For reasons of their own—venal, selfish, inexcusable reasons, all of them—both Donald Trump and Bob Woodward shirked the duties of their respective occupations and, eventually, hundreds of thousands of Americans may be dead in part because they did. The shame of this should be everlasting. Bob Woodward’s nonfeasance in the face of this disaster should stand with Walter Duranty’s covering for Stalin in the matter of the Ukrainian famine as eternal embarrassments to journalism and to simple humanity. Nobody, as the bumper stickers used to say, ever died at Watergate.

For weeks leading up to the publication of Bob Woodward’s latest book, West Wing aides were chatting about how damaging some of President Donald Trump’s quotes would be. In the past couple weeks, two senior Trump administration officials told The Daily Beast they were quietly gaming out how to combat or downplay what they’d heard was going to appear in the published work, and attempting to ferret out what other big tidbits would be in there as well.

“It’s been known for a while that this was going to be something that… needed some dealing-with,” one of the officials said. “The anticipation was that it would probably be worse than the other (earlier) Woodward book.”

Senate Health Committee Announces Briefing to Update Senators on Coronavirus
WASHINGTON, January 23, 2020 — On Friday, January 24, the Senate Health Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will host a briefing for all senators with top administration health officials regarding the novel coronavirus outbreak that was first detected in Wuhan, China.

Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) released the following statement:

“The novel coronavirus is an emerging public health threat. Senators will have the opportunity to hear directly from senior government health officials regarding what we know about the virus so far, and how our country is prepared to respond as the situation develops.”

Members of Congress are not held to the same ethics and disclosure requirements as members of the executive branch, but they must obey the 2012 STOCK Act, which prohibits trading on nonpublic information that they accessed in the course of their official duties for personal profit. Two GOP senators — Richard Burr of North Carolina and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia — have already faced accusations of improper trading, but maintain they did nothing wrong.

Burr, who leads the Intelligence Committee and is a member of the health committee, has insisted that he relied only on public information when selling off between $628,000 and $1.72 million in holdings in mid-February a week before the stock market plunged and after attending confidential briefings on the pandemic. Loeffler says her financial advisers make all the decisions for her and her husband’s stock portfolio. Her husband is CEO of the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange.

$110,000 spent on magnet-lined pouches where campaign officials meeting Trump can store their cell phones so their conversations with the president cannot be recorded.