“I know how it works – everyone has a different perspective,” said Hahn in an interview. “I wanted to tell you what happened, why it happened and the perspective we had”.
In calls and text messages, group members exchanged notes, compared memories and sent updates on media requests and interview opportunities, said four people with knowledge of the subject.
On one occasion, a virtual meeting included former Health Department spokesman and loyal to Trump, Michael Caputo – although he told POLITICO that he just joined in to share an update on his cancer recovery and to go over questions from the veteran investigative reporter Bob Woodward, who is writing another book on the Trump administration.
The sessions once again brought together most of the so-called A “group of doctors” who was part of the White House coronavirus task force and originally came together to resist the push by then President Donald Trump to reopen the country widely without sufficiently containing a virus that would kill almost 550,000 Americans and continues to rise.
Is on a nod to their individual battles with Azar, some jokingly referred to the group in particular as “AAA”, or Alex Azar Anonymous, according to a person in direct contact with several members. No one involved in the effort confirmed the name when contacted for comment.
Birx and Verma declined to comment for this article, and Redfield did not respond to requests for comment. Caputo, who has not been a regular participant in the discussions, defended Azar as a “man of honor” and expressed admiration for all of Trump’s senior health officials – several of whom helped him with his cancer diagnosis and treatment.
Azar declined to comment.
The behind-the-scenes efforts represent only part of the broader race to shape the story around the Trump administration’s response to the health crisis, which has been marked by constant internal conflicts. The turbulent period will be the subject of numerous books and television specials to be released, with little expectation that the previous government will be justified in these reports.
Trump himself will participate in at least a dozen of these retrospectives. And among many other former government officials, there is growing anguish over how their roles in the government’s chaotic response to Covid will end up being portrayed.
Much about the dysfunction surrounding the government’s response has been documented in the press in real time. POLITICO reported on efforts within the HHS to mitigate the CDC’s direction, the way an adviser to Caputo scolded government science officials who accused him of being disloyal to Trump and Azar’s moves to consolidate control over his department.
But new first-hand reports of high-profile clashes between former high-profile health officials are likely to be a major factor in new versions, shedding light on how disagreements and eroded relationships have paralyzed political priorities and increased confusion over the response to the pandemic.
HHS leaders, including Azar, went to war with Hahn over a series of policies and personnel decisions over the past year that worried authorities, distracted from the wider work of the pandemic. Both camps fought about authority amid Covid’s response and accused the other of trying to undermine them in the press.
Redfield and the CDC’s career officials faced constant political interference in their scientific determinations – including from Caputo, who at the same time was viewed with caution by HHS leaders. White House officials installed Caputo, a longtime political agent, in HHS shortly after the pandemic broke out, at a time when they feared that Azar was leaking negative information about how Trump handled the virus to improve his own image.
Hahn, Redfield and Verma came together on their mutual difficulties with Azar and his top advisers, lamenting the hostile work environment and the perception that Azar was uniquely focused on staying in Trump’s good graces. Among the reasons why they met again after the government was concerned that Azar – a skilled fighter – was orchestrating favorable coverage for himself, several people said.
For his part, Azar and his team viewed the agency’s heads as insubordinate and were angered by the cases where they bypassed the department to coordinate pandemic work directly with the White House – especially after then Vice President Mike Pence took over. control of the Covid task force in late February 2020.
These divisions have only cemented further in the weeks since, when the stress of daily fighting within the government has given way to debates among a number of former Trump nominees over whether and how to tell their stories.
A special CNN upcoming Sunday on the response to the pandemic has generated rampant speculation among HHS alumni about what will be revealed – and just as important, who will be blamed for the government’s various mistakes.
Hahn, Birx and Redfield watched lengthy interviews for the program, as did infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci, who is now advising President Joe Biden, and former HHS officials, Brett Giroir and Robert Kadlec. Azar declined the invitation to participate, according to a person who spoke to him about the process.
But some participants are concerned about how their appearances will be framed, several people said, especially after CNN debuted a dramatic promo that classified the special as a sort of confessional – “COVID War: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out.”
“I didn’t criticize Secretary Azar – I talked about how tense the relationship used to be and it was difficult, but that was all in the press,” Hahn told POLITICO. “I don’t think it’s a secret.”
Former employees of Covid’s response are also concerned by rumors that Paul Mango, who was deputy chief of Azar’s political team, is working on a book that tells everything about Covid’s response and his role in Operation Warp Speed , the vaccine accelerator of the previous government. .
In an interview, Mango said that he “put a lot of pen on paper”, but he has not yet decided whether to write a book detailing his experience in management.
“I don’t know exactly how I’m going to use it, but I want to make sure that the story will tell the story right,” he said, imagining that publishers would fight a bidding war on their own. “There were some real moments that were hot moments between certain people that would make the story a little bit exciting.”
Mango attacked some of his former colleagues, arguing that only he and Azar were fully aware of the vaccine’s development effort, widely seen as a rare success story in responding to Trump’s pandemic. He rejected many of the criticisms of Azar, considering them “trying to protect their own reputations”.
“I have never seen behavior so covert, unethical and unprofessional as in the federal government,” he said. “[Azar] you didn’t get an aces hand and you have to deal with what you have. ”
Other former Trump health officials said they had been inundated with requests for an interview in the past two months, including books in progress by two separate groups of Washington Post reporters looking to reconstruct last year’s events.
Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s first FDA commissioner who remained in close contact with government officials during Covid’s response, is also expected to release a book in July. And Andy Slavitt, now a senior advisor to the Biden Covid response team, also wrote a pandemic book to be published in June.
Slavitt said his recount – which is labeled the “internal story of how failures in leadership, politics and selfishness condemned the response to the U.S. coronavirus” – is built from interviews with Azar and others involved in the response, as well as his own interactions with Birx, former senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and half a dozen others.
“I had extensive cooperation,” he said.
For many former Trump health officials, CNN’s next special will mark their first extensive public comments about their time in administration since they left the government.
Only Birx did other interviews on camera, during which she said she was constantly thinking about quitting her job at the White House and had to contend in particular with “outside consultants” who presented Trump with conflicting data about the pandemic.
Check-ins among the small group of former Trump employees have declined in recent weeks, Hahn said, but the principle behind the group remains.
“If one person were attacked, we would all be attacked and we would be one behind the other,” he said of the pact signed during the height of the pandemic response. “I wanted to make sure that people understood that, and that was really the tip of the stick for me.”