RSN: Bernie Sanders: No One Asked New York to Cancel the Election

30 April 20

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Bernie Sanders: No One Asked New York to Cancel the Election

Team Bernie, Bernie Sanders for President
Excerpt: "On Monday, the New York State Board of Elections made the disgraceful and undemocratic decision to cancel their state's presidential primary later this year."

This means that our campaign will receive no delegates from New York, weakening our ability to fight for a progressive platform and progressive rules at the Democratic Convention. It also means our voters are less likely to turn out, which will hurt progressive New York candidates who are still facing primaries.

This is an outrage, an assault on democracy and must not be allowed to stand.

While we did not have the votes to win the Democratic nomination, our campaign was suspended, not ended, because we believe that people in every state should have the right to express their preference.

Let's be clear. New York will still be holding a primary election on June 23. Voters will cast ballots for congressional candidates and other down-ballot offices but, because of the heavy-handed decision of two members of the State Board of Elections, they will not have the opportunity to vote in the presidential primary.

No one asked New York to cancel the election.

The DNC did not request it. The Biden campaign did not request it. And our campaign communicated, very strongly, that we wanted to remain on the ballot.

Given that the primary is months away, the proper response should be to make the election safe — such as moving entirely to vote by mail — rather than eliminating people’s right to vote completely.

The truth is that the New York State Democratic Party has never taken a particularly progressive approach toward democratic participation. In fact, quite the opposite. They have a very checkered pattern of voter disenfranchisement. For many years, New York has had one of the lowest rates of voter turnout in the country.

In addition to being a blow to American democracy, New York state's action is also a clear violation of the approved delegate selection plan of the Democratic National Committee.

At a time when all of us, including Joe Biden, are deeply concerned about Donald Trump’s attacks on our democracy, we must fight back against this action in New York state.

If states violate the DNC party rules regarding delegate selection, they can lose their ability to send delegates to the convention. And this is exactly what must be done.

If this outrage is not remedied, the Democratic National Committee must strip New York of all its delegates at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. New York, and every other state in this country, must understand they cannot violate the rules of the DNC with impunity.

While the New York State Democratic Party is trying to take away progressive voices in this election, we are asking you to make yours heard:

Sign our petition: tell DNC Chairman Tom Perez to strip New York state of its convention delegates unless they reinstate the Democratic presidential primary slated to take place later this year.

Thank you for standing up for democracy and thank you for making your voice heard on this important issue.

All our best,

Team Bernie

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a close Trump ally in a crucial swing state, wanted to keep beaches open-and Trump bowed to pressure. (photo: Steve Nesius/Reuters)

Conspiracies, Dysfunction, and Arrogance: How the Trump Administration Set Back the US Coronavirus Response by Weeks
Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair
Sherman writes: "On the afternoon of Thursday, March 19, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office obsessing over the beaches in Florida. CNN footage of shirtless spring breakers packed onto the sand while the coronavirus pandemic raged sparked national outrage-and pressure on Trump to act."

Obsessed with impeachment and their enemies and worried about the stock market, the president and his son-in-law scapegoated HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and treated the coronavirus as mostly a political problem as it moved through the country.

n the afternoon of Thursday, March 19, Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office obsessing over the beaches in Florida. CNN footage of shirtless spring breakers packed onto the sand while the coronavirus pandemic raged sparked national outrage—and pressure on Trump to act. The next morning, New York governor Andrew Cuomo would announce strict stay-at-home orders for residents, but Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis refused to close his state’s beaches, a position even Florida’s Republican senator Rick Scott called reckless. “Lots of people were telling Trump to lean on Ron,” a Trump adviser said.

Trump’s view of the situation was complicated, though. For weeks, his top medical advisers, Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been hectoring him about the seriousness of the crisis and the necessity of swift action, testing, lockdowns. “We knew from the beginning...we were going to get cases in the United States,” Fauci told me.

“We knew we were in for a very serious problem.”

Sometimes, Trump listened. The disease was coming closer to his own circle—chief of staff Mark Meadows and communications director Stephanie Grisham were self-quarantining—and the number of cases in New York City had reached 4,000. But the substrate of his thinking hadn’t evolved, and it kept reappearing. He worried about the economy, which was crucial to his reelection. He vented to friends that the doctors were alarmist, and that the crisis was something Democrats and the media were doing to him. “Trump was obsessed with Pelosi, Schiff, the media, just obsessed. He would say, ‘They’re using it against me!’ recalled a Republican in frequent contact with the White House. “It was unhinged.”

Florida was a test case of his magical thinking about the novel coronavirus: That it was temporary, that warm weather would make it disappear. But eight Florida residents had already died from COVID-19 and more than 400 had been diagnosed. “Given the elderly population, if that took off, it would be a nightmare,” a person close to Trump told me. At an adviser’s urging, Trump called DeSantis to tell him to shut down the beaches.

“Ron, what are you doing down there?” Trump said, according to a person briefed on the call.

“I can’t ban people from going on the beach,” DeSantis snapped, surprising Trump.

“These pictures look really bad to the rest of the country,” Trump said.

“Listen, we’re doing it the right way,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis’s intransigence backed Trump into a corner. The 41-year-old governor was a Trump protégé and a crucial ally in a must-win state. “Trump is worried about Florida, electorally,” said a Republican who spoke with Trump around this time. Trump did something he rarely does: He caved. He told DeSantis the beaches could stay open.

“I understand what you’re saying,” Trump said, and hung up.

