, like a bat, could potentially infect another animal species, which would then infect a human. The virus could make the next animal species very ill and even kill them. But this type of virus that jumped from animal to human had a much harder time replicating—and spreading rapidly.
Second, though the Chinese government claimed the virus emanated from a seafood market in Wuhan that also sold wild and exotic game, a team of scientists in China published research in January noting that a sizable portion of the initial cluster of cases in Wuhan had no known contact with the market. Later research would establish that this quickly embraced and dominant theory about the virus’s source—that it started at the wet market—was almost certainly wrong.
Third, the Wuhan lab had a Level Four designation, giving it permission to handle the riskiest biohazards despite the U.S. government’s earlier concerns about the lab’s safety. Its sister lab, down the street from the market, had a much lower Level Two designation and harvested bat viruses.
Redfield shared Pottinger’s concerns—but he was assessing these facts as a seasoned virologist, not as a national security expert suspicious of China. He strongly believed the Wuhan lab was the source, but primarily because he knew from years of lab work that a virus jumping from animal to human had never replicated and spread as easily as COVID-19 had. Over time a chorus of scientists studying the virus would agree that they’d never seen a virus like this one. Interestingly, scientists began to learn something else as they studied the novel coronavirus’s spike protein that helped the virus enter a human cell and invade its host: their spikes were amazingly adaptable and the most successful ever seen in their quest to attach to human cells. “Zoonotic diseases that transition for the first time to man, these are not highly infectious to man,” Redfield would explain to colleagues. “This virus, in my view, is too infectious to man to assume that last January it jumped from bat to man.”
I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year Page 12
