in-town pool report #8a - POTUS quotes (1/2)

Below is the first of two reports with a partial transcript of President Trump's remarks and question-and-answer session in the Oval Office.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE CONFLICT AND TALKS: President Trump said he had had “Nnumerous conversations with President Putin of Russia, and I think we're closer now than we have been ever and we'll see what we can do. We want to save a lot of lives. We sell equipment to NATO. We don't spend any money, but we do want to see if we can save a lot of lives. When you're losing 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers, mostly soldiers, other people too, from towns like, places like Kiev, various other places throughout Ukraine is pretty bad. Nobody's seen anything like it, actually, since World War Two.

“But we're getting closer. We're having tremendous support from European leaders. They want to get it ended also. And at this moment, Russia wants to get it and the problem is they'll want to get it ended, and then all of a sudden they won't, and Ukraine will want to get it ended, and all of a sudden they won't. So we have to get them on the same page. But I think that's working on very good talk.” (Please check those last few words against transcript and video; Ottr audio is garbled.)

‘NOBODY TALKS ABOUT THE BORDER’: “They don't mention the border anymore. Nobody talks about the border. They talk about affordability, and we're the ones that are bringing the prices down. We were given the worst inflation in our country's history, and we're bringing the prices down, but the affordability is on the Democrats, because they have made it unaffordable to be in this country. But we're bringing those prices down, and they're coming down quickly. Energy is coming way down, and if you look, gasoline prices are hitting in many locations, $1.99 a gallon. Nobody thought they'd see that there were four or five and $6 a gallon under Biden.”

COLORADO GOV. POLIS AND TINA PETERS: “In May, we executed the largest fentanyl bus in the history of the US, seizing 3 million fentanyl pills all at one time. Think of that. 3 million pills amounted to billions of dollars worth of drugs, and last month, received another 1.7 million fentanyl pills in the state of Colorado, the poorly run state of Colorado, with a governor who's incompetent, and frankly, with a governor that won't allow our wonderful Tina to come out of a jail, in a high intensity jail, because she caught people cheating on an election, and they said she was cheating. She wasn't cheating. She went over, she looked at one of the election scams going on, and because she did that, they put her in jail for nine years. The governor of Colorado is a weak and a pathetic man who was run by Trend Aragua, the criminals from Venezuela took over sections of Colorado, and he was afraid to do anything, but he puts Tina in jail for nine years because she caught people cheating, and when she

walked over and got involved in it, they said she was cheating. She wasn't cheating. She caught people cheating on the election [in] 2020, along with a lot of other people that cheated on that election. You'll see that coming out more and more.”

FENTANYL AND WMD ORDER: “But here's no doubt that America's adversaries are trafficking fentanyl into the United States, in part because they want to kill Americans. This [was] a war that would be one of the worst wars, I believe they killed over the last five or six years, per year, 200 to 300,000 people. You hear about 100,000 which is a lot of people, but the numbers much higher. That's been proven, and they've destroyed a lot of families, because when they lose a child, or even if their child is heavily addicted, you lose that family, the family will never be the same. That's why today, I'm taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country with this historic executive order I will sign today. We're formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, which is what it is. No bomb does what this is doing. 200 to 300,000 people die every year that we know. So we're formally classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass

destruction.”

BBC LAWSUIT: “In a little while, you'll be seeing I'm suing the BBC for putting words in my mouth, literally, to put words in my mouth. They had me saying things that I never said coming out. I guess they used AI or something. So we'll be bringing that lawsuit. A lot of people were asking, ‘What are you bringing that lawsuit?’ Even the media can't believe that one … They actually put terrible words in my mouth having to do with January 6 that I didn't say, and the beautiful words that I said, right? The beautiful words talking about patriotism and all of the good things that I said, they didn't say that, but they put terrible words. They actually have me speaking with words that I never said, and they got caught because I believe somebody at BBC said this is so bad it has to be reported. It's called fake news. So we'll be filing that suit, probably this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”

BROWN UNIVERSITY SHOOTING: “We don't,” Trump said when asked if the administration has determined a motive.

“We're going to see what happens. Hopefully they're going to capture this animal.”

DEFENDED FBI’S ROLE IN BROWN INVESTIGATION: “Well, it's

always difficult. So far, we've done a very good job of doing it [INAUDIBLE]. With the various times this has happened, they've done it in pretty much record time. But you really have to ask the school a little bit more about that, because this was a school problem. They had their own guards, they had their own police, they had their own everything. But you'd have to ask that question, really, to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.”

ON POSSIBLY RECLASSIFYING MARIJUANA: “Because a lot of people want to see it, the reclassification, because it leads to tremendous amounts of research. It can't be done unless you reclassify. So we are looking at that very strongly.”

More quotes TK. Please check all quotes, as always, against final transcripts and video.

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John T. Bennett

White House Correspondent & Editor-at-Large

Roll Call & CQ | FiscalNote publications

| RollCall.com | FiscalNote.com

@bennettjohnt