March 19, 2020

It's time for another House investigation.

NPR obtained a secret recording from a luncheon that the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee Sen. Richard Burr attended.

On February 27 as Trump was lying to the American people about the coronavirus, NPR reports that Burr issued dire warnings to these very wealthy attendees.

"There's one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history," he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. "It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic."

Yet publicly Sen. Burr remained much more muted.

Was this at the behest of Donald Trump?

If not then Sen. Burr should be held accountable for not publicly forcing the White House to take aggressive action immediately if he considered it is destructive as the 1980 teen Spanish flu.

It was a high dollar event in North Carolina and his warnings came two weeks before Trump ordered the European travel ban.

This is outrageous.

Reporter Tim mack covered the story on NPR's Morning Edition.

"There will be, I'm sure, times that communities, probably some in North Carolina, have a transmission rate where they say, let's close schools for two weeks, everybody stay home," he said.

Tim Mack was asked what Burr said to the public after making these statements in North Carolina and he responded, "Nowhere in press statements or other remarks did Sen. Burr provide warnings about how bad he worried coronavirus would become."

Sen. Burr never told the public at large his concerns which contradicted everything Donald Trump told the public.

On the same day Burr remarkably was candid to his own constituents Donald Trump was telling America a completely different tune.

Trump said, "It's going to disappear. One day, It's like a miracle. It will disappear," It could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We'll see what happens."

As NPR says Burr should've known better since he's an author of legislation on how we handle these types of events.

He helped to write the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), which forms the framework for the federal response.

If Sen. Burr knew how dangerous the coronavirus was at that time then so did the Trump administration. So why did they refuse to take action sooner?

Was it all about Trump's stock market numbers?

This secret reporting exposes the Trump administration's culpability for not doing anything sooner about the spread of the virus.

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