Trump Admin Awarded Pandemic Contracts To Politically Connected Companies

A  new report from ProPublica reveals that the former Trump administration was so incompetent in their handling of the pandemic that they were handing out millions of dollars in contracts to companies that were politically connected to people at the White House or to companies who were completely untested and had no idea what they were doing. This is par for the course with the administration's pandemic response, and at this point the only thing shocking to learn would be that they did anything at all correctly. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Democrats in the house of representatives have released preliminary findings from an inquiry. They were conducting into the contracts that the Trump administration gave out in the early days of the pandemic. And ProPublica has sifted through these findings. And what they reveal is a white house that was not only giving contracts to companies who had no business getting contracts for what they got contracts for, but also giving contracts to companies with ties to the white house. The best way to tell this stories is you say an impro public has own words. So here it is, the committee's work backs up investigations by ProPublica and other news outlets into the more than 36 billion. The federal government has awarded much of it without traditional bidding and with little scrutiny to address the COVID 19 pandemic, at least five of the committee's lines of inquiry are exploring issues reported by ProPublica, including the 96 million no bid deal for respirators that was ordered by Peter Navarro, who is Trump's trade advisor, uh, a 34.5 bill, a million deal signed by the U S department of veterans affairs that fell apart and ended with a contractor pleading guilty to fraud, a contract for mass awarded to a former Trump administration official.

And the revelation that FEMA had paid millions to a contractor with a history of fraud and allegations for unusable and unsanitary fake test tubes.

Yeah. What'd you expect anything different from that administration? That's the worst part of this story is that none of it is shocking. None of it is surprising. You have the political, uh, nepotism, I guess you could call it giving the contracts to your friends, to the people who used to work in your administration to people who've come and gone from there. Who've been advisors, who've been unofficial advisors calling up according to the reports saying, Hey, uh, I got a company over here that I'm working with. They could do some respirators for you. They could do some mass for, and that's what happened. The other reports has people would call up people with ties to the white house one way or another and say, Hey, you need some respirators, right? I know a guy, you know, you give us some money. We can get you your respirators.

And again, totally predictable. Now, part of this and the documents that they have uncovered, which is what all this is based on the documents. Also paint a picture of, of Peter Navarro himself as being a bit perturbed about the fact that the administration wasn't doing anything. And so that is part of the reason why some of these unqualified companies ended up getting the contracts because Peter Navarro was just trying to shove them through. And at times himself actually approving them verbally and then making government agencies like FEMA have to go along and sign the contract later, uh, because he was according to the report, you know, worried we weren't doing enough and time was wasting. And we had to just spend, spend, spend, spend and not worry about any of these companies who can't do what we're hiring them to do. So I guess when you look at it that way, a one on one hand, you kind of say, okay, why I get that?