These people never quit.On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping.
That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.
The site would not have helped many Americans even if it had launched. Today, more than two weeks after the president promised a national network of drive-through test sites, only a handful of such sites have opened, and fewer than 1 million Americans have been tested.
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The partnership between the administration and the firm suggests that Kushner may have mingled his family’s business interests with his political interests and his role in the administration’s coronavirus response. Kushner’s younger brother Joshua is a co-founder and major investor in Oscar, and Jared Kushner partially owned or controlled Oscar before he joined the White House.
Atlantic
Impeach the motherfucker again.
Jesus these grifters.For the past several weeks, Kushner has led a “shadow task force” on the coronavirus, separate from Vice President Mike Pence’s official committee, according to The Washington Post. Kushner’s team, composed of federal officials allied with Kushner and outside corporate executives, has met in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. A senior official at that agency called Oscar to ask for its help on March 13, the day of Trump’s press conference, the Oscar spokesperson said.
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[The website] was designed to look like a government-developed product, provided freely by the Department of Health and Human Services to the American public.
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Two weeks ago, the company told Business Insider that it had “shared code” with the Department of Health and Human Services, but it did not disclose that it had actually made a website. Last week, Kahn told me in an interview that the company had merely “shrink-wrapped” its code, a piece of jargon that meant it had disconnected the code from its in-house technical platforms so that it could work on other servers. Her statement today admitted that Oscar had gone much further.
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Oscar donated its work freely and never expected to be paid for the project, Kahn said. The company is “not, nor has ever been,” a contractor or subcontractor for the government, she said, which would make it harder for the government to pay Oscar for its work. The work was “all at the direction of HHS,” [Jackie Kahn, the Oscar spokesperson] said. “The website never saw the light of day,” she added in an interview today.
That may not matter from an ethics perspective. The ad hoc nature of Kushner’s task force has already collided with federal laws. Oscar’s involvement deepens Kushner’s ethics and conflict-of-interest problems.
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[Companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. “The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company,” [ Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law] said.
More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the “impartiality rule,” which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake.
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In 2013, Jared and Joshua were the “ultimate controlling persons in Oscar’s holding company,” according to a New York State report that Mother Jones dug up earlier this month. When the elder Kushner joined the White House, he disclosed that he had been on the board of Oscar’s holding company from May 2010 to January 2017. He also said that he had sold his shares in the holding company for somewhere between $1.2 million and $7 million. Joshua still holds a stake in the company. When Jared joined the administration, he sold his shares to either Joshua or a trust controlled by their mother, according to his financial disclosures.
