The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane For readers of War Dogs and Bad Blood, an explosive look inside the rush to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the award-winning ProPublica reporter who saw it firsthand. The United States federal government has spent over $10 billion on medical protective wear and emergency supplies, yet as COVID-19 swept the nation, life-saving equipment such as masks, gloves, and ventilators was nearly impossible to find. In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, award-winning investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent over a year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes. Pandemic, Inc. is the story of the fraudster who signed a multi-million-dollar contract with the government to provide lifesaving PPE, and yet never came up with a single mask. The Navy admiral at the helm of the national hunt for additional medical resources. The Department of Health whistleblower who championed masks early on and was silenced by the government and conservative media. And the politician who callously slashed federal emergency funding and gutted the federal PPE stockpile. Winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, McSwane connects the dots between backdoor deals and the spoils systems to provide the definitive account of how this pandemic was so catastrophically mishandled. Shocking and revelatory, Pandemic, Inc. exposes a system that is both deeply rigged, and singularly American.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Chris Voss Show! Oh my gosh! It's another show from the Chris Voss Show. Welcome, welcome one and all. I hope you're having a good week so far. We've got some amazing, amazing guests on the show today.

He's going to be talking about his new book, and we'll be talking about some of that. It's very topical. You'll find we'll have an Apollo 13 astronaut later on today, so you want to check that out as well. And also, you can go to YouTube.com, 4 Fortress Chris Voss, to subscribe to all the amazing, it's the latest technology. It's free for unlimited time. You go there, you hit the bell notification button, and you too can be notified of the latest amazing guests we have on the Chris Voss Show. We just launched a new podcast, actually, I should give a plug in for. It's called Beacons of Leadership with Chris Voss. It's featuring me. Who saw that

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Also go see all our books for reading or viewing on goodreads.com, Forrest S. Chris Foss, and all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram as well. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my

business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today, we have another amazing author on the show. He's the author of the hottest book that's just come out, April 12th, which is, oh my gosh, today. Where's this year going on me?

April 12th, just launched today, Pandemic Incorporated, Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick. J. David McSwain is on the show with us today. He's going to be talking to us about this amazing research that he put into this. He is a reporter in ProPublica's Washington, D.C. office. Previously, he was an investigative reporter for the Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman. McSwain's reporting has spurred new laws and state and federal criminal investigations,

forced belt-tightening lawmakers to invest in social programs, and won awards including Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and Worth Bingham's Prize, a Scripps Howard Award, two IRE Awards, and the Peabody. That's a lot of awards. Welcome to the show, David. How are you? I'm well. How are you?

Congratulations on the new book. I am awesome, and we're honored to have you today. Thanks for having me. Yes. So give us your plugs. Any dot coms you want people to go check out, find out more about you on the interweb? Well, yeah. Check out the book at your local bookstore.

You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any of the above. You can find me on Twitter at David McSwain. Yeah. I need to get an intro like your show for myself. There you go. There's a brain bleed in there. That was amazing. The brain bleed, yeah.

There's a few other things that we took out because it was a little too racy. I think we had something about it might enhance your sex life sort of thing. And, you know, it was a little too fun. We're like, you know, we're not going to get top journalists on the show with some of the fun that was in there. But, you know, it was a comedy bit. So we edited it down. But, yeah, we've had some people on the show that are just like, i on a wwe wrestling thing you know i'm one of those things but it's always fun and and i want to say something too i really love your bio and investigative reporting that you do we we really

appreciate journalists on this program because people need to realize how much they expose you know abuses and stuff that goes on of course, many times they put their life on the line. So thanks for that and calling out some of these. If it wasn't for you guys, there would be a lot of people getting away with a lot of stuff in government. Thanks for that. Yeah. It's important the audience realizes this and realizes how valuable journalism is, especially when we see some of the journalists that have passed away in Ukraine.

