In early September, news broke of a newly planned Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) advertising campaign intended to "defeat despair" and instill "confidence to return to work and restart the economy" amidst the ongoing and still-uncontrolled COVID-19 pandemic. The still-in-the-works advertising splurge was allocated a quarter of a billion dollars, and was (is?) to feature whatever celebrities Team Trump could muster in what looked suspiciously like a White House attempt to spend a massive amount of HHS money not to combat the pandemic with testing, tracking, or social distancing measures, but to promote Trump's own demands that the economy of hard-hit states "reopen," regardless of how many Americans would die in the aftermath.
The planned campaign was being overseen by Trump loyalist Michael Caputo, who was implicated within a week for also manipulating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, upon which Caputo went completely off the rails with claims of CDC "sedition," secret "resistance units," and other paranoid claims—like publicly urging Trump supporters to "buy ammunition" in case Democratic candidate Joe Biden attempted to stage a coup against Trump. He took a near-immediate medical leave from his government post.
The House Oversight Committee has now received some of the subsequently requested HHS documents explaining how the "defeat despair" campaign came about, and, yeah. It looks like the original take of "Team Trump (possibly illegally) shifted $250 million of HHS funds into advertising meant to boost Donald Trump in the upcoming campaign" was exactly on the money. Both Politico and The Washington Post have obtained those documents, and they show that Caputo was extremely not subtle in his desires to tailor the quarter-billion-dollar campaign to boost Trump.
Caputo even proposed a theme for the ad campaign: "Helping the President will Help the Country," which would target Trump supporters with messages about masks and other “reopening”-friendly pandemic safety measures by suggesting to them that doing those things would be, yes, "helping" Dear Leader. (How this was supposed to work while Trump himself continued to voice public contempt for the same safety measures is, alas, somewhat unclear. The whole concept of staging a pro-safety HHS campaign centered around an anti-safety leader sounds so precarious that it’s no wonder it near-immediately turned into a fiasco.)
Further, both Politico and the Post report, documents show that the "celebrities" who were sought out to promote these public service announcements were being vigorously screened as to their political leanings, and specifically whether they had made past statements opposing Trump. Of the 270+ celebrities being considered, only 10 were eventually approved. If you're a fan of Dennis Quaid, Dr. Oz, or Billy Ray Cyrus, you're in luck, but it seems nearly everyone else on the list of America's most famous people, from Lady Gaga to Judd Apatow, were taken out of consideration due to Naughty Thoughts.
Notably, George Lopez did apparently agree to participate, only to be nixed due to, as quoted in notes by subcontractor Atlas Research as obtained by Politico, "previous concerns regarding his comments regarding the President." That serves as solid evidence that the tallying of each celebrity's past support of or opposition to Trump was not just bookkeeping, but indeed used to winnow out those who had expressed anti-Trump sentiments. (From the outside, it looks like Atlas Research or someone else started with a bare list of America's most famous faces, then painstakingly consulted Dr. Google to see which ones would not face immediate rejection by Caputo and other political minders. Not exactly the most efficient operation.)
The entire ad campaign is now under "strategic review" inside HHS, according to Trump HHS head Alex Azar, which is Washington code for has become such a political liability that it likely can no longer be pulled off. It certainly won't be arriving in time to boost Trump's election chances, which may eventually scuttle the whole thing.
What has the House Oversight Committee's attention, however, is that even with this small fragment of demanded documents, there seems solid evidence that the pandemic-premised ad campaign to fight “despair” was, from the outset, designed as a gargantuan government-funded Trump campaign boost.
That would seem to be rather conspicuously illegal. At some point, we might even have a Department of Justice again willing to look into those things.