A Young Kennedy, in Kushnerland, Turned Whistle-Blower

[demmiblue]

When Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Max volunteered with Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 task force, he likened the Trump Administration’s pandemic response to “a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”

onths before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed by Covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.

In April, Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone recently from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted Congress. “I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.”

How did a Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time at consulting and investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots. Kushner, he was told, was looking for young generalists who could work long hours for no pay. “I was torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said. “But it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So in March he volunteered for the White House Covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force, and drove to Washington.

On his first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in their twenties, mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in procurement or medical issues. He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to be auxiliaries supporting the government’s procurement team. “We were the team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.” The volunteers were tasked with finding desperately needed medical supplies using only their personal laptops and private e-mail accounts.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/a-young-kennedy-in-kushnerland-turned-whistle-blower

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[Budi]

2. Thanks Max Kennedy. K & R

.....He likened the Trump Administration’s pandemic response to “a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”

There's no doubt at all this is how the entire Trump gov't has been run, as well.