White House officials said on Tuesday that in spite of the appearance of rigorous daily coronavirus testing, President Donald Trump had not been tested everyday for COVID-19 before he announced he had fallen ill with the virus last week.
A senior administration official would only confirm to The New York Times on Tuesday that Trump was tested “regularly,” which provides new insight into a still fairly opaque understanding of how the President contracted the virus. Trump’s diagnosis has rattled the White House, which has since become something of a coronavirus hotspot.
Follow along with the TPM staff as we cover this ongoing story:
The White House’s sudden announcement on Tuesday that it had completed “contact tracing” for its COVID-19 outbreak raises far more questions than it answers.
An appeals court left in place on Wednesday a federal judge’s order extending to the end of the month the data collection operations for the 2020 census. But the appellate decision was nonetheless a partial victory for the Trump administration’s efforts to speed up the 2020 count, and leaves the administration plenty of room to continue to monkey around with the process.
Ever since President Donald Trump announced his positive COVID-19 diagnosis, members of his White House and campaign orbit have been dropping into self-quarantine like flies.
The spread has been supercharged by the administration’s highly questionable commitment to contact tracing and general opposition to best practices like mask-wearing and quarantining.
Here’s the circle of infection so far:
The White House COVID outbreak. (TPM Illustration/Getty Images/Wikimedia Commons)
Since President Donald Trump left Walter Reed Medical Center Monday, cyberspace has run thick with his tweets, many of them indecipherable and contradictory — even by his standards.
The Justice Department told the judge presiding over Michael Flynn’s case Wednesday that it “inadvertently” forgot to remove post-its it had attached to documents it produced to Flynn as part of the Bill Barr-ordered review of Flynn’s prosecution.
Michael Flynn is asking that the federal judge in his case recuse himself from further proceedings, after a fiery hearing last week in which the former national security adviser’s attorney said that the case against him was actually part of a “coup” attempt against President Trump.
This article was first published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
There’s already been some spicy commentary from both the Pence and Harris teams about respect for COVID-19 rules in tonight’s debate. And some weak plexiglass concession from the vice president’s side.