So what motivated you to want to research this book and write it? Well, I really sort of stumbled into it, actually. I was fairly new in ProPublica's D.C. office here. Just a few months in, the pandemic hits, and like every reporter in the country was trying to figure out my place in what's probably hopefully hopefully, the largest news story of our generation, of our lives, and was just watching as the Trump administration, ill-prepared, was trying to catch up and awarding contracts. We're starting to see billions go out

the door, and just knowing what I know from investigative reporting and covering some contracts at the state and local level, I figured people are going to take advantage of this program and started taking a look at who was getting money and started finding some weird cases, some weird deals, and started making calls. And I think recently, just the last couple weeks, there's been new reporting about just massive abuses. And I think the justice department is going still after a bunch of people i think yeah that a lot there's been a lot in the last couple weeks about unemployment fraud it was incredibly easy to make claims for unemployment benefits and a lot

of people did that we saw the similar thing a little bit earlier in the paycheck protection program which i get into in in the book of people really fleecing the Small Business Administration. And, you know, that's part of why President Biden in his State of the Union Address announced a special prosecutor to look into pandemic fraud, which a lot of which is detailed in this book, and hopefully they're looking and following up on some of it. That's right. I remember that being announced and stuff going on. So give us an overall arcing of the book, kind of a 30,000 foot view before we get into some of the details of what's inside. Sure. Well, I started, like I said, I started with a few phone calls. I ended up

talking to one federal contractor who got a large deal, $34.5 million to the Veterans Administration to deliver something like 6 million masks. And these were the really scary months where masks were really needed on the front line. We didn't have vaccines. Hospitals were overrun. Nurses and doctors were in great peril. And I had a suspicion that he probably didn't have these masks. Or if he did, I wondered how he had them. I called him. He said, I'm delivering them tomorrow. I'm getting on a private jet. I said, well, can I come with you? He said yes. That really launched me on more than a year of reporting following not only his saga, but many contractors and also just entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to make money during our national crisis.

I think I remember this story in live time as you were reporting it. You got on a plane with him and he went someplace and it really didn't turn out whatever, but he's still hustling the thing, I think. Am I vaguely correct? Yeah, yeah. So I joined him the next morning. It was a Saturday, the last Saturday of April 2020. And it was literally as we were taking off, he revealed to me, you know, I don't actually have the masks.

Somebody bought them out from under me. And I said, well, why the hell are we going to Chicago then if you don't have the masks? And he says, well, I have faith that i'm going to get him i've been talking with you know he lists you know a bunch of colorful characters he's working with and he's describing to me this like underworld this you know of mask brokers and investors and people who are making money behind the scenes and that's what he's been dealing with and i said that's you know i'd like to know more about that and over the the course of that trip, as we flew first to Georgia and then to Chicago, it became clear to me that, you know, he didn't have masks. He didn't have a line on masks.

But he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. Yeah, yeah. And that was the theme. That was the theme throughout. Yeah. And, you know, I began to wonder, you know, if this guy had defrauded the federal government and was committing a crime before my eyes. And I didn't know all the answers, but we wrote what we knew because we felt we needed to get this out to the public really quickly. Because these were the sort of people that our federal government was entrusting with our national well-being.

This was what we were. This was our plan. This was the strategy to get masks to our frontline workers. And, you know, and from there, I ended up falling into a number of different colorful characters and scams and swindles and so forth, and tried to stitch it all together to get that sort of high level of 30,000 foot view and just walked away with, you know, a story of really gross government incompetence and negligence, and the consequences of that being we were really held hostage to our own worst impulses, this idea that the free market would save us, and we'll just throw money at it. And it really created chaos.

Yeah, and I remember reading that story in Lifetime, and I think, wasn't there a series of articles you had on the thing as it developed and the guy, you know, eventually played out? Did they end up prosecuting him? I think they went after him, didn't they? He was. Federal prosecutors followed up on that story and, you know, dug into his finances a little bit more. And he was charged with three counts of fraud to which he did plead guilty and he's currently in prison. Wow. Well, that's, that's, that's some, you know, reconciliation. The, the, the interesting thing about it was, and correct me if I'm wrong, cause I, you know, I, I can be wrong, but,

but during the, that's my wife, my nine ex-wives. I'm not married. But, you know, during the Trump administration, it was a very different administration than we've ever had before or since. And, you know, here in Utah, we had, I'm sure you're familiar with that group. There was a group of technology nerds who had a startup who decided to, I think, I can't remember if it was masks or some sort of flu intervictim. I don't remember exactly. I think it was masks. And they did a startup and ended up, you know, causing problems with the Utah government. Of course, they just like, and there was something really unique about the Trump administration

