(CNN)If all goes to plan, a Moroccan-born, trilingual former pharmaceutical executive may be one of the few senior figures to escape the Trump administration with his reputation enhanced.
Moncef Slaoui has presided over Operation Warp Speed, the US drive to develop Covid-19 vaccines in record time. With several vaccines ready for regulatory approval, there's every sign that, unlike most of the White House's disastrous crisis response, the vaccine program will be a great success. Unlike many other key figures in the Covid-19 team still in good standing with President Donald Trump, Slaoui disdained the unwarranted triumphalism and on-camera sycophancy the President requires of his subordinates. His plain-spoken and rare public comments are rooted in science rather than politics. Slaoui took the job only after being assured of no political interference from a President who had hoped news of a vaccine would guarantee him a second term. He doesn't agree with Trump's refusal to join a global compact to ensure fair vaccine access to less well-off nations.
True, Slaoui's initial prediction in May that a few hundred million doses could be available by the end of the year was too optimistic. And Senate Democrats complained that the former GlaxoSmithKline executive's consulting contract allowed him not to disclose potential industry conflicts of interest.
But the development of several highly effective vaccines, which Slaoui says could get the US toward herd immunity by next May, will stand as one of the Trump administration's clearest legacy wins, even if the President's claims of all the credit are not fair to scientists and companies that did the hard work.
Slaoui's role as America's vaccine savior is also rather ironic. He is a poster child for the open immigration laws that Trump and his aides have spent the last four years trying to curtail. Born in Muslim-majority Morocco, he headed to Europe for his education and is a fluent Arabic, French and English speaker. After arriving in America in the 1980s, he later pursued a career fighting diseases like cervical cancer, meningitis and malaria.
Slaoui said recently that the immigrant pipeline brought "talent, innovation, diversity, energy and renewal to all societies, and has been a key element underpinning the successes that the United States has enjoyed over the past decades."
'We have not seen fraud ... '
When even William Barr says it's over, it really is over.
The attorney general, who has often behaved more like Trump's personal lawyer, this week hammered one of the final blows against the President's bogus claims that the election was stolen from him. Barr, who before Americans voted had echoed Trump's false claims that mail-in voting was not secure, said the Justice Department had looked but couldn't find evidence of widespread cheating.
"To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election," Barr told The Associated Press in an interview.
His comments will make Republican leaders -- who still refuse to call Joe Biden President-elect for fear of enraging Trump's supporters -- appear even more disingenuous.
Even though Barr has intervened in several sensitive legal situations to help Trump -- i.e. reshaping the narrative of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report -- the President is certain to feel betrayed since he has made clear that anyone who works in his administration has a higher loyalty to him than to the law, facts or reality.
Perhaps trying to soften the blow, Barr did offer Trump and supporters a gift on the way out of the door, announcing that John Durham, a prosecutor who has spent months investigating the origins of the Russia investigation -- without turning up much evidence of serious wrongdoing by Obama-era officials -- would now serve as a special counsel.
This is not just a change of job title. It means that the investigations into the investigators will drag on into the Biden administration and become a landmine for whoever the President-elect chooses as his attorney general. Any suspicion of trying to influence the Durham probe will cause shrieks of outrage from Republicans who stood by while Trump trampled all over the Justice Department's independence.
And the mere existence of the Durham investigation will fuel months of conspiratorial TV for conservative pundits and will seed Trump's fantasy that he is the victim of an establishment plot.
