Category: coronavirus

Senator’s cellphone seized amid federal investigation of stock trades made ahead of COVID-19 spread

Posted on by Jessica Sutherland

Months after it was revealed that he had made dozens of questionable stock trades ahead of a global pandemic—and advised wealthy constituents to do the same—Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina had his cellphone seized by federal agents Wednesday night. The agents were at the senator’s Washington, D.C., residence.

Burr, who is a member of the “Gang of Eight” and the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sparked scrutiny in mid-March after making 33 transactions in February, that rid him of a significant chunk of his stock portfolio and netted him anywhere between $628,000 and $1.72 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. The transactions came after briefings on the potential impact of the novel coronavirus from the U.S. Department of Health.

While NPR broke the story about the private warnings to rich Tar Heels, ProPublica was the first to report on the selloff. 

ProPublica’s analysis indicated that the Feb. 13 selling spree was Burr’s “largest selling day of at least the past 14 months.”

As the head of the intelligence committee, Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security. His committee was receiving daily coronavirus briefings around this time, according to a Reuters story.

A week after Burr’s sales, the stock market began a sharp decline.

[...]

Burr is not a particularly wealthy member of the Senate: Roll Call estimated his net worth at $1.7 million in 2018, indicating that the February sales significantly shaped his financial fortunes and spared him from some of the pain that many Americans are now facing.

The newest and wealthiest member of the Senate, Georgia’s Kelly Loeffler, also got in on the secret selloff, making 29 transactions that add up to millions.  It’s worth noting that Burr is just one of three senators (and the only one still in office) who voted against the 2012 STOCK Act, which, as McClatchy puts it, “explicitly prevents members of Congress and their staffs from using nonpublic information for insider trading.”  Both the FBI and the DOJ have refused comment, as has Burr’s team; however, as the LA Times notes, the search warrant indicates “a significant escalation” in the investigation into Burr’s possible violation of the STOCK Act.

Obama’s office slams GOP investigation into Ukraine, Joe Biden, in private letter from March

Posted on by Marissa Higgins

In a letter from March, the office of former president Barack Obama condemned a congressional investigation into former vice president and now presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. You likely remember the Republicans’ incessant focus on Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural energy company. Trump and various Republican allies have alleged that there’s a scandal there, and alleged possible conflict of interest for Joe Biden, who was key on Ukraine policy at the time. And of course, Republicans had claimed this investigation had nothing to do with wanting to distract from Trump’s impeachment proceedings or the upcoming general election. 

In the private letter signed by Obama’s records representative and now available because the office released it to BuzzFeed News upon request, Obama’s office described it as an effort to "to shift the blame for Russian interference in the 2016 election to Ukraine” and said it was “without precedent." The letter, which was first obtained and reported on by BuzzFeed News, does not actually explicitly mention Biden by name, and does agree to release the requested presidential records.  

"The request for early release of presidential records in order to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign--one that has already been thoroughly investigated by a bipartisan congressional committee--is without precedent," the letter, dated March 13 and sent to the National Archives and Records Administration (which maintains presidential records), says in part. 

As a quick review, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson made the record request in November 2019. The two senators have effectively spearheaded the investigation into the Bidens and Ukraine, and have been doing so since last fall. Both wanted records on meetings between Ukrainian officials and the Obama administration from the National Archives. 

The letter from Obama’s office refers to former National Security Council analyst and Russia expert Fiona Hill’s now-viral opening testimony about the notion that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had a misinformation effort in the 2016 election. She said it’s “a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”

The Obama office relented and has allowed the records to be released "in the interest of countering the misinformation campaign underlying this request.” Former presidents (and technically, current presidents, though it’s no surprise that representatives for Trump wouldn’t do so) are allowed to review and use executive privileges on record requests thanks to a federal mandate. But neither Obama’s office nor Trump’s did so. Obama’s office released the records essentially to counter the message that is beneath the request.

The letter finishes: “We emphasize that abuse of the special access process strikes at the heart of presidential confidentiality interests and undermines the statutory framework and norms that govern access to presidential records.”

