Joint Base Andrews pressers are not as good as Chopper pressers, but they’re close. President Trump impromptu remarks departing Andews AFB. [Video and Transcript]

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[Transcript] – THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. I’m going to Arizona. We’re going to see Honeywell. They’ve done a fantastic job on many different fronts on the pandemic, and we’re going to pay our respects and also see the great people of Arizona.

Okay. Go ahead.

Q Mr. President, with these new projections, a lot of people do want the country to reopen quickly. Are you willing to accept these new projections that show that many more people will die and — with interaction?

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President Trump delivers remarks to the media as he prepares to depart the White House for a trip to Arizona. [Video and Transcript Below]

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[Transcript] – THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. So, I’m leaving for Arizona. We’re going to be at the Honeywell plant, which is doing great work for us. And it’ll be, I think, a great day. I love Arizona.

Go ahead, please.

Q What happened in Venezuela, sir? Apparently a couple of Americans were detained.

THE PRESIDENT: I just got information. Nothing to do with our government, but I just got information on that.

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An interesting dynamic unfolds tomorrow as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) will be holding the confirmation hearing for President Trump’s nominee, John Ratcliffe.  As a result of earlier political moves the SSCI is between a rock and a hard place.

The SSCI is the drain-plug in the swamp. They use their corrupt oversight power and confirmation authority to control the intelligence apparatus (swamp guards) and ensure that no executive branch officer can disrupt or disclose their corrupt Senate schemes.

President Trump nominated Representative John Ratcliffe, an intelligence community reformer, for the position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI).  The SSCI previously rejected Ratcliffe because his existence is adverse to their interests.  However, in response Trump installed honey badger Richard “Ric” Grenell as the acting DNI.

The SSCI hates Grennel with the ferocity of a thousand supernovas because Grenell doesn’t give a f**k about their swamp life. Better yet, Grenell smacks them around publicly on Twitter whenever the SSCI dispatch the orcs from the deep swamp intelligence apparatus.  Every time orcs poke their heads out of the DC labyrinth, Grenell smacks them with a billion mega-watt sunlight hammer. They shriek and retreat to the dungeon.

The good news for the SSCI is that Grenell can only stay in the ‘acting’ role until September of this year.  However, the bad news is if the SSCI rejects John Ratcliffe then Ric Grenell gets another year to antagonize the corrupt senators, swing the sunlight hammer & expose the darkest secrets of their beloved swamp.  {{Grumble – Grumble}}

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Senator Tom Cotton appears on Fox News to discuss the latest revelations that COVID-19 came out of a laboratory in Wuhan, China.  Martha MacCallum attempts to push the Beijing propaganda of wounded panda as a victim; Senator Cotton outlines the importance of accepting that China is a communist totalitarian state.

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Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, Jim Jordan, sends a scathing letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray questioning why the evidence of gross political corruption within his institution has to come from judicial documents in the Flynn case rather than honest production of material from the FBI.

Within the letter Mr. Jordan implicates Director Wray in an institutional effort to hide prior abuses in order to keep the American public blind to the corruption within it.  Given recent comments by President Trump about Director Wray, Jordan appears to be in-line with POTUS:

[…] “We write to request that you immediately review the actions of the FBI in targeting LTG Flynn. The American people continue to learn troubling details about the politicization and misconduct at the highest levels of the FBI during the Obama-Biden Administration.

Even more concerning, we continue to learn these new details from litigation and investigations—not from you. It is well past time that you show the leadership necessary to bring the FBI past the abuses of the Obama-Biden era.”

“Please facilitate making former FBI Assistant Director of the Counterintelligence Division Bill Priestap and FBI Agent Joe Pientka available for transcribed interviews about their actions related to LTG Flynn.”

Here’s the full six page letter:

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White House Manufacturing Policy Advisor and lead on execution of the Defense Production Act, Peter Navarro, appears on Fox News to discuss the ongoing initiatives to secure, produce and/or manufacture critical healthcare products in the U.S.

There are multiple reports in media today about the White House assembling a variety of new policies and regulations to go full wolverine on ‘America-First’.  USTR Lighthizer, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross are leading the effort.

Additionally, Navarro notes FEMA, HHS and DoD will soon have rules requiring USA manufactured purchases for their government contracts.

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Wall Street’s U.S. multinationals moved the majority of U.S. apparel manufacturing to southeast Asia for the past several decades; as a result they virtually wiped out major apparel hubs in the United States.  Now those same multinationals are claiming their production shift to making masks and PPE in China means the tariffs on imports should be lifted; and they are sending their corporate lobbyists into DC to pitch that message.

Nonsense.

There are no tariffs on U.S. healthcare products made in the USA.  If the apparel industry wants to avoid tariffs, then bring the manufacturing back home.  Critical manufacturing in the United States is what U.S. consumers of those and other goods want.

President Trump should not lower tariffs on imported PPE, he should actually raise those tariffs as high as needed to shift that manufacturing back to the U.S.

The time is now to wage battle against the Wall Street manufacturers & K-St lobbyists.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Trump administration is “turbocharging” an initiative to remove global industrial supply chains from China as it weighs new tariffs to punish Beijing for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, according to officials familiar with U.S. planning.

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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin appears for a wide-ranging interview with Maria Bartiromo. Topics include international travel, the Paycheck Protection Program progress, small business relief, and overall rebuilding of the U.S. economy amid COVID-19 mitigation.

The first few minutes of the interview are weird because Bartiromo doesn’t seem to recognize the PPP program is essentially a grant to small business to keep their employees on payroll. Ms. Bartiromo appears to want the PPP grants to be shifted to free money to replace business revenue, and she’s pushing hard for her Wall St buddies.

Secretary Mnuchin tries to remind Bartiromo that businesses can apply for bridge loans, but the PPP is actually a grant. Bartiromo argues that all businesses should have free money bailouts to replace revenues; an impossible suggestion.

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A terrific outline by Stephen McIntyre today [see here] provides a great place for CTH to outline the importance of the Wolfe leak and how far-reaching the consequences became in the reporting of the DC media.

McIntyre revisits how the FBI put together the Carter Page FISA application; and specifically highlights how parts of the application are purposefully built by the FBI using the Steele Dossier to fabricate something that doesn’t exist. The issue pointed out by McIntyre surrounds the designation for Steele’s primary sub-source.

By now everyone is aware the Steele Dossier was essentially just an assembly of loosely connected data points, innuendo, gossip and outright disinformation.  The sketchy dossier was, in essence, a file of tenuous opposition research that was assembled under a fraudulent premise of a valid intelligence gathering process.

The Steele dossier underpinned the FISA application.  The dossier, and the fabricated story within it, was used to get the FISA application.  As a result of the way the FBI officials specifically used the dossier to shape the FISA application evidence, the application itself is filled with misinformation.

Because the dossier lies, which transferred to the FISA application, have collapsed under scrutiny, the FBI defenders shifted to calling the underlying fraudulent information “Russian disinformation.”  This, they hope, will be their tenuously collapsing escape narrative; which needs to hold-up long enough to get rid of President Trump.

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis discusses his plans to reopen the economy on a county-by-county basis starting tomorrow, May 4th. Broward and Dade counties will remain in their current status, but restrictions will be removed for other counties based on the status of their current healthcare system.

Florida has a high population of elderly residents and Governor DeSantis walks through the testing protocols he will use as part of the ongoing reopening process.

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