Trump Administration

The Daily Beast reports: Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, told the nation’s governors in a call today that it was vital that they ramp up testing to find asymptomatic individuals to prevent further community spread. Her remarks stood in stark contrast to those by the president at his rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma over …

CNN reports: Covid-19 has “brought this nation to its knees,” Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday in a House hearing. “We’ve all done the best that we can do to tackle this virus,” Redfield said during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing. Redfield said the virus has highlighted decades of …

“In the many cases I have been privileged to work on in my career, I have never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making. With one exception: United States v. Roger Stone. “What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct sentencing guidelines calculation …

USA Today reports: Dr. Anthony Fauci told House lawmakers on Tuesday that despite President Donald Trump’s claim that he had asked officials to “slow the testing down,” he had never been given such a directive. “To my knowledge, none of us have ever been told to slow down on testing. That just is a fact,” he said. “In fact, we …

Reuters reports: Top Trump health officials on Tuesday will testify before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Officials expected to speak include National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn and the administration’s testing czar, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir …

The Associated Press reports: Vice President Mike Pence and a half-dozen other senior advisers to President Donald Trump have repeatedly voted by mail, according to election records obtained by The Associated Press. That undercuts the president’s argument that the practice will lead to widespread fraud this November. More than three years after leaving the Indiana governor’s residence, Pence still lists …

Politico reports: White House officials are putting a target on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, positioning the agency as a coronavirus scapegoat as cases surge in many states and the U.S. falls behind other nations that are taming the pandemic. Trump administration aides in recent weeks have seriously discussed launching an in-depth evaluation of the agency to chart …

Politico reports: The State Department’s top spokeswoman on Monday muted the line of a reporter asking about John Bolton’s book during a briefing extolling press freedom. The Department convened a telephone briefing ahead of its designation of four additional Chinese news outlets as foreign missions. But when David Brunnstrom, a journalist from Reuters, asked whether U.S. allies had reached out …

Politico reports: A coalition of advocacy groups sued the Trump administration on Monday over its rollback of LGBTQ patient protections, arguing that last week’s Supreme Court decision extending workplace legal protections to gay and transgender employees invalidates the new rules. Big picture: The suit marks the first challenge stemming from the 6-3 high court decision that anti-discrimination protections based on …

CBS News reports: CBS News White House correspondent Weijia Jiang confronted White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany about Trump’s usage of the term “kung flu” to describe Covid-19. Jiang reiterated that it’s “extremely offense” to Asian Americans, but McEnany deflected and blamed media outlets for calling coronavirus the “Chinese virus” in January and February. On March 17, Jiang revealed that …

CNBC reports: White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow told CNBC on Monday that a “second wave” of coronavirus cases isn’t coming and that lawmakers will likely develop another stimulus package by the end of next month. Asked by “Squawk Box” co-host Becky Quick how he’s thinking about resurgences of Covid-19 cases in several states, Kudlow said he isn’t too concerned. …

Has any hypocritical Trumper NOT voted by mail? Current and former election administrators said it would be virtually impossible for a foreign country to produce and mail in phony absentee ballots without detection, an issue Attorney General William P. Barr raised as a serious possibility in an interview published Monday. Barr told the New York Times Magazine that a foreign …

“This was a wonderful attendance and we’re so proud of the great American patriots who showed up in the thousands to support the president at his first rally in over three months. And listen, the fact is there were so many obstacles to overcome to even get into the BOK Center. “So we had over six thousand people plus thousands …

The Guardian reports: John Bolton, the former national security advisor, has said he will not vote for Donald Trump at the November election and hopes history will remember him as a “one-term president who didn’t plunge the country irretrievably into a downward spiral.” In an interview with ABC News to promote his book, The Room Where It Happened, Bolton, who …

The New York Times reports: President Trump and several staff members stood backstage and gazed at the empty Bank of Oklahoma Center in horror. The president, who had been warned aboard Air Force One that the crowds at the arena were smaller than expected, was stunned, and he yelled at aides backstage while looking at the endless rows of empty …

Just posted to the Trump 2020 campaign site: Leftists and online trolls doing a victory lap, thinking they somehow impacted rally attendance, don’t know what they’re talking about or how our rallies work. Reporters who wrote gleefully about TikTok and K-Pop fans – without contacting the campaign for comment – behaved unprofessionally and were willing dupes to the charade. Registering …

CBS News reports: Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf today stressed that the Trump administration believes DACA is unlawful and that DHS has the ability to unwind the program. “What they didn’t like was the rationale and the way in which we proposed to do that,” he said of the Supreme Court. Wolf accused the Obama administration of creating …

Axios reports: House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Attorney General Bill Barr “deserves impeachment” for his alleged politicization of the Justice Department, but described the endeavor as “a waste of time” because Senate Republicans are “corrupt” and will not vote to convict. Driving the news: Nadler has launched an investigation into the …

The Associated Press reports: U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, confirmed Saturday he is leaving his position immediately, according to reporter Jacqui Heinrich. Berman, the powerful U.S. attorney in Manhattan who has been overseeing investigations of Trump’s allies, showed up at his office to work Saturday, but he has decided to quit. The Department of Justice …

The New York Times reports: Attorney William P. Barr said on Saturday that President Trump had fired the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who has investigated the president’s closest associates, deepening a crisis over the independence of law enforcement and the president’s purge of officials he views as disloyal. Mr. Trump removed the prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, United States attorney …