The NY Times reports:

The top communications official at the powerful cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus accused career government scientists on Sunday of “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and warned that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael Caputo, 58, the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Trump.

That is astounding. It’s Nazi-level manipulation and lying and provocation.

This is the guy who’s been trying to force the CDC people to change their reports to match Trump’s stupid lies.

“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Mr. Caputo, a Trump loyalist installed by the White House in April, told followers in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page.

Very sane, very normal.

Mr. Caputo delivered his broadside against scientists, the media and Democrats after a spate of news reports over the weekend that detailed his team’s systematic interference in the C.D.C.’s official reports on the pandemic and other disease outbreaks. Former and current C.D.C. officials described to Politico, The New York Times and other outlets how Mr. Caputo and a top aide routinely demanded the agency revise, delay and even scuttle the C.D.C.’s core public health updates, called Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, that they believed undercut Mr. Trump’s message that the pandemic is under control.

The PR guy is fiddling the professional medical reports by the scientists to help his boss the warped murderous dictator. He’s apparently also lost his marbles.

Despite the criticism of his team’s interference with C.D.C., Mr. Caputo said he expected to remain in his post because Mr. Trump supported him. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I swear to God, as God is my witness, I am not stopping.”

He’s a hero! He’s Scarlett O’Hara!

His Facebook presentation comes as Mr. Trump has increasingly singled out federal government scientists as targets, complaining without evidence that they were deliberately trying to subvert his administration’s efforts to fight the pandemic for their own political reasons.

The government scientists are trying to do their jobs despite Trump’s efforts to contradict and silence them for his own political reasons.

Mr. Caputo echoed those sentiments, saying scientists “deep in the bowels of the C.D.C. have given up science and become political animals.”

No dude. That’s projection.

Then he babbled about a Trump fan who was killed in Portland, and said it was “a drill.”

The man suspected of the shooting, Michael Forest Reinoehl, was later shot dead by officers from a federally led fugitive task force in Washington State. He “went down fighting,” Mr. Caputo said. “Why? Because he couldn’t say what he had inside him.” He then spoke of “squads being trained all over this country” — a conspiracy theory unsupported by evidence.

No, no, it’s true, I’ve got 700 of them right here next to me.

Mr. Caputo continued his social media effort after the Facebook event, retweeting a conspiratorial post that hinted with no evidence that armed camps were being established in Washington, D.C.: “Occupants don’t look like vagrants. Looks like forward basing for militant street ops,” J. Michael Waller, a conservative provocateur, posted.

Nah, the forward basing for militant street ops is all at the Marriott.

Mr. Caputo has no background in health care. He worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign for a time but was passed over for a job early in the administration. He remained friendly with Dan Scavino, who oversees the White House’s social media and is among the few of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign aides still on the administration’s staff. Mr. Scavino played a role in reconnecting Mr. Trump and Mr. Caputo. Some of Mr. Trump’s allies heralded Mr. Caputo’s appointment at Health and Human Services, describing him as both media savvy and intensely loyal to the president.

They might as well have given the job to a circus clown.

[Caputo] accused officials at the C.D.C. and other government agencies — including the Department of Health and Human Services — of deliberately subverting the president’s efforts to contain the pandemic. The C.D.C., he said, was riddled with anti-Trump researchers who “walk around like they are monks” and “holy men” but engage in “rotten science.”

Which he knows how? Given the fact that he’s a PR guy not a scientist?

But he singled out Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the agency, for praise. He “is one of my closest friends in Washington,” he said. “He’s such a good man.”

Former and current agency officials have asserted that Dr. Redfield has allowed so much political interference with the agency’s work that some career scientists are on the verge of resigning.

Right; as he said, such a good man.

Mr. Caputo’s scientific adviser, Dr. Paul Alexander, was heavily involved in the effort to reshape the C.D.C.’s weekly reports on morbidity and mortality. The reports are widely read by the nation’s health professionals, who depend upon them for medical guidance.

Mr. Caputo acknowledged in a brief interview this weekend that it was unusual for a public affairs officer to hire his own scientific adviser. But he described Dr. Alexander, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Canada, as “a genius” to his Facebook audience, saying the public criticism had only served to make his position “permanent” as a watchdog over politically motivated scientists.

“To allow people to die so that you can replace the president is a grievous venial sin, venial sin,” he said. “And these people are all going to hell.”

Meanwhile Trump continues to do things that cause thousands of people to die.