Trump campaign officials are raking in cash for themselves like a ‘criminal enterprise’: GOP consultant
On Tuesday, writing for the Huffington Post, S. V. Date painted a damning picture of how
a vast array of Republican consultants are making enormous amounts of money off
of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
“Brad Parscale, whom Trump named to run his 2020 effort in
early 2018, has already collected $38.9 million through his companies from
Trump’s various reelection committees between January 2017 and the end of
March, according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission
filings,” reported Date. “Gerrit Lansing’s payment processing company, which he
started while a staffer at the Republican National Committee, has taken in $1.7
million. Katie Walsh, briefly a Trump White House aide and a former RNC chief
of staff, has received $877,424 through her firms. And Richard Walters, who at
age 30 is the current chief of staff, makes $244,943 a year in salary but last
year was paid an additional $135,000 through his own consulting firm. Since the
Trump presidency began, he has been paid a total of $755,324.” … MORE
Although President Donald Trump and some Republican
governors have been pushing for the U.S. economy to reopen sooner rather than
later, the death toll from coronavirus continues to grow in the United States —
where researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have reported more
than 71,000 coronavirus-related deaths. And according to leaked audio obtained by Politico, some federal officials are
worried that reopening non-essential businesses prematurely could have deadly
results.
The audio was recorded on May 1 during a conference call
that included officials from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Daniel Jernigan, director of the CDC’s influenza division,
didn’t mince words and warned, “The numbers of deaths definitely will be high.”
Another official,
who Politico did not identify, made equally dire predictions and asserted, “If,
at the end of stay-at-home orders, you were to lift everything and go back to
normal business and not have any community mitigation, you would expect to see,
in the second week in May, we begin to increase again in ventilator uses —
which means cases increase, and by early June, we surpass the number of
ventilators we currently have.”
