A GOP strategist who has been consulting with Senate campaigns said Republicans have been carefully laying the groundwork to restrain a Biden administration on federal spending and the budget deficit by talking up concerns about the price tag for another round of virus relief. The thinking, the strategist said, is that it would be very hard politically to agree on spending trillions more now and then in January suddenly embrace fiscal restraint.

Man Who Reportedly Gave Hunter's Laptop to Rudy Speaks Out in Bizarre Interview

On Wednesday morning, the New York Post published a story alleging that Hunter Biden dropped off a laptop at a Delaware computer store for repair and that the device contained nefarious emails and photos.

The item was immediately viewed with suspicion, both for the timing of it—coming less than three weeks before the elections—and the path the laptop supposedly took. The Post said that “before turning over the gear,” the owner of the computer repair shop, “made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's lawyer, Robert Costello.” The story alleged that the Biden son was setting up a meeting between a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm on which he served and his father, who was then the Vice President. The Biden campaign has said no such meeting was scheduled.

On Wednesday afternoon, a group of reporters, among them a journalist for The Daily Beast, spoke with the owner of the shop, a man named John Paul Mac Isaac who lives in Wilmington, Delaware. The audio of that nearly hour-long question and answer session is below.

[Recording]

Mac Isaac appeared nervous throughout. Several times, he said he was scared for his life and for the lives of those he loved. He appeared not to have a grasp on the timeline of the laptop arriving at his shop and its disappearance from it. He also said the impeachment of President Trump was a “sham.” Social media postings indicate that Mac Isaac is an avid Trump supporter, and voted for him in the 2016 election.

Mac Isaac said he had a medical condition that prevented him from actually seeing who dropped off the laptop but that he believed it to be Hunter Biden's because of a sticker related to the Beau Biden Foundation that was on it. He said that Hunter Biden actually dropped off three laptops for repair, an abundance of hardware that he chalked up to the Biden son being “rich.”

Throughout the entire interview, Mac Isaac switched back and forth from saying he reached out to law enforcement after viewing the files in the laptop to saying that it was actually the Federal Bureau of Investigation that reached out to him. At one point, Mac Isaac claimed that he was emailing someone from the FBI about the laptop. At another point he claimed a special agent from the Baltimore office had contacted him after he alerted the FBI to the device's existence. At another point, he said the FBI reached out to him for “help accessing his drive.”

Mac Isaac referenced the infamous Seth Rich conspiracy theory—which holds that a DNC staffer who police say was murdered in a botched robbery was actually killed off by Clinton allies because he leaked committee emails—as reason for his paranoia. He said he made a copy of the hard drive for purposes of personal protection.

“They probably knew I had a copy because I was pretty vocal about not wanting to get murdered,” he said, “so I'm going to have a copy.”

Mac Isaac refused to answer specific questions about whether he had been in contact with Rudy Giuliani before the laptop drop-off or at any other time before the Post's publication. Pressed on his relationship with Giuliani, he replied: “When you're afraid and you don't know anything about the depth of the waters that you're in, you want to find a lifeguard.”

Seeming to realize he'd said too much, he added: “Ah shit.”

So, Rudy was your lifeguard, the reporters asked. “No comment,” he replied.

Donald, Rudy and Rupert's Dubious ‘October Surprise' Reeks of Desperation

Not this time. In 2016, many mainstream media outlets let themselves be used by Donald Trump and his henchmen (Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, etc.) to amplify nutso Hillary conspiracy stories. It helped put Trump in the White House, where he has violated the Constitution, his oath of office, and common decency pretty much every day since.

So far this time around, the media's track record has been better. But it's better because all the conspiracy-mongering has fallen flat. Prosecutor John Durham, who I really thought was going to do Bill Barr's dirty work and try to rig the election by indicting a number of deep-staters with “ties” to the Obama administration, reportedly won't issue a report until after the election, which means he has found nothing. And Wednesday morning we learned that another prosecutor set up by Barr to try to gin up a fake scandal has folded up his tent, too. He was investigating the “unmasking” “scandal,” but he too found nothing.