At the time of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, Republicans went out of their way to distract from any perceived weakness and create an enemy—in this case, Hunter Biden and Ukraine. But it didn’t end there. For example, Sens. Grassley and Johnson have reportedly recently dug into Secret Service documents to see whether Joe and Hunter Biden ever overlapped on trips to Ukraine. It’s endless. Even now, as a global pandemic rages on and the United States continues to fumble public health crisis management, GOP senators continue to dig into the Burisma theories. 

Soldiers and veterans are dropping dead of COVID-19, and Trump doesn’t care

Posted on by kos

Impeached president Donald Trump is a f’n idiot. He tries so hard to sound inspirational and hopeful and tough, and instead he sounds like a moron. Like here, when he ends up sounding totally psyched and excited that the United States lead the world in coronavirus deaths:

"The whole world is excited watching us," Trump tells reporters. "Because we're leading the world."

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 5, 2020

He wants to sound optimistic, but he’s too stupid to pull it off. No, the world isn’t excited to see the devastation happening in the United States (except maybe Russia), and presumably, neither is Trump. But who knows? The same happens when he tries to frame the pandemic as a battle between a wily mastermind of a virus, and America’s can-do spirit. 

Here is Trump again, yesterday:

Trump says the virus is "a tough enemy, a smart enemy. But nobody's like us and nobody's tough like us. And I said it before and I'll say it again: the people of our country are warriors."

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 5, 2020

The virus isn’t smart. It’s a freakin’ virus. It’s as dumb as a Trump, following base instincts without regards to long-term strategy. And we certainly aren’t going to defeat the virus by being “tough.” The virus doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the grit of the American people. It just does its own thing, on its own timetable, unconcerned by “tough” words from Trump or anyone else.

Literally, the only way to currently thwart this virus is to hide from it. That’s how powerful it is. And the only way to thwart this thing, long-term, is through science. So yeah, smart people doing smart things. Again, no “tough” words from Trump will matter a whit.

If Trump wants to treat this as a war, however, why not treat people as actual uniformed soldiers? Give front-line and essential employees veterans benefits, hazard pay, and medals. Give them free socialized medical care like members of the armed forces. Pay out $1 million in death benefits to every one of those workers felled in the line of duty. It’s a war, right? Treat the people like actual warriors. 

Speaking of, did you know that real-life warriors, those who are currently wearing a uniform, or did so once upon a time, are also dying en masse? According to the latest tally, 27 Department of Defense service members, employees, and dependents have died from the disease, as well as 771 veterans inside the VA medical system. Obviously, that doesn’t count veterans who died outside of that system, but even now, we’re at nearly 800 dead (and counting). 

But Trump doesn’t care. The only time he thinks about our service members and veterans is when they serve his ego, as backdrops for his campaign or photo ops. Otherwise, perhaps he’d keep them in mind and try to minimize the carnage. 

But he doesn’t care about anyone. The end. And this toxic brew of psychotic indifference and rank incompetence means that we’re in for hundreds of thousands more deaths before we’re mercifully done with his presidency next January. 

The Republican Party will owe this country for the death and destruction it wrought, for refusing to take out Trump when it had the chance (not just impeachment, but via 25th Amendment), and that’s a debt it will never be able to repay. 

Shifty Schiff: Coronavirus Deaths Fault Of Failure To Impeach Trump

Posted on by Jack Hadfield

Representative Adam Schiff put the blame for coronavirus deaths squarely on the fact that President Donald Trump was not impeached back in January.

Schiff: ‘Little Did We Know How Great The Casualties’ Of Impeachment Failure Would Be

Sparked off by a comment from MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell, Schiff went on an insane diatribe linking the casualties of coronavirus to the failed impeachment.

“We can’t act even slightly surprised by this because you told us this was going to happen in your argument in the Senate impeachment trial,” O’Donnell put to Schiff.

“Well, we certainly told the senators that he was not going to change, and there was no way to constrain him. That he is who he is, and he would continue to operate the way he had, and indeed, that’s exactly what we’ve seen since,” Schiff replied. “The one thing we dramatically understated is when we asked the question, ‘If you found him guilty, do you really need to remove him given there is another election only nine months away, how much damage could he really do?'”

