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“We should be taking every precaution. What the President, his denial at the beginning was deadly,” Pelosi said in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
As US cases surge, Pelosi questioned when Trump was informed about the coronavirus and his knowledge on its potential impact. “I don’t know what the scientists said to him, when did this President know about this, and what did he know? What did he know and when did he know it? That’s for an after-action review. But as the President fiddles, people are dying. And we just have to take every precaution.”
Asked by Tapper if she believes Trump’s downplaying of the crisis has cost American lives, Pelosi responded, “Yes, I am. I’m saying that.”
“Because when he made the other day when he was signing the bill, he said just think 20 days ago everything was great. No, everything wasn’t great,” she said. “We had nearly 500 cases and 17 deaths already. And in that 20 days because we weren’t prepared, we now have 2,000 deaths and 100,000 cases.”
“I’m actually for it, in an appropriate place. But I don’t recommend it unless we have the tools in place in real time to do the things I just said,” he told Tapper. “If we can do that, we can keep things contained without slipping into the need of having to mitigate the way they are in New York, in New Orleans, and other places now. So it’s doable. But it’s only doable if you put the tools in place.”
Asked about Cuomo’s comment, Pelosi said, “We have to do more.” She called the bill “a down payment.”
“I’ve talked to the chairman of the Fed, the Federal Reserve Bank, Mr. Powell, Chairman (Jerome) Powell, and asked him to do much more because they have the authority to do so, even more authority, since we passed this bill,” she told Tapper. “But we have to pass another bill that goes to meeting the need more substantially than we have.”
This story has been updated with additional comments from Nancy Pelosi on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
CNN’s Kevin Bohn contributed to this report.
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