- With the nation’s best medical experts at the White House’s disposal, Jared Kushner decided to go in a different direction when designing a national COVID-19 test strategy.
- Kushner hired his college roommate to work on a carefully selected team tasked with streamlining testing at the federal level, according to a new Vanity Fair report.
- While Kushner’s ubiquitous involvement in major White House initiatives is not new, like his coronavirus “impact team” derided by real experts as the “Thin Suit Crowd,” the details of the test report are new.
- Kushner’s plan “just went on the air,” according to one of his team members.
- The team also acquired 1 million tests of deceased coronavirus from a United Arab Emirates company that misspelled its own name on an invoice such as Cogna “Tecnology” Solutions.
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If this is a major issue at the Trump White House, Jared Kushner is probably the starting point.
When he was tasked with devising a national testing strategy, the president’s son-in-law and senior aide turned to his college roommate for accredited medical experts for an initiative that “just went off the air,” according to one of its participants. . .
A new Vanity Fair report released Thursday revealed new details about Kushner’s role in the nation’s failed coronavirus response, particularly in forming his own carefully selected team to create a strategy that never happened.
According to the report, efforts to build an advanced test-and-trace operation across the country were ruled out. An explanation that convinced Kushner to abandon his plan was reportedly a sentiment in the White House that the virus would only be contained in the “blue states,” providing cover for the Trump administration to blame Democratic governors for the pandemic damage.
Meanwhile, Kushner’s team still obtained 1 million deceased COVID-19 tests from a United Arab Emirates company that misspelled its own name on an invoice such as Cogna “Tecnology” Solutions, according to VF.
Roommate Adam Boehler was part of Kushner’s “brain confidence” of private sector figures working on the virus response.
One of the participants in the Kushner team described the group to Politician as “Team A of people who suck.”
Boehler, 41, who was Kushner’s roommate for a summer when they were at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University, respectively, is the CEO of the US International Development Finance Corporation, Una New agency founded as part of the Best Investment Utilization Leading Development Act (BUILD) of 2018.
His experience was private equity before he became founder and CEO of Landmark Health, which is touted as the nation’s largest provider of home health care.
Boehler’s father, Dr. Rich Boehler, works at the Landmark office in Latham, New York, and has extensive experience as a medical director, according to his LinkedIn page.
In 2018, Boehler was named Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation under HHS.
While Boehler has a medical history, he does not have an MD and was serving on a team under Kushner that excluded the Trump administration’s so-called evidence czar, Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of health.
Kushner’s preference for private-sector strangers over government officials with credited experience is part of a larger pattern that has been the subject of copious reporting, with career FEMA officials poking fun at Kushner’s “impact team” like the “Slim Suit Crowd” in a New York Times story.
“Other agencies were in their own bubbles,” aside from Kushner’s team in testing, one of the participants told VF. “The circles never overlap.”
