02/10/2026
WHY DOES KATHY HOCHUL HAVE $100 MILLION IN UNUSED COVID TESTS BOUGHT OFF HER DONORS LOCKED IN A BASEMENT OF BUILDING 11 & 12 IN THE STATE OFFICE CAMPUS?
Below building 11 & 12 sits a treasure 🤑
Over $100 million in unused covid test kits, purchased at a premium by the seditious Governor Kathy Hochul from the company of one of her favorite donors, Digital Gadgets.
During covid, Kathy Hochul’s administration paid Digital Gadgets LLC $637 million for 52 million COVID tests, averaging about $12.25 per test.
At roughly the same time, New York was buying tests from other vendors for $5 to $7.80 each.
California later bought the same CareStart test for about 45% less, a difference the Times Union calculated would have saved New York taxpayers about $286 million.
Who owned Digital Gadgets? Charlie Tebele, whose family had donated nearly $300,000 to Hochul’s campaign.
About a month before the massive deal, Tebele hosted a fundraiser for Hochul.
The purchases were made without competitive bidding.
And the money kept flowing politically.
Tebele and his wife later gave another $235,000 to the New York State Democratic Party, bringing reported contributions from the family to Hochul or the state party to about $532,000.
Then consider this: roughly $395 million of Digital Gadgets payments were made after the Omicron hospitalization spike had already subsided, according to reporting based on state records.
Hochul says she did not know the company was associated with her donors, did not personally approve the deal, and that campaign contributions had nothing to do with state purchasing decisions. Digital Gadgets has also denied wrongdoing.
But New Yorkers are entitled to ask some very simple questions:
Why did New York pay hundreds of millions of dollars more than comparable prices elsewhere?
Why was there no competitive bidding?
Why did a family giving hundreds of thousands of dollars politically end up with one of the biggest COVID-test deals in the state?
And how many of those taxpayer-funded tests were ultimately never used?
Those questions deserve records, inventories and answers, not slogans.
