Trump says he didn't know of Navarro's memo regarding Covid19

[Celerity]

4. apparently all or most all of the top WH staff, and it looks like Trump himself

https://www.axios.com/exclusive-navarro-deaths-coronavirus-memos-january-da3f08fb-dce1-4f69-89b5-ea048f8382a9.html



In late January, President Trump's economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios. The state of play: By late February, Navarro was even more alarmed, and he warned his colleagues, in another memo, that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.

Navarro's grim estimates are set out in two memos — one dated Jan. 29 and addressed to the National Security Council, the other dated Feb. 23 and addressed to the president. The NSC circulated both memos around the White House and multiple agencies. In the first memo, which the New York Times was first to report on, Navarro makes his case for "an immediate travel ban on China." The second lays the groundwork for supplemental requests from Congress, with the warning: "This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill." Why it matters: The president quickly restricted travel from China, moved to delay re-entry of American travelers who could be infected, and dispatched his team to work with Congress on stimulus funds.

But Trump was far slower to publicly acknowledge the sort of scenarios Navarro had put in writing. One senior administration official who received Navarro's memos said at the time they were skeptical of his motives and thus his warnings: “The January travel memo struck me as an alarmist attempt to bring attention to Peter’s anti-China agenda while presenting an artificially limited range of policy options." "The supplemental memo lacked any basis for its projections, which led some staff to worry that it could needlessly rattle markets and may not direct funding where it was truly needed." Navarro declined to comment for this story.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon defended Navarro's motives, calling the memos "prophetic" and saying Navarro was forced to put his concerns in writing because "there was total blockage to get these facts in front of the President of the United States." The "naivete, arrogance and ignorance" of White House advisers who disagreed with Navarro "put the country and the world in jeopardy," Bannon said, adding that Navarro was sidelined from the task force after the memo.

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