It was inevitable that Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar would become the West Wing COVID-19 scapegoat. An avuncular Yale educated lawyer with owlish glasses and a beard, Azar was not, as Trump liked to say, out of central casting. Equally bad, Azar was a “Bushie,” as Trump called Republicans who served in George W. Bush’s administration. Azar was briefed on a new and dangerous coronavirus sweeping the Chinese city of Wuhan by CDC director Robert Redfield on January 3—but he struggled to communicate this knowledge to the president. At the time of the outbreak, Trump had soured on Azar, whom he blamed for his weak health care polling numbers. “Trump thought Azar was a disaster. He is definitely on the gangplank,” a person close to Trump told me. Azar wasn’t able to speak to Trump about the virus for two weeks, even though Trump called him during this period to scream that the White House’s ban on e-cigarettes, a response to a health crisis that he believed could help him politically, had become a drag on his poll numbers. “I never should have done this fucking vaping thing!” Trump told Azar on January 17, a person familiar with the call told me.

When Azar finally told Trump about the outbreak on the phone at Mar-a-Lago, on the night of Saturday, January 18, Trump cut him off and launched into another e-cigarette rant. “Trump jumped his shit about vaping,” a person briefed on the phone call told me.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, shared Trump’s view that the media and Democrats were hyping the crisis for political purposes. And for both of them, the biggest worry was how the response to the coronavirus might impact the health of the economy. According to sources, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a fierce China hawk, and deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, a former China-based Wall Street Journal reporter who’d covered the 2003 SARS pandemic, argued to officials in mid-January that the White House needed to shut down incoming flights from China.

Kushner pushed back. “Jared kept saying the stock market would go down, and Trump wouldn’t get reelected,” a Republican briefed on the internal debates said (a person close to Kushner denies this). Kushner’s position was supported by Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council chief Larry Kudlow. Trump sided with them. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump minimized the threat in his first public comments. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control,” he told CNBC. (The White House and Treasury Department deny Mnuchin and Kudlow were against closing flights.)

When the coronavirus exploded out of China, Kushner was the second most powerful person in the West Wing, exerting influence over virtually every significant decision, from negotiating trade deals to 2020 campaign strategy to overseeing Trump’s impeachment defense. “Jared is running everything. He’s the de facto president of the United States,” a former White House official told me. The previous chief of staff John Kelly, who’d marginalized Kushner, was long gone, and Mick Mulvaney, a virtual lame duck by that point, let Kushner run free. “Jared treats Mick like the help,” a prominent Republican said.

Kushner’s princely arrogance had been a fixture in the West Wing since Trump’s inauguration. “The family has a degree of trust and protection that no one else enjoys,” the former West Wing official said. Kushner can appear mild-mannered, but, like his father-in-law, he seemed to relish the power he derived from crushing adversaries. After Trump’s acquittal, Kushner helped orchestrate a purge of national security officials that testified against the president. According to a source, Kushner provided the White House’s 29-year-old personnel director, John McEntee, with a list of names to be fired. ("In no way shape or form did Jared provide a list to Johnny McEntee on people to be fired," a source familiar with the matter said).

During his time in the West Wing, Kushner had become hardened to a degree that was sometimes shocking. The days of selling the notion that he and Ivanka were moderating forces were long gone—combat was everything. A New York business executive recalled a meeting with Kushner at the White House last fall. “I told Jared that if Trump won a second term, he wouldn’t have to worry about running again and you can really help people. Jared just looked at me and said, ‘I don’t care about any of that.’” The executive came away shaken. “I wanted to tell Jared you don’t say that part out loud, even in private,” he later said. (A source close to Kushner says he has no recollection of making the comment.)

Kushner had an enemies list as long as Trump’s, and at times it played into his response to the crisis. He scoffed when his old nemesis, Steve Bannon, launched a podcast called War Room: Pandemic in January. “Steve’s a dead man. Last he was seen, he was standing on the side of the FDR Drive with the squeegee guys,” Kushner told a Republican around this time.

Kushner also had a famously unshakable belief in his own judgment. According to sources, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert told Kushner in early March that the White House needed to step up its coronavirus response. “Tom tried sounding the alarm with Jared,” said a person who spoke to Bossert at the time. (Bossert denies this.) Kushner, according to the person, dismissed Bossert’s concerns. Bossert later published his advice in a Washington Post op-ed. “Tom was hammering him: ‘You have to get on this.’ No one listened, so he wrote the op-ed,” a former West Wing official said. Bossert later told people that Kushner icily told him the op-ed was a mistake. (Bossert denies this.)

Navarro and Pottinger finally convinced Trump to stop the flights when they showed him that more than 400,000 people had entered the U.S. from China since early January. “Trump was stunned by the sheer scale,” a Republican briefed on the meeting told me. “Navarro banged on the table enough to get the flights stopped.” On January 31, Trump barred travel from China. Even then, it was a half measure: the ban only applied to non-Americans who had traveled to China in the previous 14 days. American citizens could come and go.

Trump saw this as the end of the story—he’d taken strong public action, built his China Wall. Now, he looked forward to hitting the campaign trail and trumpeting the booming stock market. “He just wanted to hold rallies and watch television,” a former West Wing official said. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” Trump told Sean Hannity during a pre–Super Bowl interview on February 2. He held a half dozen rallies over the next month.

But it was just the beginning.

