Wednesday, May 6, 2020



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.”