“We said a lot, but little did we know just how great the casualties would be. Some days we lose the equivalent of the number of people we lost on 9/11,” Schiff claimed, with clearly no self-reflection. “You know, I think that there is no way we could have foreseen just how tragic his malfeasance would be in his remaining months in the administration.”

Absolutely Unhinged!

The RNC called Schiff’s arguments “unhinged” in their tweet covering his appearance, and I am very much inclined to agree. It’s completely deranged to not only put the blame for deaths from the coronavirus on President Trump, but also in the impeachment itself. Ironically, you can make a far more coherent case that the impeachment debacle actually distracted the attention of the Democrats in Congress from the growing threat of the pandemic back in January!

As Fox News host Sean Hannity pointed out on his March 16th show, Democrats weren’t interested in the coronavirus at all. When the first person with coronavirus entered the country on January 21st, the Democrats were “in the throes of an all-consuming, what has been the culmination of a three-year quest to impeach and throw Donald Trump out of office.” On January 23rd, when China sealed off the Hubei province, House impeachment managers were starting their opening arguments. And on January 31st, when President Trump issued the travel ban to and from China and declared a national health emergency, Democrats, including Schiff, were busy trying to impeach him.

Try denying that Schiff!

The post Shifty Schiff: Coronavirus Deaths Fault Of Failure To Impeach Trump appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump’s coronavirus cover-up continues, blocking two more key task force officials from testifying

Posted on by Kerry Eleveld

Donald Trump is denying House Democrats access to two more of his administration's top pandemic task force members. The White House is now prohibiting the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, and the director of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seem Verma, from testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to the Daily Beast.

Last week, the White House also prohibited one of its top coronavirus medical experts from testifying before the House—Dr. Anthony Fauci. But for the moment, Fauci is still scheduled to testify before a GOP-led panel in the Senate.

Laughably, Trump officials have justified the gag orders by saying testifying before Congress was too time-consuming for key pandemic response officials, as if Trump hasn't spent the past month squandering the time of those very same people as he prattled on day after day, peddling misinformation. Fauci even called the briefings "really draining" several weeks ago.

But when Trump was asked Tuesday about the task force gag order, he made clear the move was explicitly political, calling House Democrats "Trump haters."

Just like with impeachment, the default position for the White House now is that everyone on the coronavirus task force must seek permission from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify. In other words, every request by House Democrats is a complete nonstarter.

But the difference now is that Trump is blocking the public from getting information that's literally a matter of life and death. House Democrats have said the hearings are effort to gather information that can help them craft legislation in response to the ongoing public health crisis.

“The fact is that we need to allocate resources for this,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “In order to do that, any appropriations bill must begin in the House. And we have to have the information to act upon.”

Secretary Azar has not provided public testimony on the pandemic for nearly two months. Verma, who runs the government's two most expansive healthcare programs, hasn't given public testimony since the crisis began. 

Trump Wants to Know Why George Bush Didn’t Call For End to Partisanship When He Was Being Impeached

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

President Trump took a jab at George W. Bush after the latter made a rare public statement to address the nation during the coronavirus pandemic.

In a video message posted over the weekend, the former President called for an end to partisanship in the midst of the crisis, something America experienced in the days following the 9/11 tragedy.

“In this time of testing, we need to remember a few things: First, let us remember we have faced times of testing before,” Bush stated. “Following 9/11, I saw a great nation rise as one to honor the brave, grieve with the grieving, and to embrace unavoidable new duties.”

“Let us remember how small our differences are in the face of this shared threat,” he concluded. “In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants, we are human beings equally vulnerable and wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together.”

RELATED: Obama Caught Golfing While Michelle Tells Residents They Need to Stay Home

Where Has He Been?

Bush seems to have forgotten how Democrats, almost immediately after the nation rallied around him, tore him apart in the following months and claimed they never supported his response to the 9/11 attacks.

On its surface, Bush’s plea for unity is a genuinely solid message … in normal times.

