Remember this guy, Roger Stone’s protege who worked for Paul Manafort when he was the campaign manager in 2016?
Wednesday morning at 11:30, Michael Caputo was directed to meet a sedan with dark-tinted windows outside of the Washington, D.C., hotel where his lawyer, Dennis Vacco, is staying. The sedan was arranged by the government for the purpose of discreetly transporting Caputo to a mysterious office building where, once inside, he would arrive to his noon appointment with federal investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller. Caputo confirmed the scheduled meeting to New York.
A year into his review of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former FBI director has questioned dozens of individuals connected to Donald Trump’s political activities. A senior official on the campaign during the Republican primary with an unusual background as a political operative in the U.S. and in Russia, Caputo is the latest to march through the corridors of what he refers to as the deep state to answer questions in an investigation he’s called, “an attack on the presidency.”
Last July, Caputo spoke to the House Intelligence Committee, and this past Tuesday, he appeared before its counterpart in the Senate. After three hours, he delivered a closing statement of more than 800 words in which he condemned the investigation and asked who he could blame for the negative effects it’s had on his life, in the form of death threats and more than $125,000 in legal fees he said have forced him to dip into the college fund for his kids and consider moving from his home in Buffalo to Washington or Miami, where he believes he would make more money (last week, he announced the Michael Caputo Legal Fund). His statement concluded, “I want to know because God Damn you to Hell.”
The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false claims on Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.
Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump.
Mr. Caputo, who has faced criticism for leading efforts to warp C.D.C. weekly bulletins to fit Mr. Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger.
“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo, a Trump loyalist installed by the White House in April, told followers in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page. Mr. Caputo has 5,000 Facebook friends, and the video has been viewed more than 850 times. It has been shared by 44 followers.
The department said in a statement: “Mr. Caputo is a critical, integral part of the president’s coronavirus response, leading on public messaging as Americans need public health information to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Mr. Caputo said Monday, “Since joining the administration my family and I have been continually threatened” and harassed by people who have later been prosecuted. “This weighs heavily on us, and we deeply appreciate the friendship and support of President Trump as we address these matters and keep our children safe.”
Mr. Caputo delivered his broadside against scientists, the media and Democrats after a spate of news reports over the weekend that detailed his team’s systematic interference in the C.D.C.’s official reports on the pandemic and other disease outbreaks. Former and current C.D.C. officials described to Politico first, then The New York Times and other outlets how Mr. Caputo and a top aide routinely demanded the agency revise, delay and even scuttle the C.D.C.’s core public health updates, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, that they believed undercut Mr. Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control.
Those reports, deemed “the holiest of the holy” by one former top health official for their international respect and importance, have traditionally been so shielded from political interference that political appointees see them only just before they are published.
Mr. Caputo on Sunday complained on Facebook that he was under siege by the media and said that his physical health was in question and his “mental health has definitely failed.”
“I don’t like being alone in Washington,” he said, describing “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long.” He then ran through a series of conspiracy theories, culminating in a prediction that Mr. Trump will win re-election but his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., will refuse to concede.
“And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.” He added: “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”
Mr. Caputo’s installation at the agency was a White House move to assert greater control over Alex M. Azar II, who has been Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services since 2018. His job is to coordinate the messaging of an 80,000-person department that functions as the center of the American public health bureaucracy and includes the Food and Drug Administration, the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, which lead the government’s pandemic response.
Mr. Caputo boasted in his Facebook talk that the president had personally put him in charge of a $250 million public service advertising campaign intended to help America to get back to normal.
Despite the criticism of his team’s interference with C.D.C., Mr. Caputo said he expected to remain in his post because Mr. Trump supported him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I swear to God, as God is my witness, I am not stopping.”
His Facebook presentation comes as Mr. Trump has increasingly singled out federal government scientists as targets, complaining without evidence that they were deliberately trying to subvert his administration’s efforts to fight the pandemic for their own political reasons.
Mr. Caputo echoed those sentiments, saying scientists “deep in the bowels of the C.D.C. have given up science and become political animals.”
They “haven’t gotten out of their sweatpants except for meetings at coffee shops” to plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next,” Mr. Caputo said. “There are scientists who work for this government who do not want America to get well, not until after Joe Biden is president.”
He seems nice.
Actually, he has always been a despicable, horrible person. That they put him in charge of communications during a deadly pandemic says … everything.
There is no bottom.