where it was like the government just was failing at doing whatever it needed to do. And at first, you know, there was the denials like, oh, you know, it's just some big deal. It's 15 people on a ship. And yeah, it's just the flu. You know, it'll be gone by April. You know, I remember all this stuff. But it seemed like it just even during the Trump administration, normal times, it was just it was business, sort of fascist sort of business for everybody. It was like a pirate ship where just anybody who wanted to make a buck could

jump in, including Jared Kushner. And so all these people just seemed to come out of the woodwork that were just how to get rich quick schemers jumping into that pile. Is that, is that a good analogy or am I off the mark? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the behavior we saw, people were taking signals from the white house and, you know, our top elected official. And, you know, you add to that, there's sort of this perfect storm of the Trump administration had sort of been systematically tearing apart bureaucracy. And, you know, the public, as a result, lost faith in government even before we were being told not to wear masks and then told to wear masks. So you have this, you have this just mess, and you sort of have this cultural, and I think Trump exacerbated this, this cultural sense of really fierce individual liberty.

Right. And we all know that, you know, living in this country and that manifests in the context of capitalism is sort of this worship of the entrepreneur. And and I don't have a problem with that on its face as long as you're acting in good faith and, you know, you know you're making honest money for honest work but what i saw in some of my characters including robert stewart who commissioned the private jet was it was hard for me to tell initially you know who who really embodied that capitalist spirit you know who was really trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and at the same time do something for their country? And who was sort of falling for their own myth while they were really just trying to fleece us all and get rich? And that was really the central tension I saw with Robert Stewart Jr., who I ultimately view as sort of a tragic figure and others in the book, including some people in the Trump administration and just other random people I met while following tips. You know, I've always been in the tech business and a lot of our initial 10 years of the podcast

is like Silicon Valley type stuff. And there is a hustler economy out there. I mean, there's two parts of the hustler economy. There's the hustle where people work hard. I've been an entrepreneur since 18, but I don't do anything that gets me in jail. I kind of have a policy about that. I've got a real thing about just not going to jail. And if there's a question of like, would this put me in jail? We did mortgages for 20 years and there was people around us doing mortgage fraud. People come to work for me and, you know, they'd be like, how come you don't have those signature tracer lights here, Chris? I'm like, that's because we're not going to jail.

It's called a deterrent. Yeah. I'm not doing anything that puts me in that sort of thing. But there's also hustlers. We see this in the NFT and the cryptocurrency thing. And NFT is so ripe with ripoffs right now. It's crazy. And so we see these hustlers that they grab on.

And they're pretty much just kind of what I call carpetbagging scammers, carpetbaggers. They just carpetbag on whatever the newest thing is, and they just scam people. And it seemed like there was so many of these people that were doing that. One of the questions I have for you, there was stories, and I don't think that I ever fully got to the bottom of it, but there were stories that actually Jared Kushner held back a full sort of masking program that the government was going to do so that he and some of his crony friends could try and figure out a way to corner the market and make money

off of it. Was there truth? Well, there are a couple of things there. I mean, you're right. There is just something that there are always going to be con artists. I touch on this in the book as well. I mean, we have a rich history. This is a country, you know, built, as one of my characters said in the book, on, you know, on pirates, by pirates. And you're always going to see that. But I think there was an especially strong sense in this era, under this particular administration, with all the chaos going on, that that deterrent wasn't there, that you could get away with it. And it was just too much too fast. And this was a great opportunity for the hustlers.

