The Trump administration took so long to prepare for the coronavirus pandemic that one of President Donald J. Trump’s top advisers resolved the problem on his own.
That aide, Peter Navarro, Trump’s deputy assistant and commercial adviser, personally directed hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for pandemic supplies to politically connected companies or newbies, concluded a preliminary investigation by House Democrats.
Navarro gave an early alarm about the scarcity of supplies, according to emails and other documents released by a House committee that oversees the federal response to the coronavirus. In a memo dated March 1, 2020, he complained that “the movement has been slow”.
After that, the documents show, he urged the Federal Emergency Management Agency to award a $ 96 million single-source contract for respirators to AirBoss Defense Group, a defense industry supplier, telling a company executive “everything you requested is OK “, even without contract had been signed.
The agency closed the single source contract six days later. The AirBoss was represented by a retired Army general, Jack Keane, who had received Mr. Trump’s Presidential Medal of Freedom just days before the contract was issued.
In a statement, Navarro said he wanted to act aggressively to combat the threat of the virus.
“In a war, you need to move at warp speed,” he wrote. “My mission was to help the president save lives, which we undeniably did. Given the same set of facts, I would do everything exactly the same. Full stop!”
But the Democrats, led by Representative James C. Clyburn of South Carolina, the House’s third Democrat, questioned Navarro’s efforts.
They noted that employees in Mr. Navarro’s office had coordinated with executives from the Eastman Kodak Company, best known for its photography business, which then signed a letter of intent in June 2020 to collaborate in the national manufacture of pharmaceutical agents, although the company had no experience in that field.
Mr. Navarro also pressured the Trump administration to award a $ 354 million contract to Phlow, a brand new company in Richmond, Virginia, to manufacture generic drugs and pharmaceutical ingredients – an effort to build an American manufacturing base for products that were needed to treat Covid-19, but were done abroad. The Democrats’ investigation found that Navarro was introduced to Phlow’s chief executive in November 2019.
“My head will explode if this contract is not approved immediately,” Navarro wrote to the top federal health officials in March 2020. “This is a scam. I need PHLOW to be noticed on Monday morning. This is being messed up. Let’s move this now. We need to turn the switch and they cannot move until you do. TOTAL funding as we discussed. “