# Michael Caputo [[Roger Stone]]'s protégé — he started as Stone's driver — who spent the 1990s and 2000s doing political work in Russia and Ukraine, served in Trump's 2016 campaign, ran communications for the health department during COVID-19, and in 2026 became the first person to file a claim on the Justice Department's new fund compensating "victims" of investigations of Trump allies. ## Timeline | Date | Event | |---|---| | 1994–2000 | Lives in Russia; advises the Yeltsin camp around the 1995–96 elections | | 2000 | Contracted by Gazprom-Media to improve Vladimir Putin's image in the United States | | 2007 | Advises a parliamentary campaign in Ukraine | | Nov 2015 – June 2016 | Trump campaign communications in New York; pushed out after cheering [[Corey Lewandowski]]'s firing on Twitter | | May 2016 | With Stone, meets a Russian national offering damaging information on Clinton | | Apr 2020 | Named HHS assistant secretary for public affairs | | Sept 11, 2020 | Politico reports he and an adviser tried to "change, delay, suppress" the CDC's scientific reports on COVID-19 | | Sept 13, 2020 | In a Facebook Live video, accuses CDC scientists of "sedition" and warns of left-wing "hit squads" | | Sept 16, 2020 | Takes 60 days' medical leave; his adviser leaves HHS | | May 19, 2026 | Files a **$2.7 million** claim on the roughly $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund created the day before in the settlement of Trump's suit against the IRS and Treasury, citing "the illegal Crossfire Hurricane investigation" — see [[Trump IRS Lawsuit Settlement]] | ## Why it matters here Kremlin-adjacent image work in the Putin era, a Stone apprenticeship, political interference at the CDC, and now the first claim on a fund that pays Trump allies for having been investigated. Caputo is a single career that runs through most of the vault's Trump-era themes. ## See Also - [[Roger Stone]] · [[Corey Lewandowski]] - [[Department of Health and Human Services]] · [[CDC]] - [[Crossfire Hurricane]] · [[Trump IRS Lawsuit Settlement]]