And you mentioned you're an entrepreneur. And when I was a kid, my mom had me going into bowling alleys selling candy. I was always making money, which is ironic because I became a journalist. But I have respect for that. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's when you start screwing people over and delaying the national pandemic response and really causing negative downstream effects that it becomes interesting to me and needs to be written about. In terms of Kushner, I talk about this in the book, too. A lot of the problems that he caused were just public relations. We had a task force. Mike Pence was in charge of this out of the White

House, which some had problems with. It should be federal emergency managers, like professionals who understand emergency response, in charge of these things. But you had you had this official task force that was led by Pence. And then you had Kushner bringing in volunteers and, you know, and well-to-do people with time on their hands to try to track down things that the federal government needed. But they weren't employees. They didn't know how to access federal money. They're approving things that make no sense. They're making referrals to

New York State, for instance, who gave someone a contract and now they're having to sue to get their money back. It just created this perception. At the same time, you've got the president clearly favoring the policies and people and politics of red states that, you know, he had his thumb on the pulse at every turn. I spent a lot of time talking with the Navy Admiral who was brought in a little late, but put in charge of the supply chain task force. And he says, you know, a lot of that, it's really annoying to me because I came in that we didn't have a single mask in the national stockpile. And I had to just start figuring out where things were going to go. And we came up with this plan to ship things in by plane rather than maritime transport,

which gets called Project Airbridge, right? And then Kushner puts his face on it. It's sort of shrouded in secrecy. It did deliver some masks, but how effective it was is really unclear. But you really couldn't separate what was, you know, some work being done by these professionals from the face of Jared Kushner, who was bringing in friends, doing things on his private cell phone, has all these business ties. And what you get is there was a lot of innuendo out there that, you know, Kushner's really,ner's really doing this and that.

And I think more than anything, and there's some of that, I think more than anything, he just brought chaos to the thing. And he comes out and he says, it's not the state's stockpile, it's our stockpile. It's ours. And we're going to decide who gets what. And at that point, the message had really run away from the people who were trying to actually solve a problem. And it became all politics. And then not to mention, you write about in the book, I believe he's just been referred to because he's not talking to Congress. Let me pull this up again. There was Jared Kushner and then there was the, who is it? Peter Navarro. Yeah.

You know, and Peter can sue me. If anybody that I've ever seen work at the white house, who looks like he has a crack problem or a meth problem, aside from the pillow guy, Peter Navarro, man, like just anytime I've ever seen that man talk, I'm like, how did that guy get within the state of the White House at all? He sounds like a rambling idiot. And, of course, you see who he works for. But, you know, Peter Navarro, if you want to touch on that, I mean, with him sort of, you know, doing crazy stuff as well off the, you know, it was just like a bunch of people on a pirate ship doing whatever the hell they wanted. I mean, it these was like, it was just like a bunch of people on a pirate ship doing whatever the hell they wanted. It, I mean, it truly was madness. I, I really wanted to talk to Peter Navarro. He, he wouldn't return my calls. He's one of those people who only talked to right

wing folks. And I think he, I think he wanted to keep some details for, for his book, but I was fascinated by him because he, he is such a character as you mentioned and you know i sort of began to think of him as like the nicholas cage of american politics you know he does some good stuff and sometimes you're like what was that and he's just always there he's just always there and there's a nick cage movie coming out i'm going to be the first to see it but say this in a condescending way like i i'm drawn to characters i wanted to know him and find out a little bit more and everything i could gather from interviews and public records and emails and stuff that came out from congress he he was almost a hero in this story he was one of the few in the trump administration who said

you know holy crap we're in trouble we got we got to start spending money and we got to get masks. We got to get vaccines. And I think he was frustrated that they weren't moving in what he called Trump time. So he did something remarkable. He essentially took over the federal purchasing apparatus. And I found early on there was this major contract. I think it was $90 million steered to this company. And it's in this usually boring purchasing data that I'm reviewing.

And somebody wrote, ordered by the White House, which you never see. And for obvious reasons, you can't have a political office and political appointees steering public money to the companies that they see fit. And that was happening. And I didn't know right away, but it was him. And, you know, so he was trying to get things moving, but he's steering contracts to certain people who have connections. He's not cutting deals with an American mask manufacturer who said, I can get you millions

of masks, you know, because they quarreled because he's such a big personality. And then he becomes obsessed with hydroxychloroquine, you know, which was being touted as this sort of, you know, cure all. So there were these moments where, you know, you're almost rooting for Peter Navarro, despite, you know, despite himself to be successful. And by the way, he'd run as a Democrat in California several times before he somehow ends up on the Trump administration. There are moments where you're almost cheering for the guy and you wish he'd gotten what he wanted. And then you realize, well, he just really got in his own way. And for better or worse, I mean, he was one of the people in the Trump administration trying to do something.

