Trump wants schools reopened, no matter what Fauci says

'Not an acceptable answer'

Dr. Anthony Fauci may not have realized it when he told a Senate committee Tuesday there's "certainly not a confrontational relationship between me and the president," but that statement may have an expiration date.

President Donald Trump called Wednesday on the nation's governors to reopen schools, rejecting cautions from the government's top infectious diseases expert against committing to doing so in the fall.

"It's just — to me, it's not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools," Trump said after a White House meeting with the governors of Colorado and North Dakota. “Our country's got to get back, and it's got to get back as soon as possible. And I don't consider our country coming back if the schools are closed," he said. In a sharp dig at the expert who is the federal government's most trusted voice on dealing with the coronavirus crisis, Trump complained that Fauci wants “to play all sides of the equation."

Fauci said on Tuesday: “We don’t know everything about this virus, and we really better be pretty careful, particularly when it comes to children," and in some places, schools should remain closed in the fall.

Trump indicated in an interview taped for Maria Bartiromo's morning show Thursday on the Fox Business Network that he hasn't totally turned against Fauci, but on the schools issue, the president seems to be tuning him out. Fauci is a “good person, a very good person," he said. But Trump added of the shutdowns: "We can't keep going on like this. I totally disagree with him on schools."

The president also played down the risk for colleges while speaking to White House reporters. "These are young students. They're in great shape," he said. "Will something happen? Perhaps," he continued. "You can be driving to school and some bad things can happen, too." Trump acknowledged that some older, more vulnerable employees might have to return later.

The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration shelved advice from top experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to safely reopen businesses and institutions that was more detailed and restrictive than the plan released by the White House last month.

Send more help, Fed chief says

Before the pandemic, Trump used Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as a punching bag and mused about firing him. On Wednesday, the president called Powell the "most improved player" for the Fed's multiple drastic moves in the past two months to head off a worse economic collapse.

But while Trump has been talking up a "tremendous rebound" in the second half of 2020, Powell warned Wednesday of the threat of a prolonged recession and urged Congress and the White House to do more to prevent long-lasting economic damage.

Powell cautioned that numerous bankruptcies among small businesses and extended unemployment for many people remain a serious risk. "We ought to do what we can to avoid these outcomes," he said.

Additional rescue aid from government spending or tax policies, though costly, would be “worth it if it helps avoid long-term economic damage and leaves us with a stronger recovery," he said.

Warning whistle

Dr. Rick Bright, the whistleblower booted from a key government post for vaccine development, is prepared to testify on Capitol Hill on Thursday that America faces the “darkest winter in modern history” unless leaders act decisively to prevent a rebound of coronavirus.

“Our window of opportunity is closing," Bright says in his prepared testimony posted on the House Energy and Commerce Committee website. “If we fail to develop a national coordinated response, based in science, I fear the pandemic will get far worse and be prolonged, causing unprecedented illness and fatalities."

Bright filed a whistleblower complaint last week, alleging that Health and Human Services officials removed him from his post in part because he opposed the broad use of the malaria drug Trump touted as a coronavirus treatment. He is seeking reinstatement as the head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Bright also will testify that his early warnings about critical medical supply shortages were ignored. "It is painfully clear that we were not as prepared as we should have been," his prepared remarks say.

More coronavirus news

See a roundup of the latest pandemic developments from Long Island and beyond by Newsday's reporting staff, written by Bart Jones. For a full list of Newsday's coronavirus stories, click here.

Janison: Mailed-in excuses

Trump is pushing an evidence-free allegation that mail-in voting, growing as a safety measure because of the pandemic, somehow threatens to tilt the fall election against him. As usual, writes Newsday's Dan Janison, his preemptive alibis are running on a faster construction schedule than his border wall.

"Mail-in voting is horrible. It's corrupt," he said April 8 — weeks after his own Florida primary ballot was sent by mail. "Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans," Trump tweeted the next day. 

Republican leaders in key red states are ignoring him. Kentucky finalized a plan for the biggest increase in mail-in voting in the state’s history, and did so with bipartisan support. GOP officials in Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia also are expanding mail-in voting. Alabama is adding coronavirus to the reasons for which voters can request an absentee ballot.

Flynn judge: Did he lie to me?