But these are not normal times. And Trump would like to know where Bush has been with his calls for coming together when Democrats were raking him over the coals from day one, pursuing impeachment hoax after impeachment hoax.

The President quoted Fox News personality Pete Hegseth in a tweet Sunday stating, “Oh by the way, I appreciate the message from former President Bush, but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside?”

Trump added his own thoughts: “He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!”

RELATED: The Extraordinary Measures Trump is Taking to Honor President George H.W. Bush

Coming Together Means Bowing to Democrats

Understand that there has been a deep past of contentiousness and highly charged political rhetoric amongst the Bush family and the President.

That said, since when are emotions and pride supposed to dictate what great leaders do?

Trump’s correct – if this crisis is enough to coax Bush to ask for an end to partisanship, then it should equally have been of importance to try to bring the nation together when Democrats were distracting the nation with an impeachment witch hunt that wasted the time of lawmakers and likely distracted them from the coronavirus crisis in the first place.

Perhaps had he asked for unity then, there could have been a non-partisan response to the pandemic.

The post Trump Wants to Know Why George Bush Didn’t Call For End to Partisanship When He Was Being Impeached appeared first on The Political Insider.

3,300 Volunteers From 52 Nations Sign Up Coronavirus Vaccine Trials

Posted on by Wayne Dupree

Everyone has felt the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic’s effects across the entire globe.

You’ve witnessed the world’s economy come to a halt, seen 30-plus million Americans unemployed, felt the economy contract by nearly five percent in the first quarter of 2020, and stay-at-home orders being issued to curb the spread preventing hospitals from being overrun.

MORE NEWS: ‘Charmed’ Star Holly Marie Combs Blames Trump For Her Grandpa Dying Of COVID – Calls President A’ Disgrace To Humanity’

The results? The Coronavirus death curve has flattened for the US-based outbreak, even in New York City, which many called ground zero. Many feel that for most of the country, the roadmap to re-opening should occur as soon and as safely as possible.

WILL THERE BE SETBACKS?

Of course. The reason? We still don’t have a vaccine. But wait, now we are learning that more than 3,300 people from 52 nations — including at least two Stanford grads have signed up to be vaccinated and deliberately exposed to the new virus. The group 1DaySooner organized the campaign.

via Mercury News

The effort was launched by Josh Morrison of Brooklyn, New York, a Harvard-educated attorney who founded Waitlist Zero, a nonprofit organization that seeks to ease kidney donation. In 2011, he donated a kidney to a stranger, accepting a small risk of death to save a life. A readily available COVID-19 vaccine, he reasoned, could save far more lives.

Traditionally, a vaccine is proven effective after comparison of cases in hundreds or thousands of individuals who randomly receive vaccine or placebo. That process takes a long time, because it must wait for natural infection.

The premise of a “human challenge” study is to infect a smaller number of vaccinated people who are young and healthy, accelerating testing and giving manufacturing a head start. A “challenge” study takes advantage of the low death rate for those infected by SARS-CoV-2 — about 0.03% for 20-29 year olds and 0.085% for 30-39 year olds according to data from China — not negligible but very uncommon for those likely to be eligible to participate.

Such studies put volunteers at potential risk of disease and death. There is no “rescue” therapy to treat them if they get sick. The long-term effects are unknown.  Yet they’re willing to help anyway. [Mercury News]

MORE NEWS: Schiff And Pelosi Launch ‘Impeachment 2.0’

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THIS IS HEROIC

I assume this usually happens when a new vaccine is tested. This is especially heroic when dealing with a hazardous disease.

Who are these 3,000 people? You do know you’re going into a governmental trial, right! Meaning they can put a chip in you or do anything to you! I want to see all these lemmings.

Serious illness and death from Covid-19 in healthy individuals under 60 are rare, but it has happened. It is estimated that it can kill around 0.5% healthy individuals in this bracket.

Potentially sacrificing yourself for the welfare of others is called bravery, and hopefully, nothing wrong happens to these kids.

I tell you what I’ll struggle to listen to the advice of any medical expert in the media ever again after all this. Every possible wild option and scheme has been thrown out there by people who are supposed to be in the same field and had the same training.