But I think a pirate ship is an apt metaphor. Yeah. I recall now. Yeah, you're right. And of course you're right because you researched this. I'm just the host interviewing. But I remember there was that memo that he put out and it leaked out that he'd been the canary in the coal mine, right? Screaming that the ship is on fire or whatever. And it had come out.

And I remember that. I remember a lot of those things were either him or Kellyanne. I've tried to forget her name. They'd be on the TV rambling about whatever, and they look like I do in the morning when you've woken up from a hangover or something. Yeah. He's very anti-China, and there are some valid concerns there,

and I think we're all coming to terms with that. His sort of anti-China fanaticism really bled through everything. So it was hard to take him seriously, even when he was right, some people. Yeah. So do you get into PPP in the book, the PPP loans, or do you just stick with the PP? We go all over the place to test tubes. I'm sorry, testing kits. And I have a chapter devoted to the PPP loans. This was such low hanging fruit. There's been so many stories written about it. So I really tried to quantify

and pick out some of the things that I just found absolutely astounding. And, you know, aside from buying yachts and cars and, you know, people, it was one guy who bought a giant mansion and a Lincoln Navigator and paid off his wife's debts. And, you know, federal investigators are figuring it out. He goes on the lam and they end up finding him in Croatia. And, you know, he says, well, I left because under Trump, what I was doing was fine, but Biden was going to come after me. But one of the things I found most astounding about the PPP program, other than speed was prioritized above all else. So this was just the easiest fraud in the history of fraud. Yeah. You lie on a few documents, you get millions of dollars was essentially how it was working. But one of the things I found most astounding, my colleagues at ProPublica reported, just looking through the data and calling people, that there were hundreds of fake farms that geographically could not make sense.

And they had funny names like McDonald's, not burgers, but flowers and Beefy King. There were a bunch of farms off the Jersey shore where there is no farming. Just basic due diligence found that these things didn't exist and there are hundreds of them and they're all getting loans. So I tried to highlight some of the more absurd elements of that. And frankly, we're going to be trying to quantify how much fraud there really was. And investigators and prosecutors are going to be chasing these things down probably for the next decade, I guess. And I imagine with your reporting, I mean, I remember there was a lot of small businesses

and medium-sized businesses, you know, Main Street businesses, if you will, people that I knew that had, you know, little restaurants or little businesses. They all tried to grab some of that PPP money. They were legitimate businesses, and it was gone within seconds. And, of course, we found out later. And I think it was, it was the guy who was over the Fed, the money, he just got a billion dollar loan after he left the thing from the Saudis. But he, they wouldn't disclose where the money had gone initially, which was really suspect, right?

Right. We had to sue along with other news organizations and this just flew in the face of the freedom of information act like you know that's the sort of thing that we journalists get to be really indignant about so we had to sue they released it and right away just tons of stories coming out of that and we were for investigative reporters and and we did see in evaluating that data that, you know, the big banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, had in fact given that first wave of loans, the way they were being processed, ended up going to major companies that had like franchisees and, you know, the way they could work it,

they were able to get money, including hotels. So people who needed it, like your local barber, you know, these places that were closed down down couldn't get in on the first wave. So in the second wave, they relied on fintech a little bit more. And they were sort of looser, even looser oversight of that. So that's where you see the smaller individual fraud. But at the same time, it did actually free up for some people to get it. So we just have this flawed tax system to begin with and all these other things. So rushing money to the American public is just inherently messy. And when you have no safeguards on it and speed's the priority, if you're willing to lie on a couple documents, you can have a real deal. And the sad part is a lot of those companies went out of business, lost, you know, decades they built, and, you know, all because of scammers and everything else.

