Did Trump Send Putin COVID Tests From His Presidential Stash While Americans Got Defective Imports?

It is hard to rank the biggest lies of the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response. But one stands out among the rest.

At a time when desperate Americans waited in miles-long lines to get COVID tests in perilously short supply, and public health experts were sounding the alarm that the critical shortage was tanking America’s pandemic response, Donald Trump claimed the US had a bountiful supply: “Anybody who wants a test gets a test.”

It was a whopper, with life-and-death stakes. In fact, as Vanity Fair reported in July 2020, the White House—where Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was operating a shadow coronavirus task force—had made a secret, legally dubious purchase of 3.5 million Chinese-made COVID tests through a United Arab Emirates company, G42, which has close ties to the UAE’s ruling family.

At the same time, Kushner had huddled with private-sector testing experts, and designed a comprehensive national solution to the shortage that would have ramped up supplies and dramatically sped up test results. Except the Trump White House then killed the plan after determining that the spread of the virus, which was mostly hitting blue states at that time, could be blamed on Democratic governors. More than a million Americans died amid the botched US response.

All that was terrible (though, in her capacity as Trump’s spokesperson, Kayleigh McEnany did call our story “completely incorrect”). Today, we find out it was even worse than we knew. According to the new book War by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, Trump was secretly sending some of the nearly-impossible-to-get COVID tests to Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Here is The Washington Post:

Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout—not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow.

Brett Giroir, Trump’s COVID-19 testing czar, who oversaw procurement and distribution of tests on behalf of the US government, tells Vanity Fair that no such transfer went through him or his team. “We did not send any tests through me to Putin or to foreign governments, with the exception of the embassy in Mexico…. I was never asked to send any to Putin or any foreign leaders.”

He says that when he took the role, in March 2020, “I knew where every test was in the country, and really controlled the allocation.” He added, “That does not mean that tests at the White House, or through some other personal relationship” didn’t go to the Russian leader.

At a moment when Americans were battling to find essential life-saving tests, the Trump White House undisputedly controlled several stashes of them. There were the 3.5 million tests from G42, improperly purchased and shipped to the United Arab Emirates embassy in Washington, DC.

And then there were the best-of-the-best, the Abbott Point of Care testing machines, which went to the White House. “We bought about 40% of Abbott’s global supply,” says Giroir. The tests were used to ensure that those visiting the president were infection-free.

Those were the tests that reportedly got siphoned to Putin. Says Rick Bright, former Health and Human Services deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response, “Given the number of lives at stake, it was unconscionable [of Trump] to deprive Americans of such critical, life-saving tools.”

Whether Kushner’s White House task force was involved in sending the premium tests to the Russian leader remains unclear. Kushner did not respond to a text message seeking comment. Vanity Fair got no immediate response to requests for comment from G42 or Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners. In a press release, the Trump campaign said Woodward’s book contained “made up stories” and should be used as “toilet tissue.”

Meanwhile, many Americans got the G42 tests. Not only were those tests purchased with no duly appointed contracting officer, no official sales record, and an invoice that simply noted the client name as “WH,” short for the White House. They also didn’t work. As a Health and Human Services cable sent to the UAE embassy noted, “When the kits were delivered they were tested in accordance with standard procedures and were found to be contaminated and unusable.”