Jake Tapper Confronts Mark Meadows Over Pence Holding Rallies Despite Staffers Testing Positive

CNN’s Jake Tapper put White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to the grindstone on Sunday over the new coronavirus outbreak that seems to be happening around Vice President Mike Pence.

Over the weekend, news broke that Marc Short and a number of other Pence staffers tested positive for Covid-19. This comes weeks after President Donald Trump, several of his allies, and numerous top Republicans contracted the virus during a super-spreader event at the White House.

As Tapper interviewed Meadows on State of the Union, the CNN anchor immediately pressed the White House chief of staff on this, though Meadows refused to elaborate on how many people in Pence’s office have tested positive. He also carried Trump’s claim “we are rounding the corner” even though the United States just had a record-breaking number of coronavirus cases reported in a single day.

Tapper soon turned to the New York Times’ reporting that Meadows wanted to stop news of the outbreak from reaching the public.

“Why would you do that?” Tapper asked. “Is it because its another sign the way the White House has failed to contain the virus?”

Meadows didn’t explicitly deny the charge as he responded, “That’s not a report, that’s actually a tweet.” When Tapper reminded him it was a Times report, Meadows continued to say “sharing personal information is not something that we should do, not something that we actually do unless it’s the vice president or the president or someone that is very close to them where there is people in harm’s way.”

Shortly after that, Tapper moved on to Pence’s continuity of Trump reelection events despite CDC guidelines saying he should be in quarantine.

“How is going all over the country campaigning — how is that essential work?” Tapper asked “It’s not like he’s helping to contain the virus. In fact, the opposite, he’s holding rallies that could be spreading the virus.”

The two locked horns over Trump and Pence’s actions from the last few days, even as Tapper stressed that “he’s not following CDC guidelines.” This led to a collision between Tapper and Meadows when the latter railed against Joe Biden’s reference to health officials warning that America may face a “dark winter” because of the pandemic.

Watch above, via CNN.

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