An interesting segment on the 08/06/25 edition of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes (Velshi subbing) delved into the widely reported “strategy session” that was supposed to take place at Vice President JD Vance’s residence to deal with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The scandal has engulfed the Trump White House and is leading to accusations of a coverup.
#BREAKING: Velshi in for Hayes: "…a coordinating session between a VP & DOJ officials is a sort of thing that Republicans would have made into a scandal before the Trump era, in fact, come to think of it, they did. Back in 2016, after a 30 minute get-together on an airport… pic.twitter.com/ZwAGcl9j0s
The MSNBC segment aptly pointed out the hypocritical Republican reaction back in 2016, when then AG Loretta Lynch was spotted at an airport tarmac chatting with former President Bill Clinton. The DOJ was at that time investigating Hillary Clinton–then the Democratic presidential candidate–over her email server. Many Republicans were very outraged by that meeting, accusing Bill Clinton and Lynch of conspiring to bury the email server probe. The firestorm surrounding the tarmac meeting almost led to AG Lynch’s resignation.
It is therefore quite interesting how the same Republican party which pushed for Lynch’s resignation sighting DOJ independence, is now very comfortable with the prospect of current AG Pam Bondi sitting down with Trump admin officials for a “strategy session” regarding the Epstein scandal which implicates President Trump.
What happened to their clamour for DOJ independence? It is a very hypocritical stance, and MSNBC’s All In crew deserves major kudos for calling it out
A troubling Vanity Fair report says that at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner cobbled together a team which actually managed to come up with a decent national testing strategy for covid-19. Shockingly however, instead of the plan being rapidly deployed nationwide to curb the spread of the deadly virus, Kushner and some White House political operatives decided it would be politically advantageous for Trump, if they shelved the testing plan because the virus at that time was only ravaging blue/Democratic states like New York.
As unbelievable as this sounds, Kushner and the White House operatives believed it would be politically advantageous for Trump if they let people die in blue/Democratic states because they could turn around and blame Democratic Governors for incompetence in the run up to the November elections. The author of the Vanity Fair piece, Katherine Eban, told CNN’s Erin Burnett;“There was a shared feeling which turned out to be spectacularly wrong, that the virus was receding, it was going to be under control, and at the time it was just the blue states where the virus was surging. So the idea was, why go through all the effort to surge up a national plan? It wasn’t going to have political resonance, and if there was a political response that was needed, the blue state Governors could just be blamed..”
You’ll remember a recent Washington Post piece which said Trump, who had previously downplayed the seriousness of covid-19, even calling it a hoax at one point, changed his attitude towards the deadly virus only after senior White House officials presented him with data and maps showing that the virus is beginning to ravage “our people”–Trump’s base of rural White voters in Republican states. This means Trump’s bungled covid-19 response, which has led to more than 150,000 deaths so far and counting, is not only the result of a callous political decision by his son-in -law Kushner, but also the administration’s deep seated racism towards communities of color who Trump considers not “our people”, and who data has consistently shown to disproportionately bear the brunt of covid-19, both in infection rates and deaths. A sad state of affairs indeed.
Bottom line folks, as it currently stands, the coronavirus pandemic is arguably one of the biggest crisis ever to befall the United States, especially if you consider the fact that it has claimed more than 150,000 lives in the U.S. in less than six months, led to levels of unemployment most of us have never witnessed in our lifetimes, dealt a severe blow to the U.S. economy leaving economic giants such as the airline industry teetering on the brink of collapse, changed the manner and format of our beloved professional sports leagues, just to mention but a few. Reasonable people will agree that given the seriousness of covid-19, the American public is totally justified in expecting that the Trump administration, without regard to partisan politics or race, will spare no resources, and do everything in it’s power to fight the deadly coronavirus pandemic. Sadly, the Vanity Fair piece saying Kushner shelved a covid-19 national testing strategy for political reasons, and the Washington Post piece saying Trump has not been serious about the pandemic because it’s not ravaging “our people”, prove beyond any reasonable doubt that partisan politics and racism are guiding Trump administration’s covid-19 response. All Americans of good conscience must loudly rebuke this immoral and callous disregard for people’s lives. We owe that to the families of the 150,000-plus people who have needlessly succumbed to covid-19.
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