President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence and members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, delivers his remarks at a coronavirus (COVID-19) update briefing Thursday, March 26, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

One of the things that bugs me the most about some in the conservative media is the incessant demand that we continue to give people the benefit of the doubt when they’ve earned none. We’ve seen this dynamic in how criticism of the FBI has been handled despite the obvious evidence of widespread malfeasance.

For another example, two Obama holdovers recently released an IG report during the ongoing Wuhan Virus pandemic that makes claims about testing wait times. Immediately, some suspected politics were at play while others claimed it was out of bounds to suggest such.

My opinion is that you’d have to be incredibly naive to not ask questions about the timing of such a release. When is the last time an IG released a critical report while a crisis was still unfolding? This would be like an IG releasing a report on former President Bush’s “failures” while people were still dying in the Superdome in New Orleans. There’s a time for that stuff and it’s not while the virus is continuing to ravage the country. Fluid situations require fluid responses and perfection is simply not attainable.

Now, Admiral Giroir has exposed even more issues with how this went down.

If you have any doubt the HHS IG report was a political hit job just watch this video of 4 star Admiral Harvard grad Dr. Giroir who’s in charge of testing. They never even reached out to him. They went to media. Totally irresponsible during a crisis. pic.twitter.com/oZnhP8Pre8

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) April 7, 2020

These two Obama appointees released their report at the beginning of April straight into the rabid waters of the mainstream media, yet it was dated March 23rd. What that means is that the information they had was never given to the people who could actually act on it.

The Admiral points out that they never came to the task force to voice their supposed concerns. If there truly was an issue with testing at the time, the task force could have acted immediately to fix it or mitigate any issues. Instead, these HHS officials sat on them and only released their findings when it could be used to its maximum damage while leaving no room to change course. Almost two weeks had passed, meaning whatever data they had was irrelevant by the time the task force got it.

Sorry, but that’s just too many boxes checked for me to pretend this doesn’t all smell incredibly fishy. I’d posit that no IG would have ever done this under Obama and it shouldn’t be happening under Trump. The move he’s now making to remove some of these people is the right one. We can’t have bureaucrats undermining important operations via their partisan concerns.