It looks like Trump isn’t just trying to keep his behavior on January 6th under wraps, he doesn’t want anyone looking into his catastrophic handling of the pandemic:
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday asked his former trade adviser Peter Navarro to keep mum and “protect executive privilege” in the investigation by the “Communist Democrats” into his administration’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
Navarro, former director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, was subpoenaed Thursday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis chaired by Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.). The committee is looking into the Trump administration’s response to the deadly COVID-19 surge last year, months after Trump vowed it would quickly vanish.
“I’m telling Peter Navarro to protect executive privilege and not let these unhinged Democrats discredit our great accomplishments,” Trump said in a statement posted Saturday by aide Liz Harrington on her Twitter account. (Trump has been banned from Twitter.)
Trump called his administration’s response to COVID-19 “unprecedented and incredible,” even though more than 400,000 Americans died on his watch from the illness.
Navarro’s subpoena demands that he appear for a deposition Dec. 1 and hand over documents connected to the coronavirus response by Dec. 8, Bloomberg reported.
Navarro frequently spouted lies about the coronavirus and the administration. He insisted Trump’s demands to slow testing so COVID-19 cases wouldn’t look so bad were “tongue in cheek.” He has baselessly called the pandemic a “product of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Navarro:
There has already been dramatic testimony from members of the task force saying that Trump and his henchmen like Navarro and Scott Atlas were determined to downplay the crisis and virtually ignored it once the campaign got going in the summer.
Trump did a lot of terrible things during his notorious reign, not the least of which was his perpetuation of The Big Lie and inciting the storming of the Capitol on January 6th. But this was the worst, by a mile. He egged on resistance to masks and social distancing and created the atmosphere that has led his followers to reject vaccines all so that he could protect his re-election prospects. The result is three quarters of a million dead people. The man is a monster.