On February 5, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted Trump without hearing from a single witness. He was gleeful, and immediately turned his attention to his enemies. “Trump’s playbook is simple,” said a former White House official. “Go after people who crossed him during impeachment.” Forty-eight hours after the verdict, Trump launched his purge of career officials who testified in the House, including Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated Iraq War veteran and, for good measure, his twin brother, who also worked in the government.

Focused on his purge and his reelection, Trump mostly told himself a happy story about the virus, cherry-picking the most optimistic projections. He assured friends at Mar-a-Lago that Chinese president Xi Jinping promised him the outbreak would die out in warmer weather. “He said Xi told him it would all be over in April,” a Republican who spoke with Trump told me. At a rally in New Hampshire on February 10, Trump declared: “We only have 11 cases and they are all getting better.”

They weren’t. On February 23, the CDC documented the first case of person-to-person transmission in California. “Once you had community spread, we realized all bets are off,” Fauci later told me. Trump tweeted on February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA….Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” The market plunged nearly 900 points the next day. Trump called Azar and screamed that the CDC was alarming people. “It’s a little bit like the flu,” Trump assured reporters at the White House.

The same day, Trump finally pushed Azar aside and put vice president Mike Pence in charge of the White House’s coronavirus task force. According to a source, Trump had considered other candidates—former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Birx, and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb—but he told people that bringing in a credentialed outsider would signal a larger concern about the virus. “It’s going to make the issue bigger than it needs to be,” he said to an adviser. He also knew that Pence could be controlled. “Trump trusts Pence almost more than anyone,” a former White House official said. In the West Wing, Trump often belittles Pence in front of others. “Pence lives in mortal fear of being booted off the ticket. Trump constantly reminds Mike that he almost didn’t choose him,” a Republican that heard Trump make the comments told me.

Trump viewed the media as the force most toxic to his administration, and he sometimes took this belief to paranoid lengths. In early March, Trump told aides that journalists hated him so much they would try to contract coronavirus on purpose to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. “This is full-blown, pathological, paranoid-level delusion,” a former West Wing official said. Trump claimed CNN and MSNBC were trying to drive down the stock market. “I want to get Comcast!” he told a prominent Republican. “He wants Justice to open investigations of the media for market manipulation,” the person close to the administration told me.

Trump’s role as crisis pitchman became paramount, and any glitches sent him over the edge. A source said Trump was furious about his appearance during a Fox News town hall on March 5. “Trump said afterwards that the lighting was bad and he had a brown spot on his face,” a source briefed on the conversation said. “He said, ‘I look terrible! We need Bill Shine back in here. Bill would never allow this.’”

His press conference at the CDC on March 6 was his first full-scale attempt at media ownership of the crisis, and it will be remembered as a Trumpian classic, heavy on braggadocio, an infomercial with himself as the product. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump told reporters, his face partly hidden under a red “Keep America Great” hat. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”

When reviews, understandably, were not good, he complained that White House officials weren’t defending him. “He was very frustrated he doesn’t have a good team around him,” a former White House official said. Trump vented to aides about Mnuchin, whom he blamed for encouraging him to pick Jerome Powell, a frequent Trump target, as chairman of the Federal Reserve. “Steve picked Powell and Powell is trying to screw me!” Trump said, according to a Republican who overheard the comments. Sources said Trump fumed over Larry Kudlow’s refusal to hold an on-camera press briefing to talk up the markets. “Larry didn’t want to have to take questions about coronavirus,” a person close to Kudlow told me. “Larry’s not a doctor. How can he answer questions about something he doesn’t know?”

Fox News, as always, was Trump’s safe place. The network’s hosts had been following his cues, aggressively amplifying claims that COVID-19 posed little danger. “It’s actually the safest time to fly,” Fox & Friends host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers in early March, a clip that came to symbolize the network’s cavalier approach to the pandemic. Some inside Fox feared this denialism could get viewers killed and expose the network to massive legal liability. “If you want to get on the air, you had to say crazy shit about the virus,” one Fox staffer told me. Tucker Carlson was an important exception. Partly for ideological reasons—China bashing is a running story line on his show—Carlson covered the epidemic early. “Every day now brings thousands of new cases and dozens of new deaths in China.... We should be vigilant as well. We have infections already in this country,” he warned viewers on February 4.

Carlson privately told friends that Trump failed to grasp the scale of the crisis. Normally, when Carlson has advice for the White House, he says it on television. But after Trump’s rambling CDC press conference on March 6, Carlson realized the situation was an emergency and he needed to confront Trump in person.

The following afternoon, Carlson drove from his Florida home to Mar-a-Lago—surprisingly his first visit—and was astonished by what he found. The club that weekend was an alternate reality where coronavirus didn’t seem to exist. Down by the pool, Kimberly Guilfoyle was hosting a cocktail party for a hundred friends to kick off her lavish 51st birthday celebration. The guest list included much of Trumpworld’s elite, including Guilfoyle’s boyfriend Don Jr., Eric and Lara Trump, Lindsey Graham, Rudy Giuliani and Pence—even Tiffany Trump flew in for the weekend. Later that night, Guilfoyle break-danced. The president sang happy birthday after he dined on the patio shoulder-to-shoulder with Ivanka and Kushner and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s delegation.

Carlson met with Trump before Guilfoyle’s party got going. He didn’t expect to get much face time. The conversation lasted two hours. Carlson told Trump that COVID-19 posed an existential threat to the country—and his reelection—unless the White House took aggressive steps to slow the spread. “I said exactly what I’ve said on TV, which is this could be really bad,” Carlson later told Vanity Fair’s Joe Hagan. “My view [was] that we may have missed the point where we can control it.” Carlson’s message seemed to puncture Trump’s bubble. “[Trump] is just now waking up to the fact that this is bad, and he doesn’t know how to respond,” a Republican told me around this time.