WAYNE’S RECOMMENDATIONS

 

The post 3,300 Volunteers From 52 Nations Sign Up Coronavirus Vaccine Trials appeared first on The Political Insider.

Trump says he might use pandemic relief funding to extort so-called sanctuary cities

Posted on by Gabe Ortiz

Oh, not this shit again. Impeached president Donald Trump on Tuesday returned to attacking so-called sanctuary cities, but with a pandemic quid pro quo twist (I guess he really learned that lesson, right Susan Collins?): now he’s threatening to condition relief funding on local policies limiting cooperation with federal deportation agents. “Now, if it's COVID-related, I guess we can talk about it, but we'd want certain things also, including sanctuary city adjustments because we have so many people in sanctuary cities,” Trump claimed.

“Adjustments” probably means “rescinding,” because the man can’t stand anything that remotely humanizes brown people. But can he do that? No, tweeted immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “To be clear, as multiple federal courts have already ruled, Congress has to specifically give the president the authority to condition grants on sanctuary city status in order to do this—and since they haven't, he can't.” But will he try? That’s another story.

Trump also maybe confused his own very clear contempt for U.S. sanctuary cities with the reality around these policies, falsely claiming he didn’t think they’re popular, “even by radical-left folks. Because what's happening is people are being protected that shouldn't be protected and a lot of bad things are happening with sanctuary cities.”

Immigrant rights advocacy group America’s Voice pointed out in 2017 that these policies are actually pretty popular among police departments. “In order for the police to be most effective at their jobs, they need to be able to work with immigrants who report crimes, give tips, or testify as witnesses,” the group said. “In order for immigrants to trust the police, they need to know that an interaction with law enforcement won’t lead to their deportation.”

And that makes communities safer for all. “Research backs this up; one analysis has shown that sanctuary cities see 15% less crime than non-sanctuary cities,” the group continued. “Another found that two-thirds of the cities that had the highest jumps in murder rates in 2016 were not sanctuary cities—in fact, they are the opposite, generally eager to hold immigrants for ICE pick-up and detention.”

But, again, just because Trump can’t do something doesn’t mean he and henchman Stephen Miller won’t try. They’ve already exploited a pandemic that has killed nearly 60,000 Americans to, in just a just a couple of examples, deport children who are supposed to be protected by U.S. law, and implement draconian immigration changes that have been the stuff of anti-immigrant leaders’ dreams.

“We cannot allow the Trump administration to exploit a public health crisis to further their anti-immigrant agenda,” the American Civil Liberties Union tweeted in response to Trump threatening to hold funding hostage. Rep. Carolyn Maloney, House Oversight Committee chair, tweeted a simple and concise “no.” No word on this extortion threat from Sen. Collins, however.

Schiff: Lives Would Have Been Saved If Only Trump Had Been Impeached And Removed

Posted on by Rusty Weiss

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) made an outlandish claim that many American lives would have been saved from the coronavirus pandemic if only President Trump had been impeached and removed from office.

The House Intelligence Committee Chairman told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that his inability (along with other impeachment managers) to convince the Senate that Trump was guilty and should be removed “haunts” him.

“I don’t think we had any idea how much damage he would go on to do in the months ahead,” Schiff claimed. “There are 50,000 Americans now who are dead, in significant part because of his incompetence, because of his inability to think beyond himself and put the country first.”

“I don’t think we would have ever anticipated that his brand of narcissism and his brand of incompetence would be so fatal to the American people,” he asserted.

RELATED: Ayanna Pressley Compares Trump’s Coronavirus Response To ‘War Crimes’

It Was Schiff’s Impeachment Charade That Cost Lives

There is a whole boatload of stupidity to unpack in those comments, not the least of which is that Schiff seems unaware – perhaps because he was focused on impeaching rather than governing – that the President had already taken significant steps to slow the spread of the virus.

While the resistance party was plotting their impeachment gambit, Trump was setting up a coronavirus task force, ordering more testing and ventilators, restricting travel from countries known to be battling the virus, and declaring a national emergency.

The first reported case of coronavirus in the United States came on January 21st. The impeachment charade ended in the Senate on February 5th.

