NEW - Eliot Engel represents the district the early coronavirus hot spot of New Rochelle, and that is still reeling.

He hasn’t been there in months.

Last weekend, I rang his doorbell in a DC suburb.

“I’m in both places,” he told me when he answered. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/05/eliot-engel-new-york-coronavirus/611611/">https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...

Engel’s staff had advertised him being part of an event in his district the day before, I mentioned.

Which event?” he asked.

“They were handing out face masks in the district,” I said.

“I was part of that,” he said.

“But you weren’t there?”

“I was not there, no,” he said.

“We have done food giveaways, sanitizer giveaways, mask giveaways. We have been trying to deal with the needs of our community quite a bit. It’s been good, as far as trying to help our constituents,” a local assemblyman told me. “I can’t say I’ve seen the congressman.”

Engel’s spokesman confirmed he hasn’t been back to his district since at least March 27, but argued that is because he has been in DC doing work as a committee chair in the pandemic.

NY has a lot of cmte chairs among its House members. The rest have all been in their districts.

Here’s the tweet from Engel’s campaign that he’d be joining a face mask giveaway in his district. Engel was in Potomac, Maryland on the day it happened. His spokesman now says he was never scheduled to be there:

Here’s a tweet from a local state senator saying Engel was at a food handout last week in the district. Both the senator and Engel’s office have since told me he wasn’t there: