Speaking on SiriusXM's The Dean Obeidallah Show this Thursday, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner thinks President Trump's recorded words to journalist Bob Woodward -- where he admitted that he was fully aware of deadly threat posed by corononavirus way back in February -- should get him a prison sentence.
"There are only two elements for second-degree murder. The first is you caused the death of another," Kirschner said.
"The second element is the intent element," which he said would "get tricky if we didn't have Trump's incriminating admissions." Kirschner added that in his opinion as a career prosecutor, Trump admitted to "conscious disregard" of the virus' threat, thus admitting to "second-degree murder" that he "must be held accountable" for.
Rising infections among students and educators as reopenings begin appear to confirm warnings from teachers and parents that schools lack adequate resources to safely restart in-person classes.
New reporting about recent Covid-19-related deaths of public school teachers and a USA Todayanalysis out Friday showing that college towns are among the nation's top hot spots for large outbreaks are deepening fears about the clear and predicted dangers associated with restarting in-person classes this fall as the virus continues to spread across the United States.
The Washington Postreported Thursday that since the beginning of August, at least six educators in Missouri, Mississippi, South Carolina, Iowa, and Oklahoma have died after testing positive for Covid-19 as their school districts prepared to welcome students back for classes.
"The longer we have to wait for support, the more precarious reopening becomes. It's unfortunate, quite frankly, that as a nation we have now made schools a political football. That is going to have a long-term impact, without a doubt."
—Sonja Santelises, Baltimore City Public Schools
While the Post emphasized that it "isn't clear whether any of the teachers were infected at school, and many quarantined to avoid exposing students and other staff members," the newspaper noted that the deaths "have renewed fears that school campuses will become a breeding ground for the virus, spreading the illness as communities grapple with how to balance the need to educate children with properly addressing the pandemic."
The teacher deaths and growing infections among students and staff members in the early stages of the reopening process appear to add weight to vocal warnings from educators, parents, and union leaders that schools lack adequate funding, equipment, time, and support from state and federal policymakers to safely begin in-person classes amid the deadly pandemic.
Despite ongoing pleas from local officials, Congress has not passed any additional relief funds for the nation's public schools since March.
"The longer we have to wait for support, the more precarious reopening becomes," Sonja Santelises, the chief executive of the Baltimore public school system, said last month. "It's unfortunate, quite frankly, that as a nation we have now made schools a political football. That is going to have a long-term impact, without a doubt."
According to the Post:
Some districts have... been struggling to comply with quarantine requirements as staff and students test positive for the virus. Two days after children returned to classes in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, school district officials confirmed special education teacher Teresa Horn, 62, died on Aug. 28 from a heart attack after testing positive for the coronavirus...
Tahlequah Public Schools sent students home for two days of virtual classes following Horn's death. In a little over a week since, the district has reported at least eight students and staff members have tested positive and dozens have been forced to quarantine after possible exposure to the virus at school.
Reporting on the recent deaths of schoolteachers came just 24 hours before USA Today on Friday released an analysis that found "communities heavy with college students" account for 19 of the top 25 coronavirus hot-spots in the nation, heightening concerns that campus outbreaks could be impacting entire cities.
"Oxford is both a college town and a place where people come to retire," USA Today noted. "In the past month... 26 residents at a local veterans' home have died in connection to the coronavirus."
The college-town outbreaks "span the map from Georgia Southern University to the University of North Dakota, from Virginia Tech to Central Texas College," USA Today reported. "In some of the college towns, like Pullman, Washington, home to Washington State, students aren't even taking classes in person, yet are still crowding apartments and filling local bars."
The student-heavy town with the highest number of positive cases per 100,000 people over the past two weeks, according to USA Today, is Harrisonburg, Virginia, home to James Madison University, which saw infections surge shortly after students began moving back onto campus for in-person classes late last month.
"The college recorded more than 700 Covid-19 cases in one week of class and promptly pivoted to online instruction on September 1," USA Today reported. "In the past two weeks, the case rate per 100,000 residents in Harrisonburg has climbed to 1,562. In late July, that number had been at 71 cases per 100,000."
Earlier this week, graduate student instructors and other staff members at the University of Michigan went on strike over the school's failure to institute adequate protections against the spread of Covid-19 on campus and offer a universal remote work option.
According to the university's Covid-19 dashboard, the campus has recorded 42 positive Covid-19 tests over the last two weeks and 346 since early March.
"The university has refused to listen to us, which is why we've been making noise," said Ph.D. student Kathleen Brown, a member of the University of Michigan's Graduate Employee Organization. "We also know of other folks who are not graduate students, staff members, for instance, who are being pressured to work in-person and this, of course, is dangerous."
Reports are emerging that the coronavirus is starting to take a toll on 9/11 first responders, with almost 1,500 infected and 44 dead. Speaking on MSNBC this Friday, first responder John Feal, who survived a bout with the virus earlier this year, talked about making sure the public doesn't forget the sacrifice he and his colleagues made on that fateful day. He also had some pointed words for the Trump administration.
"I want to ask them why it took so long to get legislation passed to help Americans ... I'm not gonna put on my advocacy hat today, but I'm putting on my humanity hat today and I'm challenging everybody in D.C. and in the state capitols to ensure that the American people get treatment, protection, and hope and confidence that they're gonna be taken care of," he said.
Feal said that 9/11 brought people together not just as Americans, but as "human beings."
"This pandemic should've made us all become human beings again and treat each other with empathy and sympathy," Feal said, adding that the virus is "real -- it's not a hoax."
Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci on Friday suggested it was "not a good thing" for President Donald Trump to downplay the threat of COVID-19.
During an interview on MSNBC, Fauci was asked about a new recording from journalist Bob Woodward, in which Trump admitted he was downplaying the novel coronavirus outbreak despite knowing that it was "deadly stuff."
"You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in with Woodward in February. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus."
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, did not directly address Trump's comments. But he did say that he had "some disagreements" with what comes out of White House.
"I can't have any explanation for the conversations between the author of the book, Bob Woodward, and the president. So, I mean, I can't comment more on that, except to say, yes, when you downplay something that's really a threat, that is not a good thing," he added.
Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told a CNN town hall this week that he was "disheartened" to see President Donald Trump holding a campaign rally in Michigan in which few attendees wore face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Politico reports, Collins delivered a blunt criticism of the president's rally when he was asked about it on Thursday night.
"Imagine you were an alien who landed on planet Earth, and you saw that our planet was afflicted by an infectious disease and that masks were an effective way to prevent the spread," he said. "And yet, when you went around, you saw some people not wearing them and some people wearing them. And you tried to figure out why, and it turned out it was their political party."
Collins went on to say that, as a scientist, he was "pretty puzzled and rather disheartened" to see no one wearing masks at the Trump rally.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bashed the Wall Street Journal editorial board and other conservatives for trying to change the subject from President Donald Trump's coronavirus lies to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The California Democrat insisted Feb. 24 that visiting San Francisco's Chinatown was "very safe," and the president's apologists have compared those statements to Trumpwillfully downplaying the virus even though he understood how easily the deadly virus spread.
"Come on, Nancy Pelosi went to Chinatown in February," Scarborough said, his voice rising. "Nancy Pelosi is not president of the United States. Nancy Pelosi's team didn't know on New Year's Eve of 2020 what was coming from China. Nancy Pelosi's employees didn't know and start preparing on Jan. 1, 2020, about the pandemic, to warn the administration. Nancy Pelosi sure wasn't warned on, like, Jan. 28 that this was the biggest crisis to face Donald Trump in his presidency. No, she wasn't. But you know who was? Donald Trump."
The "Morning Joe" host lambasted his fellow conservatives for making excuses for Trump's failures and lies.
"I'm not sure what's in it for you continuing to apologize for this guy," he said. "But whether we're talking about him denigrating the war dead -- you know we did it, by the way. Maybe people out in personality cult, like maybe those people really think those quotes were just made, but you know they're not made up. You know he denigrated the war dead, Wall Street Journal editorial page. You know he did. You know he called men and women who dedicated their entire lives and spent months and years away from their children in defense of this country -- you know he called them suckers and things that I can't repeat on this show. But you'll defend him, you'll keep defending him."
