Michael Caputo, a Trump loyalist who is the newly appointed spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently erased all of his Twitter history before April 12.
But CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski used the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine to dig up 1,300 of Caputo’s deleted tweets and retweets between late February and early April.
Kaczynski found that Caputo made numerous racist remarks about Chinese people, and pushed conspiracy theories related to COVID-19, including that Democrats wanted millions of people to die, and that the media was creating panic to hurt President Donald Trump.
HHS, headed by Secretary Alex Axar, plays a key role in the the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
CNN reports: In a series of tweets on March 12, Caputo responded to a baseless conspiracy theory that the United States brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, China, by tweeting that “millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters.” He followed up at another user, “Don’t you have a bat to eat?” and tweeted at another user, “You’re very convincing, Wang.” … In March, he referred to one White House reporter as “a dick” after that reporter had a heated exchange with the President. He said many Americans viewed reporters as “the enemy of the people” for “carrying water for the Chinese Communist Party.” He implied that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was guilty of sedition. On March 8, he said a Democrat may try to inflict hundreds of thousands of American deaths from the coronavirus, creating a hypothetical scenario comparable to James Hodgkinson, the anti-Trump man who shot House Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise and four others during a Republican congressional baseball game practice in 2017.