The judge asked by the Justice Department to throw out charges against Michael Flynn sent another strong signal of suspicion about the move that was orchestrated under Attorney General William Barr and hailed by Trump.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan appointed a former federal judge, John Gleeson, to oppose the Justice Department’s request. He also asked Gleeson to explore whether the former national security adviser should face contempt for perjury after he pleaded guilty to a crime of which he now claims to be innocent. Gleeson co-authored a Washington Post op-ed Monday charging that Justice's decision "reeks of improper political influence."

Sullivan's unusual order plunges the Flynn case even deeper into uncharted legal waters, The Washington Post writes. The new player in the case, Gleeson, has a storied bio. Before becoming a judge, he was the Brooklyn federal prosecutor who put the late mob boss John Gotti behind bars.

Trump and his allies are trying to build on their Flynn-was-framed argument to attack the foundation of the Russia investigation and suggest wrongdoing by the Obama administration. Two Republican senators disclosed a list of names of Obama officials who they say may have received Flynn’s identity from intelligence reports in 2016 and 2017. Among the names is Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Names of Americans are routinely hidden in intelligence reports describing surveillance of foreigners, so U.S. officials have to make a specific request if they want to know the person’s identity, or “unmask” them, The Associated Press notes. The officials had full authority to get the name of a person who had interacted with the Russian ambassador — it turned out to be Flynn. They used proper channels, according to Trump administration documents. In 2016, the FBI and other agencies were scrutinizing Russian interference on Trump’s behalf and trying to understand whether Trump associates were involved.

Jailbird Manafort can nest at home

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, whose sentence called for him to remain in prison until November 2024, was released Wednesday to serve his term under home confinement. His lawyer said it was because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons under Barr has favored early releases for inmates who had served more than half their sentences or had 18 months or less remaining. Manafort is not in either category. But his lawyers wrote to prison authorities last month that Manafort "is 71 years old and suffers from several preexisting health conditions, including high blood pressure, liver disease, and respiratory ailments," raising the risk of death if he became infected.

Manafort was serving a 7-year term after a jury found him guilty of bank and tax fraud and he later pleaded guilty to separate conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges. Trump complained the former lobbyist was unfairly prosecuted in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a pivotal player in Trump’s impeachment, said Manafort’s release from a prison with no reported coronavirus infections raised troubling questions. “People have lost confidence in its neutrality that justice is blind. Instead they think justice bends to Donald Trump’s will," Schiff told MSNBC.

Another Trump scandal figure, his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, had been expecting a release in early May but will remain incarcerated until he reaches his halfway mark later this month. Unlike Manafort, Cohen turned on Trump, who denounced him as a "rat."

What else is happening:

• The Abbott Laboratories coronavirus test that's been used at the White House to confirm rapidly whether persons there are infected may miss as many as half of positive cases, according to a report from New York University. Abbott disputed the NYU study's methods and said the company's research put the rate of false negatives at 0.02%.
• Trump is set to name a former pharmaceutical executive to lead his administration’s all-out effort to produce and distribute a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, Politico reports. Moncef Slaoui, former head of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccine division, will captain “Operation Warp Speed."
• Biden named Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx), a leading progressive voice and backer of the "Green New Deal," along with former Secretary of State John Kerry, a prime mover behind the Paris Climate Agreement, to co-chair an advisory panel for developing a climate change policy. Biden set up the group in collaboration with former primary rival Bernie Sanders.
• Democrats are worried that Biden's homebound campaign isn't doing enough to strengthen the case that he can be a formidable general-election candidate, The New York Times reports. A new CNN poll Wednesday found Biden is ahead 5 points nationally but trailing Trump by 7 points in 15 battleground states.
• Republicans have won a special election for Congress in Southern California, reclaiming a suburban House seat lost in the 2018 midterms. It became vacant when Democratic freshman Rep. Katie Hill resigned in a scandal over a sexual relationship with a campaign staffer. Trump endorsed the winner, Mike Garcia, and repeatedly weighed in on the race on Twitter.
• Trump is yearning to lay eyes again on his vice president, who is isolating himself from others in the White House because of exposure to a staffer who caught the coronavirus. “I haven’t seen Mike Pence and I miss him," the president said, adding that they "speak a lot on the phone."