I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!
Beginning in late January 2020, U.S. intelligence agencies reported to senior Trump administration officials that the coronavirus spreading in China threatened to become a pandemic and spark a global health crisis.
But then-President Trump’s public statements over the next two months “did not reflect the increasingly stark warnings coursing through intelligence channels,” including the president’s daily brief,available to Trump and senior members of his administration, according to a report issued Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee.
By February, the intelligence community “had amply warned the White House in time for it to act to protect the country,” committee investigators concluded. Trump claimed in a May 2020 tweet that the intelligence community “only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner,” a statement that “simply does not match the record of intelligence analysis published in late January and February,” the committee found.
Committee staff spent two years examining the intelligence community’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. Their report, which was staffed by bipartisan aides but written by the Democrats, who hold the majority on the committee, broadly praises the work of intelligence analysts for providing early warning about the virus for policymakers.
He didn’t want his numbers to go up.
The committee does criticize the Intelligence Community for failing to use clandestine sources and other tools in the early days of the pandemic to collect useful information and it also recommends several improvements for the future.
But in the end, none of that will be helpful if the government is trying to cover up the information and is determined not to use it. If you have a president who is too inept to understand real threats to America and sees the job entirely through the prism of his own self-interest and nothing else, no amount of better practices is going to help.
The only way to truly protect ourselves is not to vote for imbeciles and gangsters for president. Apparently, that’s not as easy as it seems.
If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, it would be most appreciated. Happy Hollandaise everyone!