One good thing about Dems controlling the House is that they get to investigate the many, many failures of the previous administration. Turns out senior Trump advisers warned in February 2020 about “critical mistakes” in preparing for the pandemic, according to emails obtained by the House’s select subcommittee on the pandemic. Via the Washington Post:

“In truth we do not have a clue how many are infected in the USA. We are expecting the first wave to spread in the U.S. within the next 7 days,” adviser Steven Hatfill wrote to Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade director, on Feb. 29, 2020. “This will be accompanied by a massive loss of credibility and the Democratic accusations are just now beginning. This must be countered with frank honesty about the situation and decisive direct actions that are being taken and can be seen in the broadcast news.”

Hatfill, a virologist who began advising the Trump White House in February 2020, blamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for rolling out flawed coronavirus tests and urged Navarro to begin purchasing additional tests and deploy. His warning to Navarro came hours after then-president Trump boasted of his administration’s “pretty amazing” response to coronavirus. “We have 15 people [infected] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that,” Trump said at a political rally in South Carolina, where he charged that Democrats were “politicizing the coronavirus … this is their new hoax.”

After receiving Hatfill’s warning, Navarro privately warned Trump in a March 1, 2020 memo that the government’s response was “NOT fast enough” and that a “very serious public health emergency” was looming, but Trump continued to downplay the virus’s risks in public.