Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Thursday, September 10. In today's news, at least seven are dead,

including a one-year-old boy in the West Coast wildfires.

A top homeland security official says he was ordered to stop providing intelligence on Russian interference in our elections.

And dozens of Austrians are wondering why they received U.S. stimulus checks.

But first, the big idea. President Trump acknowledged on

Wednesday that he intentionally downplayed the deadly nature of the rapidly spreading coronavirus last winter

as an attempt to avoid what he said would have been a frenzied panic.

It was part of an escalating damage control effort by the White House related to a forthcoming book from the Washington Post's Bob Woodward

Trump's comments came hours after excerpts from the book and audio from some of the 18 separate interviews The president conducted with the of knowing that he was not telling the truth about a virus that has now killed nearly 190,000 of our fellow Americans.

The book reports that in a February 7th interview,

Trump revealed to Woodward that he thought the situation

was far more dire than what he was saying publicly.

Democrats, led by Joe Biden, denounced Trump's actions as part of a deliberate effort

to lie to the public for his own political purposes, when other world leaders took decisive

action to warn their people and set those nations on a better path to handling the pandemic.

Biden in fact called Trump's actions a quote life and death betrayal of the American people.

Trump who regularly flouts those guidelines at White House events and campaign rallies,

rejected the criticism that his myth's truths helped create a false sense of security in the public and led to a more

widespread transmission of the disease than in other leading nations.

Privately, however, the president realized that this book would not be good for

his political fortunes.

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