What Trump didn’t know then was that coronavirus was spreading unchecked around Mar-a-Lago. Bolsonaro’s press secretary later tested positive and potentially seeded a cluster. He’d shaken hands with Trump and Pence and attended Guilfoyle’s party (more than a dozen members of the Brazilian delegation eventually came down with COVID-19). Guilfoyle’s friend, Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, developed suspicious symptoms, a source told me. “Kimberly spent all week with Caroline,” the source said. (A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said Wren tested negative.) RNC chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel also came down with symptoms after attending a donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago.

The same weekend, news broke that an attendee of CPAC, the conservative activist conference, tested positive for coronavirus, and that Trump had potentially been exposed. Fauci and other officials wanted Trump to announce social-distancing guidelines and other mitigation strategies. But Trump was still pushing back. He refused to get tested and insisted that he would continue to hold rallies. “He is going to resist until the very last minute,” a former West Wing official told me in early March. “He may take suggestions to stop shaking hands, but in terms of shutting stuff down, his position is: ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’”

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic, and Trump agreed to broadcast an Oval Office address to the nation. But even then, Kushner advised Trump to tread lightly. One source briefed on the internal conversations said Kushner told Trump not to declare a national emergency during the address because “it would tank the markets.” The markets cratered anyway, and Trump announced the national emergency later in the week. “They had to clean that up on Friday,” the source said. (A person close to Kushner denies this version of events.)

Even as the crisis was tearing through New York, with emerging problems in Louisiana, Michigan, and Illinois, Trump obsessed over the future, fixating on the fall and his reelection. He took time to call NFL owners and urge them not to preemptively cancel football season. “Trump begged them not to cancel,” said a source briefed on the call.

Increasingly, Kushner was in control of Trump’s response. Looking to keep him close, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short recruited Kushner to officially join the coronavirus task force on March 12. “Pence people look at Jared apprehensively. Pence treats Jared as a peer,” said Sam Nunberg, the former Trump aide. Kushner quickly assembled a shadow network of coronavirus advisers that became more powerful than Pence’s official team. He even worked on Shabbat, a source who spoke with him on a Saturday said. (A person close to Kushner says working on Shabbat is accepted for Orthodox Jews if it’s “to save someone’s life.”) “On balance, Pence wanted Jared involved because it guarantees Trump is focused,” an executive who Kushner consulted recalled.

Azar was still the necessary scapegoat. Kushner blamed him for the criticism Trump received about the delays in testing, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved. Kushner had no medical experience, but that didn’t seem to matter. “To be honest, when I got involved, I was a little intimidated. But I know how to make this government run now,” Kushner said, according to a source. “The arrogance was on full display.”

Kushner advocated for the iconoclastic public-private approach he had used for his Mideast peace plan. He reached out to business leaders like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, according to a source. With bravado only partly grounded in reality, he promised Trump that Google was rolling out a testing website. He also made a point of bypassing normal channels, phoning Wall Street executives and asking for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. A former West Wing official said Kushner’s involvement wrought chaos: business leaders wanting to contribute masks or ventilators didn’t know who in government to call. According to two sources, Kushner told Trump about experimental treatments he’d learned of from executives in Silicon Valley. “Jared is bringing conspiracy theories to Trump about potential treatments,” a Republican briefed on the conversations told me. (A person close to Kushner said he brought COVID testing ideas to Trump.) Trump could be a receptive audience. Another former West Wing official told me: “Trump is like an 11-year-old boy waiting for the fairy godmother to bring him a magic pill.”

Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against Cuomo after the New York governor gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting, Kushner told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present. Trump later echoed him, telling Sean Hannity in an interview, “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”

By early April, Trump began to realize that he was losing the messaging war. Cuomo’s morning press briefings, which had become appointment television for many, were a particular goad. “He’s said Cuomo looks good,” said a Republican briefed on internal conversations. Trump counterprogrammed with his own evening press conferences. As a former West Wing official put it, “Trump wants to play press secretary.” He prepared each day with Hope Hicks, who returned to the White House after a brief stint working for Fox Corp, nominally working for Jared Kushner. A source said she counseled him on how to look presidential. But the briefings could stretch to Soviet lengths, often over two hours, and they lurched wildly in tone. With the media as a captive audience, Trump often couldn’t resist shifting into rally mode. One day, he lit into NBC News reporter Peter Alexander when Alexander asked what Trump would say to Americans who are scared about the crisis. The confrontation energized Trump, according to a Republican who spoke to him afterward. “He was in the Oval Office feeling positive,” the source said.

Fauci had become a costar and a straight-man foil, something that Trump has never been able to stand. Their relationship was badly strained after Fauci gave a series of candid interviews and appeared to face palm as Trump spoke at a press conference. “I made Fauci a star. The least he could do is give me a little credit,” Trump complained to a friend. Republicans became so worried that Trump would fire Fauci that they looked for any means to prevent it. One Wall Street executive lobbied House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to tell Trump the Dow would implode if he canned Fauci. “The markets follow Fauci,” the executive told me. (“Has it been stressful? Uh, yeah,” Fauci told me when I asked him about working for Trump. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me.”)

