The Daily Beast Podcast - The Dirty Little Secrets of Trump’s Pandemic Aid

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

J. David McSwane, author of Pandemic, Inc. shares his reporting on some of the fraudsters who got their hands on PPE contracts during the pandemic. Plus, a fun segment in which co-hosts Andy Levy and Molly Jong-Fast listen and respond to the wildest GOP clips from this week—including one in which Josh Mandel tells MLK Jr’s daughter she needs a history lesson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we're going to be joined by David McSwain, who's a reporter at ProPublica and the author of Pandemic Inc, chasing the capitalists and thieves who got rich while we got sick. And he's going to talk to us all about all the corruption he saw during the pandemic.

But first, let's have some fun. It's Sunday. You guys ready to listen to some clips? You know we are. Yeah, sure. Our first clip is going to be the first of two ads from the Ohio Senate race. The first comes from author J.D. Vance. Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump's wall.

They censor us, but it doesn't change the truth. Joe Biden's open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country. This issue is personal. I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border. No child should grow up an orphan. I'm JD fans, and I approve this message because whatever they call us, we will put America first. So maybe one of you guys can help me out here.

So in his book and horrible movie, it wasn't the whole thing that his mom got hooked on prescription opioids? Mm-hmm. Yes, yes, dude. Known to be coming across the border. in the... The Sackler family, not in Mexico. Which time is he lying, is my question. Was he lying in his book, or is he lying now?

I'm going with whichever the Othiel fellows wrote this for him. It's just not reading his shitty book all the way through. Yeah. So that would be now. He's lying now. Yeah. I think now. Yeah.

Okay. You know, it's amazing. It's like, here's a guy who's so educated and so successful and has made so much money, but is actually quite bad at this. I mean, I'm always sort of in awe. You know, here's, T.L. is so rich. And he, you know, and he has this guy and then he has another guy in Arizona who's also kind of like just very sort of made in a lab. And neither of them seem to be that appealing to people. Yeah. I mean, I haven't, I don't know what the most recent polls are. The most recent polls are that Josh Mandel, the least likable man in America.

is winning in that state. Yeah, the only person happy about Josh Mandel leading is Ted Cruz because he might not be the most unlikable person on Capitol Hill if Josh joins. Wow. Yeah, it's just an outright lie. Like, I listen to it and I'm like, wait a minute. Like, that's not what he said in his book. And it's like on the record. And it's like how you just, you can't, like you said, you can't be that bad.

bad at this. You've got to be better at lying if you're going to be a liar. It'd be nice to say it's a compliment that he's not a good liar, but in this case, it's not. Well, it's also just, I mean, I'm not sure that owning being a racist is the winning argument that he thinks it is. I mean, I just am not. Like, yes, clearly Trump has caught onto an inherent racism in the base of the Republican Party, but I'm not sure that people want to see commercials talking about how it's true. Well, like that, like, the first sentence of that ad is so weird. Like, it didn't need to be there.

You just start with, you know, if you want to do a scaremongering ad, just start with the stuff flowing across the border. You don't have to say, you know, are you a racist? Like, why start with, it's just, it's just weird. It doesn't work. I have a theory. Please. I actually think they took.

I think they took this template, like, where they were looking at tropes of the way you do commercials and ads. This is actually, like, how all the Viagra ads started. Like, are you experiencing erectile dysfunction? They're like, all right, we got it. That was a winning product. Right. I agree with you. I think that's what they were going for.

It just didn't work. Yeah. It just makes it, I don't know, the whole, it's just, it's an amateurish ad from a guy, you know, who should not be making amateurish ads, I guess. Yeah. My favorite part is when he says, Democratic voters coming over the border. That's the real scare tactic.

Yeah. Yeah. I honestly, I totally missed that. I was so caught up on him lying about his mom that I couldn't even handle that. As promised, there's a worse out in this race somehow in the same week. No, I don't believe you. Well, race theory is crap.

