A Young Kennedy, in
Kushnerland, Turned Whistle-Blower
When Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Max
volunteered with Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 task force, he likened the Trump
Administration’s pandemic response to “a family office meets organized
crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”
By Jane Mayer
September 21, 2020
Months before Bob
Woodward’s book “Rage” documented President
Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed by covid-19,
Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old grandson tried to blow the whistle
on the President’s malfeasance from an improbable perch—inside Trump’s
coronavirus task force.
In April, Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure
agreement, sent an anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous
incompetence in the Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone
recently from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted
Congress. “I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed
by what I’d seen.”
How did a Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump
Administration? After graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time
at consulting and investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but
the pandemic cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion
that he join a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get
vital personal protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots.
Kushner, he was told, was looking for young generalists who could work long
hours for no pay. “I was torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat,
said. “But it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it
seemed larger than the Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So
in March he volunteered for the White House covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force, and drove to Washington.
On his first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in
their twenties, mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in
procurement or medical issues. He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to
be auxiliaries supporting the government’s procurement team. “We were the
team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.”
The volunteers were tasked with finding desperately needed medical supplies
using only their personal laptops and private e-mail accounts.
As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was
alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that
room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the
public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was
being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show
up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred
years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the
largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and
gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so
upsetting.”
Kennedy believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in
order to sidestep government experts and thereby “control the narrative.” He
said that Brad Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task
force, pressured him to create a model fudging the projected number of
fatalities; Smith wanted the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S.
deaths, claiming that the experts’ models were “too severe.” Kennedy said that
he told Smith, “I don’t know the first thing about disease modelling,” and
declined the assignment. (A spokesman said that Smith did not recall the
conversation.) To date, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died.
The volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from
the President’s friends and supporters. According to Kennedy, the group paid
special attention to Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality. Pirro, Kennedy
said, was “particularly aggressive,” and demanded that masks be shipped to a
hospital she favored. The volunteers were also told to direct millions of
dollars’ worth of supplies to only five preselected distributors. Kennedy was
asked to draft a justification for this decision, but refused. “Hundreds of
people were sending e-mails every day offering P.P.E.,” he said, but no one in
charge responded effectively. “We were super frustrated we couldn’t get the
government to do more.”
In the end, the task force failed to procure enough equipment,
leaving medical workers, including Kennedy’s cousin, to improvise by wearing
garbage bags and makeshift or pre-worn masks. States were left to fend for
themselves, bidding against one another for scarce supplies. Kennedy was
disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing
Trump as “a marketing genius,” because, Kennedy said they’d told him, “he
personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.” The response was
in line with what Kennedy calls the White House mantra: that government doesn’t
work, and “that the worst thing we could do was step on the toes of the private
sector.”
Kushner came by the fema office
a few times, once to ask the flailing volunteers what three things they most
needed, and promising fixes by the end of the day. He had “an air of
self-importance,” Kennedy recalled. “But I never saw a single thing that
Kushner promised change.” After two or three weeks of growing distress, Kennedy
wrote his complaint, addressing it to the House Oversight Committee, hoping
that Congress would step in. Meanwhile, the task force stopped meeting in
person, because a member tested positive for covid-19. In April, Kennedy quit, and he has since gone to
work on the Democrats’ 2020 election efforts. He decided to defy the N.D.A.,
which he does not think can legally stifle him from expressing his opinion, and
he is featured in a new documentary, “Totally Under Control,” from the director
Alex Gibney. Kennedy said, “If you see something that might be illegal, and
cause thousands of civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.” The
Administration’s coronavirus response, he said, “was like a family office meets
organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of
chaos.” ♦