Inside the West Wing, the blame game kicked into high gear. “This is going to be 9/11 and Pearl Harbor combined. People are going to be covering their asses for years,” a former West Wing official told me. A front page New York Times piece on April 11 was widely seen as an effort by Azar’s camp to push back on Trump and Kushner. After the piece ran, Trump installed Michael Caputo, a loyalist and close Roger Stone friend, to be Health and Human Services spokesman.

Even Kushner wasn’t insulated. Trump was enraged that Kushner had oversold Google’s coronavirus testing website and that he’d gotten slammed in the press for promoting an essentially phantom product. “Jared told Trump that Google was doing an entire website that would be up in 72 hours and had 1,100 people working on it 24/7. That’s just a lie,” the source briefed on the internal conversations told me. (A White House official responded: “This is just another false story focused on rumors about palace intrigue instead of the actual aggressive measures President Trump has implemented to keep the American people safe and healthy.”)

The virus was a threat Trump couldn’t bully, and his record of inaction something he couldn’t erase. Later in April, he tried to change the subject, announcing an immigration ban, with little detail about how it would work. Beaches in Florida, bowling alleys and nail salons in Georgia were reopened—magical thinking had reemerged. But beneath the bluster was a darker reality. “He’s paralyzed,” a former official said. Trump reversed course and criticized Georgia’s move to reopen. “This is not what [Trump] likes to do,” added a former West Wing official. “There’s no boogeyman he can attack.”

Trump clung to hope. “The economy will be back in two months, just wait,” he told a friend. But the fall was still a long way away. “If I have any rallies at all, they won’t be until the convention,” he told another friend in mid-March.

The thought seemed to depress him. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told the friend. “What I do now will determine if I get reelected.”

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President Trump and Vice President Pence watch New York gov. Andrew Cuomo's daily briefing, during the daily White House coronavirus task force briefing at the White House on April 19. (photo: Alexander Drago/Reuters)

After One Tweet to President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York for Ventilators
Rosalind Adams and Ken Bensinger, BuzzFeed News
Excerpt: "Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices. But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million."

The Silicon Valley engineer, who had no background in medical supplies but was recommended by the White House, never delivered the ventilators.

n March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!”

One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”

Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.

But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.

Not a single ventilator ever arrived.

A state official, speaking on background because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the terms of the deal, said New York entered into the contract with Oren-Pines at the direct recommendation of the White House coronavirus task force.

Nearly a month later, New York has terminated the contract, and the state is now trying to recover all of the money it paid the Silicon Valley electrical engineer. Officials refused to say how much the state had been able to claw back. “We are in discussions on a few remaining issues,” said Heather Groll, a spokesperson for the New York Office of General Services, part of the interagency effort to help New York get supplies.

Reached by telephone, Oren-Pines said “neither me nor my company is providing any comment on this,” and then hung up. He did not respond to subsequent text messages.

The money he received on March 30 was the largest single payment made by the New York Department of Health under an executive order issued by Gov. Andrew Cuomo last month that aimed to streamline the procurement process so that critical medical equipment could reach hospitals as quickly as possible.

The episode underscores the extent to which the fear of overrun hospitals prompted politicians around the country — and particularly in New York — to turn to untested and at times unqualified vendors.

“We had no choice but to overturn every rock to find ventilators and other needed equipment,” said Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Cuomo, referring to the state’s scramble to find critical medical equipment as the pandemic overtook New York.

“States were forced to fend for themselves to purchase lifesaving supplies to combat a global pandemic and with all modeling showing a more severe spread of this virus with more hospitalizations and more fatalities,” Azzopardi said. He added that the state has since been able to meet most of its needs and is now reevaluating some contracts and canceling others, while going through with other contracts as it tries to build up stockpiles to help prepare New York for any future emergencies.

Like most states, New York’s procurement rules typically prohibit payments for goods or services until after an order has been fulfilled. But Cuomo suspended those rules last month to meet the urgent need for ventilators, N95 masks, gowns, and other personal protective equipment. A 25-member team now works overtime to vet potential vendors. In some cases, it has begun paying for orders before they are fulfilled.

Between March 19 and April 27, the Health Department cut 77 checks for $1 million or more for medical supplies, for a total of nearly $735 million, state records show. Some of the recipients are established health care suppliers, such as Henry Schein, a huge, publicly traded distributor with $10 billion in annual revenue and a long history of contracting for New York state.

But the overwhelming majority of the payments were made to an eclectic mix of firms, many with little or no apparent experience in medicine: upscale fashion and other apparel brands; Chinese iron ore and tool importers; a company that sells hair and wrinkle removal products; a number of private equity and investment firms; and even the Qatar Fund for Development, the state-run foreign aid arm of the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf nation.

Other states and government agencies also scrambled to strike deals for needed supplies. The California Department of Transportation agreed to pay $12.74 apiece for N95 masks that typically retail for as little as $1.25, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed a purchase order for 2 million respirator masks at $7.25 apiece — more than 10 times the price it's paying to buy them directly from 3M — only to cancel after the vendor said it couldn’t deliver.

New York City, meanwhile, rushed over the past month to order 214.7 million pieces of personal protective equipment, including N95 masks, gloves, and face shields. S. So far only 8% — or just 17 million — of those items have arrived.

But it was the state government in Albany that proved most aggressive in its acquisitions as it struggled to deal with COVID-19.

“I need 30,000 ventilators,” Cuomo said in a press briefing on March 24. “How can you have New Yorkers possibly dying because they can’t get a ventilator?”