Martin Luther King marks right here. So skin color. wouldn't matter. I didn't do two tours in Anbar province fighting alongside Marines of every color to come home and be called a racist. There's nothing racist about stopping critical race theory and

loving America. Josh Mandel. Pro God, pro-gun, pro-Trump. I'm Josh Mandel and I approve this message. You want a fighter? Send it the Marine. Right out of VIP! Pro-God? Pro-God, pro-gun!

Pro-Trump. Pro-Rump. I agree with him that he did not go to Iraq to come back and be called a racist. He came back and became a racist to be called a racist. No, he went to Iraq as a racist. He came back as a racist. He continues to be a racist. But, and I think this is the important part of this story, he's a Jew. So.

Not good. I know. Not great. Not great. Yeah. Pretty. pretty bad. Not a fan of Shonda Mandel. Yeah, Shonda Mandel.

But did you see there's a little bit of backlash to this ad. Did you guys see that? Yeah, Bernice King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s She doesn't like her dad being misquoted by a horrible racist. But why? She put out a tweet saying, Regretfully, I do not believe that I or the King Center legitimately motivated you to film this ad as it is in opposition to nonviolence and to much of what my father taught. I encourage

you to study my father slash nonviolence in full. And then he was like, and another thing about your father. Right. And then he decided the smart move here was to go after Martin Luther King's daughter. So he quote tweeted her and said,

your father knew the importance of the Second Amendment when he tried to exercise his right to self-defense and was wrongly denied a gun permit by anti-gun racists. firearms do not equal violence. Study your history better, Bernice King. Oh, it's his daughter, you fucking asshole. She lost her father to an assassin and his gun.

Oh, God. And Josh Mandel thinks she needs to study her history better. It's amazing stuff. The chutzpah, Molly, the chutzpah. It's a Shanda. It is. It's a Shonda and not a good Shonda, a bad Shonda. Yeah.

I'm not using Shonda ironically. We should point out Because actually we didn't point this out We're going down to the world The reason Bernice King tweeted out him in the first place I forgot this is that he tweeted That he tweeted that ad out

That you just heard people And he said thank you Bernice King and the King Center For motivating me to film this ad Oh my So that's why she was Really It's important to point that out

That she didn't just jump on this And he tagged her in the tweet. Oh. But he put her, he said, thank you at Bernice King at the King Center

for motivating me to film this ad. And so that's what made her respond. So he, unless he wants this fight, like, I don't know. Maybe he thinks

fighting with Martin Luther King Jr.'s daughter will help him in the Ohio Republican primary, which, you know what? Maybe he's not wrong. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't want to live in this world anymore. I mean, sorry, I do, but this is not true. I know. Jesus Christ. Yes. You are saying you would prefer to live in a different world. Yes, under the sea and a pineapple.

Yes. Yeah. Okay. Let's get out of Ohio since it's even a little bleak there. Go to the much, much brighter swamps of D.C. One, Matt Gates had a little scuffle this week because he's very mad about the woke generals. You guys said that Russia would overrun Ukraine in 36. six days. You said that the Taliban would be kept at bay for months. You totally blew those calls.

And maybe we would be better at them if the National Defense University actually worked a little more on strategy and a little less on wokeism. Has it occurred to you that Russia has not overrun Ukraine because of what we've done and our allies have done? But that was baked into your flawed assessment. That was baked into your flawed assessment. And so I saw that the Obama administration tried to destroy our military by starving it of resources. And it seems the Biden administration is trying to destroy our military by force-feeding at wokeism. I yield back. I mean, it's like the biggest, Biden has approved like the biggest military budget since ever, right? Ever, ever, ever, yeah, ever, literally ever. Billions of trillions of dollars for more and more war supplies, but sure.

But five billion of that is for wokeism. That's right. Actually, five trillion of that. Five trillion, yes, is for wokeism. It's all just the generals discussing CRT in a symposium all day. You know how the generals love to read about CRT. Yeah. It was amazing to see the head of the army. He was pissed. That was the sound of a military man very pissed off. Yeah, that is not what you usually get from the military when they are on capital.