"Where's Marco Rubio, by the way, on vacation?" Scarborough added. "Where's Ted Cruz, I haven't heard from them. Do they agree with Donald Trump? Where's Cory Gardner? Does he agree with Donald Trump?"
President Donald Trump has been widely criticized this week because of the bombshell revelations in veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” which shows that back in February, Trump was privately acknowledging that COVID-19 had “deadly” potential and could become the worst health crisis in over 100 years —even though publicly, Trump was claiming that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. Trump has defended his coronavirus lies by claiming that he didn’t want to create a “panic,” and his economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, is defending the president’s COVID-19 response.
Kudlow told CBS News, “I think we did the right thing, and I think we did it pretty well. We did the best we could, and I think it’s really quite effective. I think the president led wisely, I think the vice president led wisely.”
Trump’s critics have been stressing that tens of thousands of lives in the U.S. could have been saved if the president had publicly acknowledge the danger that COVID-19 posed earlier and had promoted social distancing measures back in January and February. But Kudlow is echoing Trump’s talking point that he didn’t want to cause a “panic.”
Kudlow told CBS told, “As a member of the coronavirus task force — Vice President Pence’s task force — I can tell you that the president’s public posture, where he wanted calm not panic, in no way reflected or slowed the internal process of building an across-the-board infrastructure to combat the virus.”
The U.S. has, for months, been the COVID-19 epicenter of the world. According to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the worldwide COVID-19 death count has passed 910,000 — and more than 191,000 of those deaths are in the United States.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist based in Michigan, told CNN on Friday that the president was putting his own supporters' lives in danger by having them all crowd together in a tight space without wearing masks during a pandemic that so far has killed 190,000 Americans.
"He doesn't care," said El-Sayed. "I live in Michigan and I know that our state is that much less safe because of all of the potential case transmission that happened in a packed airport hangar that did not have to happen because this person cares more about his presidential campaign than our public health."
The doctor went on to say that he was tired of watching the president constantly show a disregard for human life.
"It's deeply frustrating to watch him to consistently disregard the information he now knows and understands," he said. "And so this is part of a broader pattern of lying about this pandemic and politicizing this pandemic in ways that made it harder for public health professionals all over this country to take this on. It is deeply frustrating and extremely cynical."
President Donald Trump has been boasting to advisers that his administration has already stopped a second wave of the deadly coronavirus.
Public health experts are worried about another wave hitting the U.S. this fall, during cold and flu season, but the president seems increasingly convinced that just won't happen, two people familiar with his remarks told The Daily Beast.
“One of the reasons he is so confident about the fall is he seems to totally believe he did everything right the first time, so if it happens again, why not continue and stay the course?” one of those sources said. “He has told me that nobody wants a 'second wave' more than the media or Democrats, who would just want to stick it to him."
Trump privately tells advisers that his new coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas and economic adviser Larry Kudlow have assured him the second wave isn't likely, those sources said, and that another surge in infections shouldn't require major changes.
“The president holds this up as one of his greatest accomplishments,” said a senior administration official who works with the coronavirus task force. “It is something he takes a lot of pride in … even though many of us would say the work is not done yet.”
Conservative economist Stephen Moore, who's been an informal adviser to Trump and his White House, concedes a second wave is possible but agrees with the president that economic considerations should outweigh public health.
“A second lockdown would be just totally unacceptable," Moore said. "I think that’s widely accepted on the White House economics team.”
The type of pollution emitted by many chemical plants in Louisiana's industrial corridor is correlated with increased coronavirus deaths, according to new peer-reviewed research from SUNY and ProPublica.
This article was produced in partnership with The Times-Picayune and The Advocate, which was a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network in 2019.
The industrial plants in the riverside Louisiana city of Port Allen have worried Diana LeBlanc since her children were young. In 1978, an explosion at the nearby Placid oil refinery forced her family to evacuate. “We had to leave in the middle of the night with two babies,” said LeBlanc, now 70. “I always had to be on the alert.”
