Ex-adviser says officials traded the health agenda for sugar money, lost the midterms, then blamed Trump

…(cont) On November 6th the sentence acquired a subject. In an interview with Joe Rogan, as the New York Times reported it, Means accused the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, of repeatedly bowing to lobbying pressure and fixating on campaign contributions. Two days later, on Face the Nation, he said the president "has been subverted by people that are beholden to special interests," which is the alias version of the same sentence, and told interviewers the staff treated the president like a "baby," per The Hill.

Then came the filing, and the filing is the thing. The Hill reported that Means followed the accusation with a formal request that Wiles preserve her records. All together now — line one: the request is addressed to the official he had just accused. Line two: it asks her to serve as custodian of the evidence about her own office. Line three: by October 26th that office was already a defendant, six citizens having sued over the White House's bans on news outlets, also The Hill. There is no line four.

Today the blanks got filled in. In The Hill and the Guardian, Means names the industry: sugar. He says officials dropped the Make America Healthy Again agenda to take sugar-industry money to fuel the midterms, which Republicans lost. He says Wiles then tried to pin the blame on the president for health policies he claims lobbyists shaped — throwing, in his words, Trump under the bus. Trump removed Wiles as chief of staff last week, so the records request now sits with a private citizen.

For the fundraising calendar he describes, the government kept its own copy. On October 23rd, ten days out from the vote, the Social Security Administration — run by Trump nominee Frank Bisignano — emailed the public praising the "historic tax cut" signed last summer, and Common Dreams reported the agency was accused, yet again, of unlawfully using federal resources to celebrate the president. All together now, second ball: the law being praised is the budget law that cut Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance. That is the health agenda, mailed out as an achievement, at public expense, for a party that lost anyway.

I want to be fair about this. Nobody has been charged with anything, and nothing in the record requires that anybody be. The only enforceable instrument in the entire affair is one letter asking a person to keep her own paperwork, delivered to an office she no longer occupies. Sugar got its money. The rest of us got the email.