Yesterday I mentioned that the Trump administration has mandated that hospitals now report their COVID data directly to the HHS rather than the CDC. The White House and HHS are spilling all of the ‘normal’ rationale as to why this is a good thing, but the fact is, bypassing the Center for Disease Control during a pandemic, does seem a bit strange. It has certainly raised concerns across the medical community. The data will apparently be compiled in two new databases, HHS Protect and TeleTracker. The CDC system has been in place for 15 years but that will now be sidelined. Teletracker was developed earlier this year as the result of a non-competitive, multi-million dollar contract awarded to ?? I have been unable to track down the awardee yet.
However, as I was reading the announcement about this new edict, one name stuck out to me – Michael Caputo – who was mentioned in the story. That kind of rang a bell so I decided to peel the onion a bit more. I found some fascinating information.
Michael Caputo is a friend of Trump (and Roger Stone) who was appointed by Trump to the position of Assistant Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services for Public Affairs in April 2020 (Seems like kind of an odd time for an appointment, i.e. during a pandemic?). If you look up his bio, he is listed as a ‘Republican political strategist and media consultant.’ So now we have a Trump crony who has spent much of his career spinning things to benefit the Republican party in the organization which will get all of the data from the hospitals instead of it going directly to the CDC! I’m sure there is no possibility at all that the data reporting could get a bit wonky!!
But wait, there’s more! I looked up the bio on the HHS website. This is what it says:
“Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs
HHS Office of the Secretary
Michael R. Caputo is the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). A 30-year communications counselor, he is a film maker, an author and a media commentator.
Prior to joining HHS in April 2020, Mr. Caputo served as president of Caputo Public Relations for 17 years, where he counseled corporations, chief executive officers, governments, presidents, and non-profit organizations on crisis communications, media relations, digital marketing, video production, executive communications, and public affairs. He has led victim-side disaster recovery communication programs after every US hurricane since Katrina for the nation’s leading litigators protecting survivors. He has also advised top inventors protecting their intellectual property, job creators advocating public policy, and political candidates running for office in America and around the world. He started his career as a public affairs specialist for the United States Army 25th Infantry Division and served as a deputy director of the US House of Representatives Radio and Television Correspondents Gallery.
Born in Ft. Bragg, North Carolina and raised in small towns in Ohio and upstate New York, Mr. Caputo earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Foreign Affairs from the State University of New York at Buffalo.”
Sounds quite impressive and fairly benign. However, there are a few things that seem to be missing from this bio. If you look up his bio on Wikipedia (corroborated by others sources) this is what you find.
Michael Raymon Caputo (born March 24, 1962)[2] is a Republican political strategist, and media consultant. In April 2020, Caputo was appointed as assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services for public affairs.[1][3]
He worked for the Reagan Administration with Oliver North, and later as director of media services on the campaign for President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 United States presidential election.
Caputo moved to Russia in 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, and was an adviser to Boris Yeltsin. He worked for Gazprom Media in 2000 where he worked on improving the image of Vladimir Putin in the U.S. He moved back to the U.S. and founded a public relations company, and then moved to Ukraine to work on a candidate’s campaign for parliament.
Caputo worked as the campaign manager for Carl Paladino in his 2010 bid for Governor of New York. Caputo worked for the Donald Trump campaign from November 2015 to June 2016, and was in charge of communications for New York. He left the campaign after publicly supporting the removal of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
Caputo was investigated by the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence as part of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
I’m sure it was just an oversight that the bio on the HHS website omitted the move to Russia; advising Boris Yeltsin; working to improve the image of Vladimir Putin while consulting with Gazprom Media; or moving to Ukraine. And, of course, there was no mention of the investigation during the Mueller probe.
Like I said, I’m sure I’m reading more into this than is really there. I’m sure Mr. Caputo, like all of Trump’s friends and associates, is an honest, upstanding individual who has the best interests of the country at heart and would never do anything unethical or perhaps even illegal to help Trump get re-elected. And I’m sure that yet another individual connected to Trump who has ties to Russia is just a coincidence.
Now that Roger Stone is a free man, perhaps he and his friend Michael Caputo, will get together for dinner just for old times sake. Roger Stone, admitted ‘dirty trickster’ for the Republican party and Michael Caputo, Republican strategist who is now employed by HHS in charge of ‘public affairs’ – what could go wrong? The coronavirus will kill Americans – the corruption in this administration is likely to kill America as we once knew it.
I have included below an article by George Will that appeared in the paper this morning. It’s very sad reading.
