Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has tested positive for the coronavirus, a source familiar with the diagnosis said Thursday, raising concerns that President Donald Trump's crowded election night party at the White House sparked another outbreak of the deadly virus.
Lewandowski, who was one of Trump's campaign managers in 2016, is one of several top allies and officials who have contracted the virus after having attended the largely maskless event in the East Room of the White House.
Lewandowski told CNBC in a text message, "I feel great."
Lewandowski has been helping the Trump campaign's election challenges, and he spent several days on the ground in Philadelphia advocating Trump's case — often without a mask — alongside Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.
David Bossie, who had been tasked with heading Trump's re-election legal challenges, tested positive for Covid-19 on Sunday, sidelining him from the efforts, NBC News reported this week. Bossie, who also attended the White House election night event, traveled to Phoenix last week as part of the president's legal challenge there, and he did not wear a mask at a news conference alongside Republican politicians and other campaign staffers.
Reporters at the White House party, which lasted several hours, said that of the nearly 150 people still at the event when Trump emerged to make remarks after midnight, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar was the only high-profile attendee seen wearing a mask.
In the week since the event, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has tested positive, as has Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.
On Wednesday, another attendee, former Trump campaign adviser Healy Baumgardner, told NBC News that she had tested positive for the coronavirus, as has Brian Jack, the White House political director, two sources familiar with the diagnosis confirmed.
The outbreak is the third to have hit the White House in recent months.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease expert, has described Trump's Rose Garden ceremony Sept. 26 announcing his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court as a "super-spreader event."
Among the people who attended the event who later tested positive were the president and first lady Melania Trump, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former top Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah and University of Notre Dame President John Jenkins.
Since then, the number of people in Trump's orbit who have tested positive has grown to include more than a dozen aides at the White House and on the Trump campaign, as well as others in their orbit.
A second, smaller outbreak hit the vice president's office last month, with at least five of Vice President Mike Pence's aides having tested positive, including chief of staff Marc Short.
In all, an NBC News review found that there have been at least 44 coronavirus cases involving White House officials, campaign officials and Trump allies in the past two months, not counting several related cases or those that are less recent.
