Last week the Washington Post published a report titled “Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic,” which revealed that President Trump had not sought the counsel of the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in more than a month.
But as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.
The 2,500-word report only briefly touches on the official who does that scuttling: a man named Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide who has been described as a conspiracy theorist with racist views and is closely allied with former Trump adviser Roger Stone. Continue reading.