Is Schiff really under the impression that Trump’s ouster and Vice President Mike Pence’s takeover of the presidency (he is Chair of the coronavirus task force) would have led to different results? Especially when it had already been in the country for two weeks at least, likely longer?

RELATED: Schiff Vows To ‘Dive Deep’ Into Trump Coronavirus Investigation

Schiff Lied, People Died

Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), has already debunked the claim that more should have been done by President Trump in the month of February.

“You keep calling February this lost month, it’s really not,” Crenshaw told HBO star Bill Maher previously. “It’s just an easy, cheap accusation because there’s no big bold moves taken like there was in January or like there was in March.”

Crenshaw noted that even as of March 3rd, there were still only 100 coronavirus cases in the United States and that Americans weren’t going to accept a lockdown at that point.

Which makes Schiff’s point moot.

Anybody with a working set of eyes and ears is aware that it was the impeachment hoax that took Congress’s focus off of the coronavirus.

It was Schiff and his Democrat colleagues who bogged down an entire nation with their little impeachment dreams while the coronavirus was beginning to flourish.

Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino responded to Schiff’s claims, spitting fire on Twitter:

Known liar, clown, fraud, oxygen thief, serial hoaxster, and all-around garbage-person, sleazy Adam Schiff is doing everything he can to make this awful situation worse. There aren’t many people walking this planet who’ve done more damage than this sleazeball.

Buckle up. He’s about to do much further damage.

Schiff vowed two weeks ago to conduct a thorough investigation into the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are diving deeply into what does the intelligence community know, what resources we would bring there, and what do we need to do prospectively to better protect the country in the future,” he announced.

That means another investigation – we’ve already endured Russia, Ukraine, emoluments, etc. – to drag America down even further.

While the President will be working diligently to revive America from the economic devastation wrought by this pandemic, Democrats will be working feverishly to slow him down yet again.

Meaning they will have even more blood on their hands when victims of suicide due to the financial crisis, or domestic violence victims due to lockdown, suffer while Democrats play politics.

The post Schiff: Lives Would Have Been Saved If Only Trump Had Been Impeached And Removed appeared first on The Political Insider.

Luxury hotel chains, including Gordon Sondland’s, among those capitalizing on ‘small business’ loans

Posted on by Joan McCarter

Remember Gordon Sondland? Of course you do, from back in the before time when the national crisis was impeachment. He’s the now-former ambassador to the European Union, who got that cushy job by being a big donor to Donald Trump's inaugural committee. Trump might have fired him from that sweet gig, but that doesn't mean Sondland's out of the money loop with Republicans at all. Because guess who got some of that "small business" coronavirus emergency loan money?

Provenance Hotels, the hotel chain Sondland owns, got some of that loan money according to a spokeswoman, along with some very wealthy, very connected to Republican lawmaker hoteliers. How much Sondland landed isn't clear, but the company spokesperson told the Portland Business Journal: "Now that we have been approved for our SBA PPP loan, we hope to bring back a significant portion of those employees and retain them for as long as possible." Let's certainly hope so. Not all business are doing so, figuring the terms of the loans are so good that it doesn't matter if they flout the rules and spend the money on other costs.

One of the biggest winners was Dallas hotel executive Monty Bennett, also a Trump major donor. He got a combined $59 million for three of his companies—Braemar Hotels & Resorts, which operates a Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas; Ashford Hospitality Trust Inc., which operates 100 or so hotel properties around the country; and finally the management firm that oversees both chains. Bennett's given Trump $150,000 just in the last six months, and was rewarded nicely. Ashford’s group said in a statement that the loan program "is working exactly as intended by providing much needed capital to small businesses and larger businesses that have been the hardest hit—hotels and restaurants." The Bloomberg article doesn't say whether Ashford also claimed to be retaining its employees.

It does, however, report that Ashford expects to get more loans on top of the $30 million it got in the first round. If Bennett is spending all that money on keeping his 1,000 or so employees paid, great—keeping people afloat right now is the main thing.

But when this is all over? There had better damned well be a wealth tax that claws this money back.