And that was, I think that was the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, I think. Yes. You don't usually get that from secretaries of defense talking to Congress. They're usually very calm and, you know, they just sort of, you know, they sort of coddle the Congress people. And he absolutely did not. And if you want, you know, an understanding of just how fucking dumb Matt Gates is. Yelling at him.

But yeah, but all he wanted was to say wokeism a couple of times because that's the thing. And what do you know, after being banned from Tucker Carlson for a year, he's now back on Tucker Carlson's show. And was he banned by Tucker Carlson? He was banned because of... of the charges against him. Oh. Or the investigation into him, not the charges against him.

Yeah. Wow. I don't remember. It was like a year ago that Tucker had Gates on to talk about them. And Gates, it was a really bad performance

and like awkward and they haven't had him on since. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. So you know what? He did his job. Like that's, they're stupid and they're craven

and they're pretty much just straight up evil. But Matt Gates wants to be back on Tucker Carlton. Matt Gates wants to be on Fox News much more than Matt Gates wants to be a congressperson. So that's what this is all in service of. And you throw out words like wokeism and you act like the army is, like the army has issued a, you know, the army uses a lot of acronisms and initialisms. And I don't think there's a CRT manual, despite that. It's just the dumbest stuff in the world. And also, these are the same people who are always like, you know, Putin is so strong. Our armies, we worry about wokeism and stuff like that, but look at Russia. Meanwhile, the Russian army is proving to be, to a large extent, a paper tiger, which is not to play down the horrors in Ukraine.

But, you know, nobody thought that they would be this bad and this sort of incompetent. They've suddenly, they've lost that as their big thing, which is like, oh, we need to be more like Russia. They've got the strength. And so now they, you know, it doesn't stop them. from just continuing to make up this stuff about our military. David McSwain is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of Pandemic Inc. Chasing the capitalists and thieves who got rich while we got sick. Welcome to the new abnormal, Dave.

Thanks for having me. So talk to me about how you decided to write this book. Well, the genesis of the story that became the book was really, you know, going back in time to those really scary months, April. May 2020, I was reporting for ProPublica taking a look at the outset. at the outflows of just millions and millions, eventually billions of dollars, to contractors to find things like masks and test kits and so forth. And just sort of came in a little bit skeptical, wondering how the government possibly could have vetted these contractors and just ran some queries

and, you know, looking for people who got big deals and started looking into them and ended up connecting with a contractor who was sort of an unknown. He had never had a major federal deal. He landed a $35 million contract with the VA, which oversees the largest hospital network in the nation. And I connect with them and ask him, you know, how did you get the $6 million N95s that you're poised to deliver? And he tells me, oh, I have them, getting on a private plane tomorrow, and I'm going to deliver them to the VA in this warehouse. It's important not to have to fly commercial when you're delivering your stuff for the government. Right. I mean, at this point, I mean, the airports are closed. You know, there goes towns. Right. I guess that's true. Yeah. Yeah. And I just, I'd done a little bit of background. I had a feeling he didn't have the kind of scratch you'd need for a private jet. But, you know, I just asked, hey, that's an interesting story. I'd love to tag along. And he said, okay, so the next thing you know, I'm on a private jet with this federal contractor. And just sort of one thing after the other, I start to realize, I'm wondering, is this guy who he says he is?

and is he defrauding the federal government? I don't want to give away too much, but that sort of set me off on this nearly two-year-long journey of just following these mercenaries, that federal government, being as unprepared as it was, had no choice but to lean to deliver these sort of life-saving supplies just during these really horrible traumatic months. Was it worse than you thought it would be,

or less bad than you thought it would be or about the same? You know, we investigated a report, orders are cynical. I knew from the outset of the CARES Act that people were going to take advantage of these programs. So just sort of instinctively, I knew to look at it. And I wasn't the only reporter to do this. But I have to admit, I came out more disillusioned than I thought. The federal government was so woefully unprepared. And we had no national strategy. Stockpiles had something like 1% of everything we needed to address that first wave. And we really were so flat-footed that the response was to give out contracts to known criminals and fraudsters

and people who created a company that very weak. It really was disheartening to see how dysfunctional our government was and to see that failure sort of cascade from the federal level to states which are competing over the same supplies to your cities and hospitals, which, you know, they're trying to get their own things because they don't have help from the federal government. And it truly was a mess. And in that vacuum, you know, you find these people who found a way to get rich. Do you think that the government was more dysfunctional because Trump was in power or the same amount? Like, you know, the $500,000 toilets have existed long before Trump?

