A Republican-run committee responsible for Affordable Care Act oversight tried to enlist the help of John McAfee, ex-fugitive and developer of McAfee Anti-Virus software, to help with the dodgy launch of the Obamacare website, Healthcare.gov.
According to emails obtained by CNBC, House Republicans contacted the murder suspect to “guide our oversight and review” of Healthcare.gov.
“Given the failures of Healthcare.gov, and Mr. McAfee’s expertise, I was hoping he might be able to discuss his views with staff on the hill,” wrote House Committee on Energy and Commerce counsel Sean Hayes to McAfee’s lawyers. “It would be an informal discussion: we would take notes but these would not be for attribution, it would mainly guide our oversight and review of the program.”
Last year, McAfee went into hiding in Central America after his neighbor in Belize was found killed, shot in the head, shortly after a confrontation with McAfee. McAfee was found and held in Guatemala and then deported back the U.S., but was never charged with any crimes. He denied killing his neighbor, Greg Faull.
McAfee expressed interest in speaking to the House committee and emails showed that there were arrangements to have McAfee flown from Portland, Ore., where he lives. However, plans were quickly abandoned after the committee refused to pay for McAfee’s travel costs.
McAfee did offer up some advice when speaking about the situation to CNBC.
“I promise you this cannot be fixed without at least scrapping the front-end processing, which is more than half of the systems,” said McAfee. “Seriously, if it were me and I were running this and I had been asleep in a hospital for two years and woke up to this mess, I would say OK, throw it out and start over. But start over in the right way.”
Josh is a writer and researcher with Ring of Fire. Follow him on Twitter @dnJdeli.