Three days later, the state issued the second of two payments totalling almost $116 million to a small Brooklyn company called Dome International that rents ventilators and other respiratory devices to hospitals and nursing homes. The company, which has no website, has no record of prior contracting with New York or with the federal government.

The deal was for 5,700 ventilators, according to a report by the Albany Times-Union, but the devices were never delivered. A call to Dome International’s co-owner, David Chait, was not returned.

Two payments totaling $32.3 million, meanwhile, went to a Tampa company, Premier Orthopedic Solutions, which specializes in selling devices used for rehabilitation from joint surgery. The owner, Carl Bax, played offensive line for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL, but in 1990 was arrested before his second season after receiving a shipment of steroids. He pleaded guilty and his football career ended after nine more games.

Bax did not respond to a request for comment.

But the contract with Oren-Pines stands out even among the motley array of vendors that struck deals with New York state over the past month.

It’s unclear how he came to the attention of the White House coronavirus task force, which was established in late January and has featured daily press briefings led by President Trump. The task force also confers regularly on the state of the pandemic, including the availability of ventilators, N95 masks, gowns, and other much-needed medical supplies around the country.

“The guy was recommended to us by the White House coronavirus task force because they were doing business with him as well,” said the New York state official. “I think everyone was genuinely trying to help each other out and get supplies.” The New York official added that he was unaware of whether Oren-Pines got a federal contract; federal databases show no record of any such deals.

A spokesperson for the White House referred a request for comment to the office of Vice President Mike Pence, who chairs the task force. A spokesperson for Pence referred the query to FEMA. A spokesperson for FEMA said it could not speak on behalf of the White House and that it does not share information about potential suppliers.

After this article was published, a spokesperson for Pence, Katie Miller, said in a statement that "The White House Coronavirus Task Force was never informed of this contract and was not involved in it at all."

An Israeli immigrant who graduated from the University of Maryland, Oren-Pines has lived in Silicon Valley since the mid-1990s, public records show, and is named on at least 18 different patents. He has held a variety of jobs in the tech sector, including a recent stint with Google and several years at Crocus Technology, a venture-backed firm that specializes in magnetic computer memory, according to his LinkedIn profile and interviews with former colleagues.

Mike Ritter, who supervised Oren-Pines at Google, said that before the pandemic, they had made plans to meet up in Napa this week, but those plans were canceled and the two haven’t spoken in weeks. Ritter said he wasn’t aware of the contract for ventilators but said he knew that Oren-Pines had supplier contacts in Asia.

“He's always a go-getter. Anytime there's opportunity, he's always been out there trying to help and make a buck,” said Ritter.

In 2013, Oren-Pines cofounded Legasus Networks, a networking solutions company, in the Bay Area. Doug Lee, who’s listed on registration documents as the company’s chief executive officer, said he had no knowledge of any transactions involving ventilators. According to Thao Tran, one of its other founders, Legasus “has nothing to do with medical or ventilators” and has not been active. “We don’t have any products right now.”

Oren-Pines’ LinkedIn profile indicates he is the founder and owner of a company called InCommon, described as a consulting and contracting firm for the mobile phone industry. No listing for InCommon could be found in state registries.

A review of Oren-Pines’ social media shows he has been tweeting at Trump since 2011 and been a vocal supporter since at least December 2015 when he offered, on the website, to put up a “Trump for President” lawn sign in front of his house.

Since late January, Oren-Pines has posted a handful of tweets related to the coronavirus, including one on March 20 listing stock index performance in different countries, showing that only China had made a small gain, and describing the idea that China might benefit from the pandemic as an “interesting conspiracy theory.”

A week later, he tweeted in response to the president’s call for ventilators.

A tweet posted less than an hour after Oren-Pines’ callout about the ventilators provides one possible clue to his plans. The tweet was from an account belonging to Israeli entrepreneur Segev Binyamin, whose three Twitter followers include Oren-Pines. Offering to supply ventilators to Israel’s defense minister, Binyamin wrote, “I own a Chinese company and have the ability to ship 1,400 machines.” That happens to be almost the exact number of ventilators Oren-Pines contracted with New York state to sell.

Reached by BuzzFeed News, Binyamin, whose account also follows Oren-Pines, repeatedly said “I’m not going to comment” before hanging up.

According to Azzopardi, the senior adviser to Gov. Cuomo, the team vetting New York’s coronavirus-related contracts includes officials from the state’s inspector general’s office and the MTA inspector general’s office. Barraged with entreaties from potential vendors, the officials primarily consider whether potential vendors could make good on their promises. Only about 10% of potential vendors have been approved.

Oren-Pines, with his bid of $47,600 per ventilator, was one of them. By comparison, the Department of Health and Human Services paid $15,000 apiece for top-of-the-line ventilators made by Philips —and Congress is currently investigating whether that price was too high.

“We selected our contracts based on the best value under market conditions that were literally changing every day,” said Azzopardi.

A separate deal for 750 ventilators in New York, since canceled, valued each at an even more remarkable $74,666. The state was eventually able to recover the $56 million it had paid Trinity Partners, a health consulting firm.

Groll, the spokesperson for the New York Office of General Services, did not answer a series of detailed questions about the transaction with Oren-Pines other than to say it had been “terminated” and that “a bulk of the money was returned to the state.”