Yeah, you know, it's really impossible to disentangle the inept and callous and irresponsible behavior we saw in those early months from the Trump administration. from just the national preparedness and our response in general. But I think it's safe to say that we weren't prepared to begin with because of defunding the stockpile because we weren't taking it seriously enough. And it was made much worse by politics and poor governance and leadership that denied an inconvenient pandemic. Do you see a world where there's something? some accountability? Well, we're starting to see some things now. President Biden in his state of the

union address announced the creation of a special prosecutor over pandemic fraud, and that includes things like unemployment fraud, people fraudulently getting unemployment benefits and small business loans. But it also appears to encompass the Justice Department's look into these contractors who defrauded states in the federal government, delivered things that were subpar, delivered nothing at all. So I think we're going to learn some lessons. We're still learning those lessons. And the point of this book really is to provide a blueprint of exactly what we shouldn't do the next time we face an inevitable pandemic or other national crisis. And hopefully we can learn some of those lessons and are a little bit better prepared and aren't left to free market and,

you know, fraudsters who want to fill the void and take advantage. How much of this do you think, and this is a question you will never be asked by anyone but may, how much of this do you think is because America is too big to govern? You know, that's an interesting question. It's not just that it's too big to govern. It's, I don't delve into this too much because there's not an easy answer. Right. But we have to look at federalism itself.

And the notion that how do we have a national response to something like this when governors of certain states, particularly red states, can enact policies that undermine what's happening in other states. And you end up dealing with 50 different epidemics, you know, with all of these different strategies. And, you know, at the same time, you have to wonder, would we really have wanted Trump to have universal authority over all of, all of the United States. There's no easy answer there. I do think the American experience is unique in that everyone was able to compete for their own supplies. We had different policies in different states and municipalities. You had red state governors undermining blue city leaders on things like mask mandates. It really was chaotic. And when you add sort of this notion of fierce individualism and how the way that manifests, you know, through capitalism of this sort of

worship of the entrepreneur, you see these people taking advantage of that chaos. And that was sort of the sweet spot I found myself lurking in and talking to friends from Europe and elsewhere. They just say, wow, that's a phenomenon we just didn't see in this scale, at least. Tell our listeners something while you were working on this book that really blew your mind where you were like, this is even worse. God, it's hard to blow my mind anymore. Having having been gone. so deep on this. It's just one outrage after another. I mean, I was initially shocked that you see the initial contracts that are given out millions and hundreds and millions of dollars. And it's going out so quickly that whatever math I did or my colleagues did was irrelevant the next day.

And the federal government is telling us, oh, yeah, we're doing vetting. We're checking out all these contractors. And I would spend about, you know, a minute looking into one company and realize, well, they have a history of fraud. Or they incorporated on Monday and got. got a contract on Wednesday. There really was no vetting. It was completely, these contracts were given out indiscriminately. If you had connections to the Trump White House, you know, you stood a pretty damn good chance of getting a deal. Thanks to folks like Peter Navarro, his trade advisor, who sort of inserted himself into the national response. And then from there, just sort of the credulity of some of these agencies, and this happened to the state and local level

too. For instance, FEMA gave a contract to a company and I detail this in the book, something like $10 million to deliver COVID-19 test kits to all 50 states and territories. And we start to look at it. And this company had no background in the medical equipment space whatsoever. And these are the, these are supposed to be for the PCR test, you know, the real tests. And testing is still lagging. We're far behind. This is critical to our ability to catch up. We look into it. And this company had been supplying these plastic. They're called pre-formed soda bottles. They are blown up with heat and pressure to become your two-liter soda bottles at the store.