LeBlanc worried an industrial accident would endanger her family. But she now thinks the threat was more insidious. LeBlanc, who has asthma, believes the symptoms she experienced while sick with the coronavirus were made worse by decades of breathing in toxic air pollution.
“That is the one time in my life I thought, I’m not going to survive this,” she said. “I’m going to become a statistic. I was that sick.”
New research, conducted in part by ProPublica, shows she could well be right.
COVID-19 can be made more serious — and, in some cases, more deadly — by a specific type of industrial emission called hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs, according to new peer-reviewed research by ProPublica and researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The study, published Friday in the journalEnvironmental Research Letters, found this association in both rural counties in Louisiana and highly populated communities in New York.
The analysis examined air pollution and coronavirus deaths in the roughly 3,100 U.S. counties and found a close correlation between levels of hazardous pollutants and the per-capita death rate from COVID-19.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines HAPs as chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer and other serious health problems. Under the Clean Air Act, industrial facilities emitting these pollutants are subject to regulations.
Hazardous air pollution may help explain the disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths in communities like West Baton Rouge Parish, home to Port Allen. With 39 deaths as of Sept. 7, the parish’s per-capita death rate from COVID-19 ranked it among the top 3% of all U.S. counties with at least 30 deaths. Several of its neighbors in Louisiana’s industrial corridor also rank near the top of the list.
COVID-19 and Air Pollution Exposure
The coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed over 189,000 lives across the country, including more than 4,900 in Louisiana, offers a rare opportunity to study the public health outcomes of both short- and long-term air pollution exposure.
Because the virus affects the respiratory system, researchers have rushed to study the potential association between mortality rates and air pollution. Early studies, including one looking at particulate matter — distinct from HAPs, but often found with them — have suggested a link.
Last year, The Times-Picayune and The Advocate and ProPublica published the series Polluter’s Paradise, which used data from an EPA model to quantify levels of hazardous air pollution along the lower Mississippi River’s industrial corridor. As the virus battered many of those same communities this spring, we wanted to determine whether air quality was contributing to high death rates.
The SUNY-ProPublica analysis uses pollution information from the EPA’s 2014 National Air Toxics Assessment, a screening tool aimed at helping state agencies identify and measure the sources of HAPs. These pollutants can come from industrial facilities as well as from power plants and vehicles.
NATA combines information on pollutants that affect the respiratory system into a variable called the “respiratory hazard index.” The analysis found that an increase in the hazard index at the county level corresponded to an increase in COVID-19 death rates. This association existed at all levels of HAPs exposure, including levels that the EPA deems acceptable.
The analysis controlled for a long list of variables, including population density, income, race and age, as well as community health indicators such as prevalence of smokers, adult obesity, preventable hospital stays and physical inactivity.
Peer Review
A recent study by researchers from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that long-term exposure to particulate matter made the coronavirus more deadly. But EPA officials and industry groups have dismissed the research primarily on the basis that it lacks peer review, a standard but time-consuming process where new research is evaluated by independent experts prior to publication.
ProPublica and The Times-Picayune and The Advocate sent the EPA a copy of the new analysis on hazardous air pollutants, which has been peer reviewed, seeking comments. Enesta Jones, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that understanding the links between air pollution and COVID-19 is a “complicated process that will take many years.”
“The research in this area is just beginning, and EPA looks forward to reviewing papers once they are peer-reviewed and published,” she said.
Cancer Alley
The industrial corridor that stretches alongside the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans is nicknamed “Cancer Alley” because of the perceived health risks associated with local chemical emissions. LeBlanc considered herself lucky because no one in her family has had cancer. But she does have asthma, and so do two of her three children.
According to EPA data, West Baton Rouge Parish has more air pollution that affects the respiratory system than 99% of counties nationwide.
Research has long supported an association between asthma and exposure to air pollution. While researchers are not sure how this happens, they believe air pollutants could prevent the body’s immune system from being able to tell the difference between a harmless allergen and a dangerous particle, like a virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that people with asthma are at higher risk of getting very sick from COVID-19.
In mid-March, LeBlanc began having flu-like symptoms. It started as a fever and cough. “Then, the second week it got doubly worse,” she said. LeBlanc went to a drive-thru site in Baton Rouge to get tested for coronavirus. Her test came back positive.