So they're shooting blanks. But wait, here comes the New York Post to the rescue! The Murdoch tabloid ran a story also on Wednesday morning, which I will not link to, that purports to contain the smoking gun proving that Joe Biden did... well, something to do with Ukraine, it's not exactly clear what.

I thought I said somewhere here that "we still have the Hunter Biden "leak" to look forward to", but I guess I said that somewhere on FB.

(https://www.businessinsider.com/documentary-trump-made-states-bid-ebay-style-ppe-masks-2020-10)

One of the most powerful moments in "Totally Under Control," a new documentary about the US government's coronavirus response, is Mike Bowen's testimony before Congress.

At a House hearing on May 14, Bowen, a Texas mask manufacturer, described how federal officials ignored his repeated warnings about mask shortages — and how the entire country was suffering the consequences.

"I'm getting 500 to 1,000 emails a day," Bowen said. "I'm getting emails from moms, I'm getting emails from old people: 'Please, send me masks.'"

Then he started to cry: "I can't help all these people," he said.

A veteran of the medical supply industry, Bowen knew that the US did not have enough N95 masks to manage a pandemic, according to the documentary, which directors Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger filmed in relative secrecy over the past five months.

On January 22, Bowen emailed the US Department of Health and Human Services with a proposal: His company, Prestige Ameritech, could start producing an additional 1.7 million N95 masks a week.

"We can't protect Americans. That's too late. But I could make at least enough N95s to protect healthcare workers," Bowen said in the film. All he needed, he added, was financial support from the federal government.

The Trump administration didn't take Bowen up on his offer, even though President Donald Trump learned on January 23 that the coronavirus had the potential to spread globally. Less than a week later, Trump was also warned that the virus could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Instead, in February, the Trump administration encouraged other American mask manufacturers like 3M to sell their entire inventories of N95 masks to China, as part of its CS China COVID Procurement Service.

More than a month later, many US hospitals were dangerously low on PPE and ventilators. Workers were using the same single-use masks for several days, and nurses wore garbage bags instead of hospital gowns. One surgeon in Fresno, California, told the New York Times it was like being "at war with no ammo."
Instead of helping states get the supplies they needed, Trump told governors to go it alone.

"Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves," Trump said, according to the New York Times.

With no direction or leadership, states were forced to bid against each other for limited supplies, driving up the prices of equipment and increasing profits for the private companies that had imported them, according to the documentary.

"It's like being on eBay with 50 other states," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a press briefing on March 31.
The bidding war increased profits for mostly foreign manufacturers, and forced taxpayers to cover the extra cost. In many cases, Americans were forced to pay up to 10 times more than the price that local producers would have charged, according to the documentary.

The federal government also outbid states on several occasions, driving Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker to express frustration during a teleconference with Trump on March 19.

"I got a feeling that if somebody has a chance to sell to you or has a chance to [sell to] me, I'm going to lose every one of those," Baker said.

Trump laughed.

"Well, we do like you going out and seeing what you can get, if you can get it faster," Trump said. "And price is always a component of that also. And maybe that's why you lost to the feds."
By the end of March, it was clear the government's free-for-all strategy wasn't working. So Trump Senior Advisor Jared Kushner set up his own PPE procurement task force with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The FEMA supply chain task force was meant to help the federal government procure additional masks and supplies, partnering with other government initiatives like Project Airbridge to deliver PPE to hard-hit areas.

But the task force proved to be a disaster, as Business Insider previously reported. Max Kennedy Jr., one of its members, said in the film that the team consisted largely of inexperienced, 20-something unpaid volunteers "cold-emailing Chinese factories" from their personal Gmail accounts.

"In my time on the task force, our team did not directly purchase a single mask," he said.

Eventually, FEMA procured additional PPE and sent it to states. Even so, shortages of PPE and other medical supplies have persisted across the US.

"It is hard to believe that our nation finds itself dealing with the same shortfalls in PPE witnessed during the first few weeks that SARS-CoV-2 began its unrelenting spread," Susan R. Bailey, president of the Journal of the American Medical Association, wrote at the end of August.

She added: "But that same situation exists today, and in many ways things have only gotten worse."