They're sort of like child's test tubes. You might see it in like your third graders chemistry set. And they're completely unusable. They don't fit standard lab equipment. They had employees shoveling these with literal shovels into bins in the open air. It's completely contaminated. And, you know, they're squirting salient. Completely unusable.

set back testing in all 50 states. And FEMA accepted those. So that vendor got paid. And FEMA accepted the product. And it set us back and no one could use those test kits. What do you think the lessons are that government should learn, which again, this is like a question we have to ask, which we know, you know, government is so good at learning lessons that there should be no problem. It does seem that history. rhymes and we have trouble learning from our mistakes. I mean, obviously your leadership matters. Who you vote into office matters. And that can have profound effects that are difficult to quantify all over the place. But at the very least, we need to shore up the strategic national stockpott.

We need to make sure we have a handle on inventory. I found the federal government was tracking these things with disparate Excel spreadsheets that were like people were inserting by hand and they had no idea where things were or where they needed to go. So your local Walgreens had a better inventory than the federal government did over its emergency supplies. We can fix things like that and try to create an infrastructure that could be used in a useful and immediate way, no matter the party or the leaders in charge. And hopefully that's something that this administration is looking at, as well as, you know, let's make sure we're not reliant. on mercenaries and companies that are popping up out of thin air to deliver things like masks and test kits. Is someone who's married to a venture capitalist, I often think about like VCs do have,

and a lot of Silicon Valley people have this, where they think like, if you just do business right, it can revolutionize everything. And Jared Kushner had a bit of that. And he brought that to this, right? Yeah. Some of the reporting in those early months really focused on, Kushner's involvement just, there was so much palace intrigue and it was unclear what was going on. And you had people who don't work in government.

Wandering in and out, yeah. All of a sudden, they're in the mix. But at the end of the day, you know, I talked at length with the Navy Admiral, who was in charge of, by the time that Trump administration decided to do something, he was in charge of the supply chain. And he says, you know, it was probably a net benefit because they were able to get things on planes and move them faster. and work around the sort of inertia of the existing supply chain. But the idea of the free market will take care of this. And we have the will and we're American entrepreneurs being inserted into something like this

where you probably need that very visible hand. The federal government said, we're going to control these supplies. We're going to make sure they go where they need to go. earlier and gotten companies like 3M and Cardinal Health and so forth to ramp up earlier, we wouldn't have had states competing against one another. You know, a lot of emergency preparedness experts would say, this is not an area where we want to play with the free market. We need some control.

And I'm no anti-capitalist either. This is something I've talked a lot about with friends. The point of this book isn't that capitalism is bad. It's that our sort of worship of unfettering. unfettered capitalism and the Trump administration's sort of blind adherence. The free market principles just created madness in this scenario. Ish, because they also are like very mad at some companies and want to punish them. I mean, it's it's free market if we like, you know, if it's my pillow, but it's not free market if it's NBC News or something.

Sure. Yeah. Just tell our listeners one other thing that they will find fascinating about this. book so they can run out and buy it. Sure. You know, as somebody who was reporting on the pandemic and a particularly sort of, you know, bothersome aspect of it, but was also coping with the pandemic, I'm very conscious that we're all tired.

You know, there's this pandemic fatigue. We want to move on. And, you know, the way I've written this book, it includes humor. It includes anger. It includes all of the textures of humanity and things that I think we've all felt. And while I believe this book is, well, is an artifact of this era, it's really a story about us as Americans and the way that we behave and the way we treat one another and the things we value and how us sort of leaning on our own instincts really hurt us. It really got in our way. You know, sometimes it's unfettered capitalism. Sometimes it's patronage. Sometimes it's just nasty politics. I think I had a unique sort of front row seat to a lot of that. And I've tried to bring that through.

So my hope as readers will feel a little more informed about the sort of behind the scenes madness that was affecting us all, but also get a sense of, you know, next time we can do it better because this was so bad and so crazy and so silly that these are things we can address. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. The book sounds amazing. It's Pandemic Inc. chasing the capitalists and thieves who got rich while we got sick. Thanks, David. Thanks for having me.

On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh,

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