The Trump appointee who steered a $300 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign to "defeat despair" about the coronavirus privately pitched a different theme last month: "Helping the President will Help the Country."
That proposal, which came in a meeting between Trump administration officials and campaign contractors, is among documents obtained by the House Oversight Committee that further illustrate how political considerations shaped the massive campaign as officials rushed to get public service announcements on the air before Election Day. The committee shared the documents with POLITICO, which first detailed the campaign in a series of reports last month.
For instance, contractors vetted at least 274 potential celebrity contributors for their stances on gay rights, gun control and the 2016 election before allowing them to participate in the campaign. One promised public service announcement, which would have also featured infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, was nixed because the celebrity who was set to participate with Fauci had been critical of President Donald Trump, according to documents.
The official overseeing the campaign — Michael Caputo, who Trump personally tapped as the health department’s top spokesperson — also sought to overrule the career civil servants assigned to the campaign, directly urging contractors to rush production of ads with celebrities like Trump-supporting actor Antonio Sabato, Jr.
“We must film them ASAP — we need content in the can now,” Caputo wrote in an email to contractors on Sept. 13, three days before he took a medical leave from the health department. A federal official subsequently removed Caputo from the email chain and reiterated that only two career civil servants on the chain could provide “actionable direction” to the contractors on how to proceed.
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The planned campaign — with contractors racing to produce ads with celebrities to air before the election — collapsed following a POLITICO investigation last month, with actor Dennis Quaid and gospel singer CeCe Winans withdrawing their participation and other celebrities pulling out. Both Quaid and Winans posted videos insisting that their participation was solely focused on promoting public health and was not intended to be political.
The campaign was the brainchild of Caputo, who was installed as the health department’s top spokesperson in April and who abruptly requisitioned $300 million from the Centers for Disease Control to fund the campaign this summer. The health department then recommended that contractors hire one of Caputo’s business partners, Den Tolmor, to film the celebrity videos, although the Russian-born filmmaker had no prior experience with U.S. public health campaigns.
