To the Editor:
Re “Biden Rebuffs Trump’s Effort to Shield Logs” (front page, Feb. 17) and “Facing Doubts About His Wealth, Trump Produces New Figures” (front page, Feb. 17):
Will the visitor logs from the Trump White House that the Jan. 6 committee seeks be an accurate record of visitors to the White House? It is hard to believe, with former President Donald Trump involved, that they could be anything other than purposely incomplete.
Will Mr. Trump’s actual wealth ever be determined, or will he continue to change his story? He seems to be contradicting himself every day now in an effort to confuse and obscure.
As the walls are closing in on Donald Trump, he continues to do what has served him well his whole life — compounding his lies with more lies and doing so with a straight face. It is obvious that he believes that morality is for wimps and laws never apply to him.
History has shown us where men like Donald Trump can take us. We must press on with every effort to investigate this man so that never again will he be in any position where he can attempt to eviscerate democracy.
Patricia Weller
Emmitsburg, Md.
To the Editor:
Question: How do you know that Donald Trump is lying? Answer: Assume he is; the odds are overwhelming that you’ll be right.
This is particularly true where matters touching on his enormous ego are concerned. It’s very important to him to be seen as enormously wealthy — except, of course, when tax time rolls around.
Of course, whenever he’s challenged on something he has claimed, his response is to insist that he’s right, that he’s done nothing wrong, and that any assertion or evidence to the contrary is “fake” and part of a vicious plot against him.
I don’t doubt that he’d continue to say so even if caught dead to rights and sentenced to prison. Sadly, I also expect that if that happens, his millions of worshipers will believe him.
Eric B. Lipps
Staten Island
To the Editor:
Back in the day, when I was employed by a financial services company, there was something known as “due diligence,” which was something like Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify.” Before getting involved with a company or person, especially if that company or person had a less than stellar reputation, you were expected to have done your homework and checked to see that all was on the up and up.
Does that quaint practice no longer exist? Mazars’ statement says that Donald Trump’s financial statements can no longer be relied on. Does that mean that there was a time when those statements could be relied on?
John T. Dillon
West Caldwell, N.J.
Will Russia Invade? It Did in Hungary in 1956.
To the Editor:
Somewhat analogous to Russia’s claim that its forces have begun to pull back from the Ukrainian border is what happened in Hungary in late 1956.
On Oct. 31, four days before the Soviet military intervention that crushed the anti-Soviet revolution in that country, the Kremlin issued a formal declaration stating that negotiations could start about “the question of the presence of Soviet troops on the territory of Hungary.”
Some of the Soviet troops already stationed near Budapest, the Hungarian capital, had actually abandoned their barracks and began what appeared to be the gradual withdrawal of the Soviet military from Hungarian territory.
Concurrently, however, new Soviet forces crossed the Hungarian-Soviet border in the east, reaching the cities of Miskolc and Debrecen. The situation was unclear. On Nov. 2, a headline in a Hungarian daily called Igazság (Truth), a newspaper born during the revolution, captured the question of the moment: “Are They Coming or Going?”
As we learned decades later from the Kremlin’s archives, the Soviet Politburo, having briefly considered a negotiated settlement with the Hungarians, changed its mind, resorted to a good deal of time-honored deception and occupied the country, including Budapest, at dawn on Nov. 4.
Today, the Biden administration deserves high praise for leaving the door open for negotiations while keeping a skeptical eye on what the Russian military is actually doing.
Charles Gati
Washington
The writer is author of “Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt.”
Covid Vaccines: Balancing Profits and Public Health
To the Editor:
Re “J.&J. Halts Production of Vaccine for Covid” (Business, Feb. 9):
It is only natural that a for-profit pharmaceutical company, Johnson & Johnson, would choose to use its capacity to produce an experimental vaccine for developed countries rather than a needed, approved Covid-19 vaccine for developing ones. Unless constrained by governments, for-profit companies will seek to maximize profits.
The U.S. government could have prevented this result while still respecting J.&J.’s profit motive. It could have conditioned the nearly $1.5 billion it gave J.&J. to develop its vaccine on the government’s ability to buy out any developed know-how and patent rights, to enable the government to make the technology freely available to generic producers.
A multibillion-dollar buyout would have been a bargain, given the particular suitability of J.&J.’s vaccine for worldwide distribution, the millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake, and the urgent need for rapid vaccination to prevent development of new variants.
Even now, governments around the world have ample authority to direct the production of J.&J.’s vaccines to maximize worldwide public health benefits.
First, governments can condition research and development or manufacturing funding on government retention of know-how and patent rights produced with such funding, in order to license generic production, or on private commitments to assure adequate production and affordable distribution.
Second, governments can use authorities like the U.S. Defense Production Act to prioritize private company contracts, and thus can direct what gets produced by private companies.
Third, even without contract conditions or control over production priorities, governments can take privately developed technologies and compensate companies for them to increase worldwide generic production. Governments should not leave these decisions to profit incentives, when lives and economies are at stake.
Joshua D. Sarnoff
Washington
The writer is a professor of law at DePaul University.
