Jared Kushner Reportedly Led Inexperienced Volunteers in Botched Search for Personal Protective Equipment

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A new report says Jared Kushner recruited about a dozen volunteers to help the Trump administration procure personal protective equipment to help battle the coronavirus, but it turned into a bungled search for supplies with questionable results.

The New York Times reports that Kushner’s volunteers were mostly recruited from venture capital and private equity firms, and they were “expected to apply their deal-making experience to quickly weed out good leads from the mountain of bad ones.” The group was expected to pass the most promising leads on to FEMA for further review, but they had little to no experience with government procedures and officials told the Times it was difficult to point out worthwhile contracts they were able to source.

The Times also says they obtained emails and documents showing that the volunteers were instructed to “prioritize tips from political allies and associates of President Trump, tracked on a spreadsheet called “V.I.P. Update.” The report alluded to a Mar-a-Lago visitor who urged FEMA officials to buy from his associates, and it also said that Fox News host Jeanine Pirro “repeatedly contacted task force members and FEMA officials until 100,000 masks were sent to a hospital she favored.”

From the report:

Few of the leads, V.I.P. or otherwise, panned out, according to a whistle-blower memo written by one volunteer and sent to the House Oversight Committee. While Vice President Mike Pence dropped by the volunteers’ windowless command center in Washington to cheer them on, they were confused and overwhelmed by their task, the whistle-blower said in interviews.

“The nature and scale of the response seemed grossly inadequate,” said the volunteer, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity and, like the others, signed a nondisclosure agreement. “It was bureaucratic cycles of chaos.”

The Times partially based their report on the anecdotes of Dr. Jeffrey Hendricks, a South Carolina physician who said he reached out to FEMA and said he had “manufacturing contacts in China and a line on millions of masks from established suppliers.” Hendricks said his tip was passed on to Kushner’s team, where his follow-up messages went unanswered for weeks until early April when he got picked up by a Defense Department employee.

“When I offered them viable leads at viable prices from an approved vendor, they kept passing me down the line and made terrible deals instead,” Hendricks said, adding that he ended up selling his supplies to hospitals in Michigan and elsewhere.