In fact, the Trump properties, to my understanding, got a lot of money. I think some of Jared Kushner's stuff got a lot of money. It was really, really dirty the whole way the thing went down, I guess, in my opinion. How much of this contributed to, you know, we've seen the fallout over two years of, you know, people having vaccine hesitancy, not believing in masks. We went into this whole system of, you know, what we've seen where people, you know, I mean, where they're still fighting on planes, the fallout from the, the idiocy that's come from disbelief and everything and not being able to trust stuff. You know, some, some of it, I initially equated Donald Trump, you know, telling people at the beginning, Oh, it's not the big deal. It's not whatever, which is really dumb on his part. If he, if he would have embraced it, he likely would be

president again and, and, and, and done a valiant fight If he would have embraced it, he likely would be president again and done a valiant fight. He would have been president. But the initial denial in all that gameplay, I always assume created a lot of doubt in people's mind. But let me ask you this. How much of this other stuff that you researched in the book, all these different scams and all this stuff going on,

how much did that contribute, do you think, to mask people hating on masks and people's hesitance about the vaccine and stuff? Interesting question. Well, one thing that comes to mind, and this was a little bit earlier in your question, a lot of those anti-vax folks, the people who make money by spreading misinformation and selling things like vitamin D super doses and suntanning beds and, you know, that prevent cancer. They all got PPP loans for their businesses. So taxpayers bolstered the anti-vax movement indirectly, which I found astounding. In terms of, you know, the crazy mask market and all that, You know, I don't know how much of that became

sort of a cultural, you know, flashpoint for people. I think we are sort of trained to accept a certain amount of fraud. So these, I don't know if those stories really did it, but I think turning the mask into a political weapon and the mask being probably the enduring image of this era was one of the more unfortunate elements and you know fighting over something so silly that is really just a minor inconvenience yeah prevented prevented our recovery and and contributed to the profound loss of life in our in our communities yeah and all that did was prolong the pandemic and prolong the spending you know and and it has led us to this exhausted state we're in now where we're you know trillions in the hole yeah and like everyone's so sick of the whole thing i mean

that's what kind of made uh what was it the omnicron worse is people were just like i'm done i'm not wearing the mask. I'm going to go out and make out with everybody. And then, yeah, we just get slammed. I didn't expect this book to be relevant, to be honest with you. You thought it would be over and cleaned up by then? Well, I mean, it's been two years, right? Yeah. I had hoped.

When I went down this road, I thought, all right, it's probably not going to be a big seller, you know, because people are going to be like, well, that was a while ago and whatever. It's about policy and money and so forth. And it became more and more about just the absurdity that we're in now and who we are as people. And unfortunately, it is relevant today. And, you know, I'd trade it for anything to have the most irrelevant book in the world to be done with this yeah and it's still ongoing i mean you saw what happened at the it was the gridiron thing and you know we're having these little pop-ups you've seen what's going on in shanghai which is just crazy do i I have the right city? You mentioned in the book in 2020,

you could have paid $100 to form an LLC on a Monday and by Friday have a multimillionaire contract to provide masks. That's insane, man. Oh yeah, we saw this a lot. That's in reference to a company that did end up providing some masks, but all they did was ship them in from China and sell them at a markup to the US.

These were your thin surgical masks. They weren't the N95s that everyone was losing their minds over. But yeah, that company was formed. It had a shadow co-owner who was currently being sued by the Federal Trade Commission for a series of alleged scams,

including selling bogus male sex enhancement pills, or as I call them in the book, dick pills. And, you know, this person became a major federal contractor from whom we were dependent on getting masks. And we saw another instance where a company was created and very shortly thereafter got a $10 million deal with FEMA to provide test kits, which at this point, we, you know, we didn't have tests available like we do now. These were the PCR tests or, you know, the fancy tests that are more accurate. And

we wondered, how does this company with no medical experience, how are they providing COVID-19 test kits? You know, and we were behind many months at this point in testing, and it prohibited us from getting ahead of the virus. Looked into it, and this company, what they were doing, and the owner of this company had a history of fraud allegations. They were providing, instead of test tubes, plastic mini soda bottles, which are called preforms, which are actually blown up with heat and pressure to create your two liter bottles at the grocery store. And they were in this hot warehouse with a big fan air whipping around and had temp workers taking these bottles with literal