She was sicker than she’d ever been. “I had nightmares. I had coughing. I had aches in my bones. I couldn’t even touch myself,” she said. “That’s how painful it was.”
LeBlanc has nearly recovered. But she said she still has not regained her senses of smell and taste and she gets fatigued more quickly. She believes her debilitating symptoms owed partly to her compromised immune system. “Now what causes your immune system to be down? Is it the air you’re breathing?” she asked.
Diana LeBlanc and her son David at her home in Port Allen, Louisiana. Diana, David and her other two children all have asthma. (David Grunfeld/The Times-Picayune and The Advocate)
Dr. Michael Brauer, a professor of public health at the University of British Columbia, said there is substantial evidence of a link between air pollution and respiratory infections. “If you’re exposed to a viral infection or bacterial infection and at the same time are exposed to air pollution, that infection is more likely to become severe,” he said.
But air pollution can also have permanent effects on health that make COVID-19 symptoms more severe, whether or not a person continues to breathe in polluted air. Vijay Limaye, an environmental health scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Science Center, said that short-term declines in air pollutants in New York City due to lockdown measures in March and April did little to protect populations suffering from long-term exposure.
“In some cases, damage to our lungs, our brains, our hearts from air pollution is irreversible. And there are certain harms inflicted by these exposures that can’t be mitigated even after months or years of breathing cleaner air,” said Limaye.
Asthma Alley
ProPublica and SUNY researchers created a nationwide ranking of counties by combining two variables: COVID-19 mortality rate and the quantity of pollution affecting the respiratory system. First on the list is the Bronx, a borough that was hit particularly hard by COVID-19.
“The air quality issues here and the type of decision-making that’s happened over and over has made us Asthma Alley,” said Mychal Johnson, an organizer from the South Bronx, referencing the local nickname of an area with one of the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the country.
“Waste transfer stations, fossil fuel power plants, heavy diesel trucking,” Johnson said, listing the various sources of pollution in the South Bronx. “We knew that what we had been fighting all these years was only going to make us more susceptible to COVID mortality.”
While all of New York City’s five boroughs except Staten Island occupied slots in the study ranking’s top 20, the remainder of the list included more sparsely populated counties in Louisiana, Alabama and Georgia that contain industrial facilities or power plants. Five counties in the top 20 are located on the lower Mississippi River in Louisiana’s chemical corridor, including West Baton Rouge Parish.
LeBlanc’s son moved his family to a farm farther away from chemical plants in the parish because of his concern about air pollution, and his mother is moving there soon. But a trucking company just north of the property is seeking a permit from the state to increase its air pollution.
“I do worry about my grandchildren,” she said. One of her grandsons has severe asthma and allergies, at times requiring a nebulizer. “It’s just something we’ve had to live with, and that’s the terror of it,” she said.
When LeBlanc’s children were young she had a bag packed at all times in case an industrial accident happened and they needed to evacuate. “I lived in fear of just having to pick up my babies and run,” she said. “I did everything I could for them and here it’s come to the next generation.”
"The lives of everyone in these photos—and of everyone they come into contact with in the next few weeks—are now at risk. But Donald Trump doesn't care, so long as his ego is fed."
The lack of face masks and social distancing on display at President Donald Trump's packed campaign rally in Freeland, Michigan Thursday evening deeply alarmed epidemiologists, journalists, and other observers who warned the gathering could turn out to be a Covid-19 "superspreader event" that endangers the lives of the thousands in attendance and others they come in contact with in the near future.
Reporters covering the rally on the ground in Freeland were quick to note the lack of face coverings in the crowd of more than 5,000 Michiganders who assembled in support of Trump's reelection bid just 24 hours after the president admitted he has been downplaying the severity of the virus from the start because he didn't "want people to be frightened."
"This is the crap that makes grown epidemiologists cry," epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, a fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, said in response to photos emerging from the campaign event, which was held at a Freeland aircraft hangar. According to state health officials, more than 120,000 Michiganders have contracted Covid-19 and at least 6,900 have died.
