Tag: kellyanne conway

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Coronavirus/COVID-19 

• The U.S. reported 38,234 new cases and 572 additional deaths.

• President Trump would be willing to sign a bill that included Postal Service funding and reform – but only if Democrats agreed to include other economic relief measures along with it, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said Sunday.

• The FDA authorized the use of blood plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID-19 as a treatment for the disease.

• The president began his announcement of the FDA issuance of emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma as potential treatment for COVID-19 with a xenophobic comment. 

• FDA commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn said that his organization makes decisions “on data only,” denying he was pressured by the White House to issue an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma.

• A federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from enforcing a controversial rule that directs states to give private schools a bigger share of federal coronavirus aid than Congress had intended.

• East Carolina University Interim Chancellor Ron Mitchelson announced in a letter that they are moving to online classes, just two weeks after welcoming students back on campus.

• The University of Kentucky began a second phase of Covid-19 testing Sunday, testing 5,500 students who belong to fraternities and sororities. 

University President Eli Capilouto wrote. “We believe a number of factors associated with communal living spaces likely contributed to the high positivity rates in these residences.”

• University of Alabama President Stuart R. Bell asked students, faculty and staff to work together to follow safety protocols so the university can finish the fall semester with in-person classes. Bell said there will be consequences, including suspension, for not following the rules on and off campus.

• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said  that officials are staging helicopters, C-130 transport aircraft, high-profile vehicles, sheltering teams, disinfecting teams and mobile testing squads to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19 during Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura.

• California surpassed 12,000 Covid-19-related fatalities as the state reported 146 new deaths Sunday, bringing the state’s total number of 12,134.

Trump Administration

• White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on Sunday dodged questions about President Donald Trump’s embrace of QAnon days after the president said followers of the conspiracy theory “love our country.”

“We don’t even know what it is,” Meadows told “Fox News Sunday” after host Chris Wallace asked whether the president would denounce QAnon, which the FBI has labeled a potential domestic terror threat.

• The impetus behind the president’s “FDA/Deep state” tweet seems to come from the president’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who accused the FDA of being part of the “Deep State” during a meeting that was supposed to be about COVID-19 and the Strategic National Stockpile.

According to two sources in the meeting, Navarro had aggressively confronted FDA officials, saying, “You are all Deep State and you need to get on Trump Time.” (That’s the expression Navarro uses to describe the speed that he says Trump demands.)

Sources familiar with the situation said Navarro has been venting at the FDA for weeks at what he perceives as its slowness to approve therapeutics to fight COVID-19 and help the U.S. “bring our medical supply chain home.”

A third senior administration official said Navarro — a fervent proponent of hydroxychloroquine — remained angry at the FDA for saying the drug didn’t work against COVID-19.

• White House counselor Kellyanne Conway will depart her position in the Trump administration at the end of the month to focus on family matters, she said in a statement late Sunday.

“This is completely my choice and my voice,” Conway said. “In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”

Conway’s husband, George, separately wrote on Twitter that he would be leaving his role with the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, for similar reasons.

Protests/Racial and Social Issues

• Santa Clara University in California is conducting an investigation after a Black assistant professor at the school said she and her brother were harassed by campus security in a recent encounter.

• Demonstrators in Detroit were back on the street in Detroit on Sunday to talk about the arrests by police of 42 people during a protest the night before over the presence of federal agents in the city.

“We were standing in the middle of the street and they arrested us,” Tristan Taylor, of Detroit Will Breathe, told a crowd of about 50 people. “The issue isn’t that they arrested us. The issue is the brutality. When you do something to get arrested you expect arrest, but not brutally beaten. We weren’t doing anything to get brutally beaten.”

Sgt. Nicole Kirkwood, a police spokeswoman, said protesters blocked all lanes of traffic early Sunday by standing in an intersection. “Dozen of warnings were given to them before any arrests were made,” Kirkwood said. “They were advised they were blocking traffic by blocking all four lanes of Woodward and John R and that they were assembling unlawfully.”

“DPD is not going to “tolerate people blocking the public streets,” she said.

Presidential Campaign

• A federal judge in Pennsylvania halted the Trump campaign’s lawsuit against the state over how it sends and counts mail-in ballots.

Nicholas Ranjan of the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Pennsylvania, who was appointed by President Trump, ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the secretary of state and 67 county election boards should be put on hold while state court cases about voting move forward.

• Joe Biden told ABC “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir that everybody should pay “their fair share.”

“I will raise taxes for anybody making over $400,000,” Biden told Muir, adding, “no new taxes” would be raised for anyone making under $400,000.

• Trump tweeted that ballot drop-off boxes “are not Covid sanitized. A big fraud!”

After Trump sent the tweet, Twitter took action, saying, “We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our Civic Integrity Policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting.” 

• Fifty-seven percent of Republicans believe the over 176,000 deaths from the coronavirus is “acceptable,” and hold positive views of the US response to the pandemic.

Sources:  ABC News, Associated Press, The Atlantic, Axios, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Fox News,The Hill, Independent, MSNBC, NBC News, NJ.com, NPR, NY Times, Politico, Reuters, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post