snow shovels, putting them into smaller bins and then having workers squirt saline into them, capping them off and throwing them into a bag. And when I talked to health officials in various states, they were just astounded. They're like, what is this? We don't know what this is. We can't use these. They don't fit standard lab equipment. They're not sterile. They're supposed to be hermetically sealed. And I show up to the warehouse and like, you know, they're loading these things into an enterprise rental truck. It's supposed to be a refrigerated truck. Start asking questions and, asking questions and they just scream at me and scare me off. But I managed to get some of it on video and see that this was a major contract for testing. And FEMA was forwarding these to all 50 states and territories. And after

we reported the story, they had to say, don't use the test kit. So it set us back even further. And the thing that struck me most about that is FEMA accepted those test tubes. So the vendor was paid. And contract experts we talked to said because FEMA accepted them, the contractor delivered and they were accepted. So they get paid. That's insane. Part of your book, there's over 500 cases that they're going after.

Is that correct? 500 defendants so far? In the PPP space, yeah. That have been criminally charged, I should say. There's probably more they're investigating. Yeah, I suspect that we're going to be seeing investigations for a long time, particularly with Biden's announcement of a special prosecutor for pandemic fraud. Do you think that with that special prosecutor, there might be people in the government that were in the administration that we might uncover some sort of shady business? I know that seems like the most obvious thing to say about the Trump administration. I think there may be. So when I first went down this path and I was talking to some of my editors right away, we're thinking like, who's getting kickbacks? Let's dig into this. And and that, you know, maybe there was some of that at the higher level. But the more I saw just random companies getting major deals, I began to suspect that we were so screwed that your contract officers, you know, just people,

normal people with normal jobs who aren't in the public eye, who are used to buying, you know, pencils and desk chairs, were now just awarding contracts left and right, because they didn't know what to do. They were kind of on the front line, they had to find these things. And there was just no oversight. And the federal government would argue, well, you know, if they didn't deliver, we didn't pay most of the time, right? But that doesn't work either. Because what was happening, for instance, in the case of the guy with the private jet and the VA contract, the VA issued a contract to pay nearly $6 a mask, right? This contractor takes that contract and goes to this sort of underground market of mask brokers and investors

and people with connections to China. Now, everybody in the world knows, well, the price is now $6 for a mask. So you've just inflated the prices and you're competing because the Trump administration has not coordinated anything with every other state and every other city. So it just jet fueled this crazy market. And, you know, you had people who they got away with with much higher returns. And then you had people who never even had anything to begin with and were just trying to fleece somebody, you know, get a wire transfer. Wow. I remember. Yeah. you bring back how crazy it was you had governors running to i think it was south korea and bringing in planes they're worried about the fbi seizing them you know like states are just like on their own and trump's like arguing and bashing states especially democrat states or something and you, the whole thing is just

chaos and just the worst leadership and poor management you could ever expect from a leader. And I remember, who was the governor who went overseas? It was Korea or Japan. He gets like some load. Has it personally flown in?

Do you remember that? The governor of Maryland had a shipment come in. I don't know if this is the case you're referring to, but was just trying to get masks, you know, and FEMA would claim they weren't seizing things. But I think what was happening is somebody at FEMA would decide, well, there's this lot of masks here. These are more needed elsewhere. So they were rerouting things. And then with Kushner and Trump, you know, people would connect the dots and say, well, they're giving them to red states rather than blue states. And, you know, there's a lot of innuendo. It's hard to prove what was what. But what was clear is governors were on their own. Gavin Newsom in California cut a really lucrative deal with that company in China, got a lot of heat for it. And, you know, I mentioned this,

it might not have been the worst idea, you know, the price not for it. And, you know, I mentioned this, it might not have been the worst idea, you know, the price notwithstanding, and, you know, it took them a while to deliver. But this, you know, if you're a governor of a state, you're looking at the Trump administration's response, we had something like 1% of what we needed in the national stockpile. It might make sense to try to get your own masks and that just heats everything up. And then you have Andrew Cuomo of New York on TV talking about how it's like eBay. And, you know, we were just shooting ourselves in the foot because there was, there was no one controlling this market. This is not a time for like, you know,

untethered, unfettered capitalist enterprise. It's time for a national leadership to decide where we move things and make sure that, you know, people can't price gouge and you get things where they need to be. Yeah. I mean, that really contributed to the whole pirate ship image too. The States having to outbid each other and they're all fighting and, and yeah, Andrew was doing those press conferences. I'll never forget the time he talked about the boyfriend. The boyfriend. That was always a funny bit when he'd talk about his daughters and the boyfriend.