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Michigan gov. Gretchen Whitmer addresses the state during a speech in Lansing, Mich., Monday, April 27, 2020. (photo: AP)

Michigan Governor Announces Tuition-Free Educational Program for Essential Workers
Amanda Jackson and Keith Allen, CNN
Excerpt: "Essential workers in Michigan that are helping on the front lines during the coronavirus pandemic may be given the opportunity to continue their educational pursuits for free, the state's governor said Wednesday."
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Preliminary results of a study of the antiviral drug remdesivir show it is effective in shortening the recovery time for patients with COVID-19. (photo: Gilead Sciences/AP)

Antiviral Drug Remdesivir Shows Promise for Treating Coronavirus in NIH Study
Laurel Wamsley and Carmel Wroth, NPR
Excerpt: "Preliminary results of a major study of the antiviral drug remdesivir show it can help hospitalized patients with COVID-19 recover faster. Dr. Anthony Fauci hailed the findings, released Wednesday, as 'quite good news.'"
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An indigenous child plays in the crude-oil stained riverbanks at the community of San Pedro de Rio Coca, Northern Ecuadorian Amazon. (Photo: Telmo Ibarburu)

Two Pandemics in the Ecuadorian Amazon: COVID-19 and Oil
Mitch Anderson, Sierra Club
Anderson writes: "Thousands of Indigenous families in northeastern Ecuador are living a nightmare within a nightmare."

EXCERPT:

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Indigenous people severed connections between their forest communities and the outside world to prevent contagion in their territories. Local sources of food and water became more crucial than ever. Hunting, fishing, and subsistence agriculture are especially important in the northern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon as hunting grounds have been heavily degraded by the oil industry.

Then, on the evening of April 7, two major pipelines running along the banks of the Coca River in the Andean foothills collapsed, releasing an enormous quantity of crude oil into the rushing rapids.

Try to imagine: A deadly airborne virus is sweeping across your country. The government declares a national emergency and tells you to shelter in place. Your home is the forest, and your isolation is your only protection. There are no supermarkets, clinics, or hospitals; for many communities, the nearest ventilator is several days’ journey by canoe and foot. Then, at the worst possible moment, a massive manmade disaster devastates your home and eliminates your only source of food and water.

The Coca River is a key artery in the regional Amazon system. It runs through three national parks that form one of the most biologically rich areas on Earth, eventually merging with the Amazon River in Peru. The breakage of the two arteries—the Trans-Ecuador Oil Pipeline System and Heavy Crude Pipeline—affects hundreds of miles of rainforest riverways and tens of thousands of people. Though the Ecuadorian Amazon is infamous for its history of oil contamination, this particular spill—its cruel timing and the government’s knee-jerk efforts to assuage oil-buyers rather than Indigenous families affected downriver—perfectly encapsulates decades of state and industry abuse, disregard, and destruction.

Most communities learned of the spill the day after, when they stepped into the river to fish and found their legs covered in oil. Two days later, Ecuador’s Minister of Energy, Rene Ortiz, claimed only 4,000 barrels had been released. He had nothing to say about the environment or health risks posed to downstream Indigenous communities.

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Old lodgepole pines in Montana killed by the mountain pine beetle stand beside young, healthy trees in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

In Montana, Children File Suit to Protect the State's Wilderness
Judy Fahys, Inside Climate News
Fahys writes: "To read the 108-page complaint, filed in March, is to understand that they're fighting for what Montanans call 'the last best place.'"

Part of a 50-state strategy, the lawsuit highlights Montana’s love of wild landscapes to force the state to address the climate impacts of fossil fuels.

She's identified only as Kathryn Grace S., one of 16 youths who've sued to keep the state of Montana from promoting the use of fossil fuels, threatening their future.

To read the 108-page complaint, filed in March, is to understand that they're fighting for what Montanans call "the last best place."

Grace, 16, says in the complaint that drought has dried up the Clark Fork River for rafting. 

Georgianna F., 17, fears shortened winters have reduced snow she needs to train for Nordic skiing.

Ruby D., 11, of Crow descent, claims frequent wildfires have scarred lodgepole pines needed for the teepees essential for the ceremonies that are part of her identity.   

While lawyers for the state responded last week in briefs that the courts aren't the right place to fix the climate crisis, attorneys for the children say they are suing Montana not for failing to act on climate change, but for harming the environment by promoting the use of coal, oil and gas. 

The Montana case, led by the non-profit public interest firm, Our Children's Trust, is part of a 50-state campaign to put government policy contributing to climate change before the courts.

A landmark national climate change suit, Juliana v. USA, was thrown out in January by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where judges ruled 2 to 1 that climate change is not an issue for the courts. The plaintiffs, also led by Our Children's Trust, have since petitioned for a rehearing. 

The Montana case is one of seven state actions, including lawsuits filed in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington.

In Montana, lawyers for the plaintiffs offer vivid examples of how their young clients' lives are being shattered by a warming planet to underscore the state's failed constitutional obligation: guaranteeing all citizens an inalienable right to a healthy environment. 

 "What we're trying to do is uphold our constitutional rights," said Grace, in an interview. (None of the minor plaintiffs used their last names in the lawsuit). 

A sixth-generation Montanan, she spends a lot of time outdoors, playing soccer, rafting nearby rivers and hiking the Rattlesnake Wilderness north of where she lives in Missoula. Perhaps her favorite place is the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, which is sometimes called the American Serengeti because of its rich wildlife: bison, antelope, elk, trout and a famous wolfpack.

But now she's worried enough about the climate impacts she already sees—the wildfire smoke that nixed soccer practice, the drought that's dried up the rivers—that she wonders whether her own children will have the chance to experience the place she loves so much, and even whether it's ethical for her to have children.