Several rally attendees expressed complete indifference about the threat the event posed to their own health and that of others, with one Trump supporter telling CNN's Jim Acosta, "There's no Covid."
"It's a fake pandemic created to destroy the United States of America," the man said.
Another supporter of the president told Acosta that he is "not afraid" of the virus because "the good lord takes care of me."
"If I die, I die," the man added. "We gotta get this country moving."
Veteran Michigan reporter and New York Times correspondent Kathy Gray said Trump campaign officials tracked her down and escorted her out of the event after she tweeted pictures of rallygoers without face coverings. Gray estimated that "maybe 10%" of the thousands of attendees were wearing face coverings.
"I've just been kicked out of the Trump rally," wrote Gray.
At one point during his rambling and lie-filled speech Thursday, Trump bragged about the number of people who turned out for the event without voicing any public health concerns, declaring, "This is not the crowd of a person who comes in second place."
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) warned during the rally that "the lives of everyone in these photos—and of everyone they come into contact with in the next few weeks—are now at risk. But Donald Trump doesn't care, so long as his ego is fed."
As the Detroit Free Pressreported, the dangerously crowded Trump rally was "in stark contrast" to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's visit to the state on Wednesday.
"That speech was closed to the public," the Free Press reported, "with media and a handful of attendees asked to remain in chairs spaced throughout a parking lot."
"Nearly 200,000 Americans are dead and more than 6 million have been infected with Covid-19 because of the administration's disastrous response, but Trump's top priority is showering giant corporations with deregulatory special favors," says Matt Kent of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
In the nearly six months since President Donald Trump declared a public health emergency over the coronavirus pandemic, he has rolled back at least 30 public protections, while proposing changes to at least 20 others, according to a report published Thursday by Public Citizen's Coalition on Sensible Safeguards.
Noting that Trump "has directed agencies to press forward with his dangerous, unpopular, and corrupt deregulatory agenda as if it's business as usual," the report accuses the president of appearing "eager to take advantage of the crisis and ram through deregulatory policies while the rest of the country is distracted."
The rollbacks are spread widely across numerous federal agencies, with many occuring at the besieged Environmental Protection Agency. Here is a sampling of some of the administration's more egregious actions:
Among the administration's proposed rollbacks are: revoking protections for unhoused transgender people, redefining critical wildlife habitats, revising the Clean Air Act, weakening pipeline safety rules, and removing barriers on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Sea.
"Instead of using their regulatory and enforcement powers to implement a national pandemic response, Trump officials have sabotaged or obliterated essential health, safety, environmental, anti-discrimination, and financial safeguards for the American public," said Matt Kent, a regulatory policy associate for Public Citizen, in a statement.
"Nearly 200,000 Americans are dead and more than 6 million have been infected with Covid-19 because of the administration's disastrous response, but Trump's priority is showering giant corporations with deregulatory special favors," Kent added. "It's an appalling betrayal of the American people."
President Donald Trump told reporters he did not lie about the coronavirus despite lying to the American people for months. In a series of 18 recorded interviews President Donald Trump in January and February told Watergate reporter Bob Woodward he knew how deadly the coronavirus was, while publicly downplaying its danger.
"Why did you lie to the American people and why should we trust what you have to say now?" ABC News' Jonathan Karl asked Trump.
"Terrible question, and the phraseology. I didn't lie," Trump said, lying. "What I said is we have to be calm, we can't be panicked."
"I knew that the tapes were there," the the president continued, "these were a series of phone calls that we had mostly phone calls, and Bob Woodward is somebody that I respect just from hearing the name for many many years, not knowing too much about his work and not caring about his work, but I thought it would be interesting to talk to him for a period of you know calls. So we did that. I don't know if it's good or bad, I don't even know if the book is good or bad, but certainly if he thought that was a bad statement, he would have reported it because he thinks that you know you don't want to have anybody that is going to suffer medically because of some fact, and he didn't report it because he didn't think it was bad. Nobody thought it was bad, and your question, the way you phrase that is such a disgrace it's a disgrace to ABC Television Network, it's a disgrace to your employer. And that's the answer are you ready, because I love."