But yeah, the rest of the time you'd sit and listen to him and go, well, what he says makes sense. Like, why isn't the federal government, there's a reason we have one. And there you go. I mean, there's so much that you have in the richness of this book. It's amazing. Anything we want to touch on or tease out, we could probably talk for like 20 hours. And people need to go buy the book. You know, one thing I would like to add, you know, I was writing about the pandemic while I, like everybody else, was enduring it. We're all tired.

And I tried to keep that in mind. You know, I didn't want to write a book that was just like a dissertation of everything that just happened and just depress us further. This is really a story about who we are as Americans and what, you know, the way we behaved and hopefully a blueprint for exactly what not to do. Next time we're faced with such a crisis. And, you know, in the process of reporting, you run into crazy people. You know, I was, I was, I had one person I'm talking to, she's trying to get me high. And she's a delightful character. There was a time when I thought she might be a stripper, but she was actually a Native American medicine woman. These are real things. And no, she, she, she's a legitimate, you know,

earth medicine practitioner. She said, you know, this is one of the mysteries in the book. I finally find her. But through, through the course of the course of reporting, you don't always get the answer you're looking for. You don't always get the answer and you end up somewhere else and you find funny and wacky things. So I tried to include that. There's the anger we all feel in here. There's the humor that I found along the way. And I try to provide some lessons. It's, it's not just a dramatic retelling of everything we just saw. And, and that was important to me because, you know, we're, we all just experienced a trauma and we're still, we're still in it. And maybe we can use some levity. And, and definitely to learn something from it. Like, let's not do this ever again, at least not respond. You know, I don't think we are in control of our virus technically, but, you know, the response was, I mean, I was stunned.

The CDC was one of the most, before the thing was one of the most highest regarded, you know, they would say it was one of the most highest regarded, you know, intellectual logical, uh, sort of, you know, parts of our government. And, you know, within months it was, it was turned into a clown factory. I'll never forget when, what was it when Donald Trump sat there and lied to everybody and in this at the CDC offices and said, yeah, everyone can get a test like now. Yeah. They're available all over the place. Yeah. Right. And you're just like, holy shit. And the, the guys are just standing there. The two clowns are just standing there beside him going, yeah, they're available all over the place. Yeah. Right. And you're just like, holy shit. And the guys are just standing there. The two clowns are just standing there beside him going, yeah.

And you can see on their faces. You're just like, you guys are full of it. Like, what the hell? The gaslighting is off the chart. Anyway, I'm glad for journalists like you who dig into this stuff and shine a light on it. Because, you know, abuses like this are just, it's insane and we need to never do this

again and hopefully, you know, the one thing man can't learn from his history is man never learns from his history, but that's the beauty of journaling this and writing it out. Well, at the very least, we could fill the stockpile, you know, and have masks, you know, at the very least, we could fill the stockpile, you know,

and have masks, you know, at the very least. Yeah. Hopefully the next virus doesn't require, you know, something else, and we've got the mask for it. Anyway, thank you very much for coming on the show and sharing some of the stuff with us. We really appreciate it, Dave. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Thanks for coming. Give us your plugs so we can find you on the internet. I'm on Twitter, at David McSwain. I have a website, davidmcswain.com, and the book is at all your major book retailers, from Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. I'm not used to plugging. Did I do that right? You did great.

Yeah. You got it. You got the old buy my darn book already, as we like to say over here. So definitely check it out, guys. It's number one bestseller in government management right now on Amazon. Pandemic Incorporated, Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick, just came out today. So you want to take and pick that book up.

You can see the first one in your neighborhood block or your book club to have read it. I really encourage everybody to read these books. You want to vote for better people in government who do a good job? God knows. I mean, just the worst. I never thought we would be the worst at this. And we, I think, still had the most sickness and death, didn't we? Did anyone ever beat us out on that?

Our global population was an astounding failure. Yeah, it's just incredible. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. See everything we read and review over there. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe, as we always say about the pandemic, and we'll see you guys next time.