"What we want is for the courts to encourage or institute a climate recovery plan that lowers our fossil fuel rates to the point where we're not harming the environment anymore," she said, "and to uphold our constitutional rights for a clean environment."

Nate Bellinger, one of the childrens' lawyers, acknowledged the storytelling strategy. "A central part of that story is how the youth plaintiffs ... are currently being impacted by climate change," he said, "and how they are expected to be impacted by climate change if it's not addressed."

Two brothers, Lander B., 15, and Badge B., 12, say the changing climate is making it harder to hunt the elk and deer that their family depends on for food and that warm temperatures and low stream waters make it harder to fish for cutthroat, rainbow and bull trout. 

Kian T., 14, reports in the complaint that trees on his family's property—birch, spruce, aspen, cottonwood and firs—are dying because warmer winters have led to increased insect activity.

The young plaintiffs' concerns are exactly the sort of complaint you'd expect from Montanans whose shared identity is bound up in the wildness and beauty of the Big Sky state's breathtaking mountains and plains.

In some ways, the lawsuit itself is the latest chapter in the 50-state, coming of age story about the legal fight to combat climate change that began eight years ago. In Utah that year, children were among 20 petitioners who pressed environmental regulators to start accounting for climate change in state regulations. 

In Wyoming, a case called Kids v. Global Warming pressed environmental agencies to begin restricting and reducing fossil fuel emissions enough to limit CO2 to 350 ppm by 2100. The petitions were denied in both cases.

An earlier Montana case asked the state Supreme Court to rule that the atmosphere should be held in trust for citizens, but justices declined to take up the case.

"We aren't suing Montana or the other states for their failure to act on climate change," Bellinger said, trying to correct a misperception about the cases. "It's because the state is actively harming the environment it's constitutionally mandated to protect."

It's this constitutional provision that gives the Montana suit its unique strength, Bellinger and other legal experts agreed. The preamble to the state's constitution says: "We the people of Montana grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of our mountains, the vastness of our rolling plains, and desiring to improve the quality of life, equality of opportunity and to secure the blessings of liberty for this and future generations do ordain and establish this constitution."

Montana's unique approach to the environment is also part of a learning curve that builds upon the lessons of past setbacks and failures in the youth climate cases, said Richard Frank, a law professor, blogger and director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center.

The Montana case, he noted, focuses on particular injuries being suffered by the 16 plaintiffs rather than simply making sweeping, heady arguments about violated "atmospheric trust litigation" as past legal and administrative actions did. The more recent cases are also stronger because they rely on new sophisticated, scientific conclusions that were not available to lawyers involved in the earlier cases, he said.

"The key point for me is that it's a lot more strategic," Frank said. "It's more tactical, it's more science."

In the Montana lawsuit, the children argue that Montana undermines their birthright in two significant ways: with a state energy policy that explicitly promotes fossil fuels, and a prohibition on accounting for climate change in decision making. As a result, models project annual average daily maximum temperatures in the state will increase by as much as 6.0 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-century, "a temperature increase that would imperil human civilization," and go up by as much as 10 degrees by the end of the century. 

"It is as if the Earth has a constant fever," the lawsuit says, "and just as in the human body, even a slight rise in temperature weakens the organism, increases the vulnerability of the organism, and can have dangerous long-term effects on the system."

The lawsuit contends that the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation "has authorized, permitted, licensed, and encouraged fossil fuel exploitation, extraction, and production, and forestry practices and activities that have caused and contributed to dangerous concentrations of atmospheric GHGs and the climate crisis and harmed Youth Plaintiffs."

Allowing refineries to spew millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, permitting the 1,210-mile Keystone XL Pipeline to traverse the state, and approving a 977-acre expansion of the state's largest coal mine are just some of the ways in which Montana has bowed to fossil fuels, the lawsuit says.

Regulators did not examine emissions impacts for the coal mine, nor did they estimate the climate impact of the 90 percent of Montana-mined coal that was burned out of state, the suit says

"Defendants—who manage, operate, and regulate the energy sector by and through the State Energy Policy—have the authority to produce renewable energy sources," the lawsuit says, noting that state agencies authorized almost seven times as much fossil fuel energy as renewables. "Nevertheless, Defendants are manifestly indifferent to Youth Plaintiffs' injuries and continue to authorize energy from fossil fuels as opposed to renewables."

Bellinger, the childrens' attorney, pointed out that as early as 1968, Montana leaders were discussing the implications of growing greenhouse gas emissions. "That's just not really compatible with the future that these youth want to live in Montana and protect the environment," he said.

Even with the more narrowly drawn claims in the Montana lawsuit, some still doubt it will be successful. Sam Kazman, general counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a non-profit libertarian think tank, cited the state's constitutional provision when he said: "I think it does have a slightly better shot than the Juliana case."

But, ultimately, he's not convinced that the Montana case will go any farther than the better-known national case. In an echo of the criticism leveled against the Juliana case, he said developing and implementing an energy policy is not something that courts are well-equipped to do.

"Ultimately, I think it is still trying to get a court to take over what really is a host of legislative functions," Kazman said, echoing arguments made by the state's attorneys.

Montana environmental lawyer Jack Tuholske said the case shines a compelling spotlight on the state constitution's healthy environment provision. The guarantee of environmental health, he said, was added in 1972 because of historic mining pollution in a state where industry had outsized influence on lawmakers.

"This [case] is very much in a context of the history and culture of the state," he said. "It'll be interesting to see how the court approaches this case, based on the Constitution."

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