1. Max Kennedy Jr., Robert F. Kennedy’s 26-year-old grandson, reportedly attempted to blow the whistle from inside President Trump’s coronavirus task force, which he says tried to lowball projected coronavirus deaths.
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2. Kennedy joined the task force in March after a friend suggested he volunteer with the White House covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force that Jared Kushner was putting together.
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3. Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said “it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the Administration.”
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4. He said he was shocked to learn that they were not supporting the government’s official procurement team but rather *were* the team: “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.”
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5. “Kennedy believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in order to sidestep government experts and thereby ‘control the narrative.’” (The New Yorker)
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6. “He said that Brad Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task force, pressured him to create a model fudging the projected number of fatalities.” (The New Yorker)
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7. “Smith wanted the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S. deaths, claiming that the experts’ models were ‘too severe.’” (The New Yorker)
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8. Kennedy says he told Smith that he knew nothing about disease modeling and declined the assignment. A spokesman said Smith had no recollection of the conversation.
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9. As of September, almost 200,000 people have died from covid-19 in the U.S.
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10. After a few weeks of increasing distress over the government’s response, Kennedy wrote an anonymous complaint to the House Oversight Committee, despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement.
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11. He is also speaking publicly now, saying he does not believe the NDA can legally keep him from expressing his opinion.
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12. “If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.”
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13. “The Administration’s coronavirus response, he said, ‘was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.’” (The New Yorker)
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