NOTICIAS

Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined Fox & Friends to discuss his new role as Acting Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Planned Parenthood affiliates improperly receiving Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans, and gradually reopening the State of Florida. See below for highlights and watch the full interview here.

On Planned Parenthood improperly receiving PPP loans:
 
“They just don’t qualify for it. There’s something called affiliation rules … In this particular case, in order to be a Planned Parenthood affiliate, you have to get approval of the parent board, the one that’s located here in Washington, D.C., a parent board that is sitting on — according to their own numbers, in 2018 — close to half a billion dollars in net assets …They just don’t qualify under the affiliate rules. It’s as simple as that. Leave aside all the other issues, they do not qualify. So they need to return the money and if they did this knowingly they need to be held accountable. And whoever helped them do this knowingly needs to be held accountable. That includes, potentially, people on staff at the SBA, the banks, and anybody else.”
 
On likelihood Congress will extend PPP’s 8-week provision:
 
“Some people are saying we can’t fund payroll in 8 weeks, we need 12 weeks or 16 weeks. There’s actually unanimity up here for the most part … we need to provide more time for people to use that money as opposed to having to return it. … The only question now is can we pass it as a clean bill … or are Democrats or someone else going to insist that we add something else to it beyond just that provision … I hope we can do it. Democrats have told me they agree on extending the time frame. Let’s just do that as a clean provision before we leave.”
 
On gradually reopening the State of Florida:
 
“First of all, remember why we did the shutdowns to begin with and that is because we didn’t want the hospitals to be overwhelmed. So part one is the state government under Governor DeSantis and the local governments and our hospitals all took the steps necessary to create new capacity … they did all kinds of things so that the hospitals did not get overwhelmed, and they did not. Number two is that the Governor allowed each county and city to set their own requirements, and that’s important, because every community has different, unique characteristics and different needs … Number three is the people of Florida complied. People stayed home…
 
“These three things led to the result that we were able to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed. Now the question becomes, until we have a vaccine, and we hope that’s sooner rather than later, how do we reopen the economy and get to a new normal while mitigating the risks… But ultimately, we could not be under the conditions we were in indefinitely, and there are people pretending we could be like this forever, we can’t be like this forever. We’ve got to figure out a way to diminish the risk and protect the most vulnerable, but we can’t be in that condition forever.”
 
On the declassification of Susan Rice’s email:
 
“I think the other relevant thing to look at in that email is — it actually makes it abundantly clear that this is actually at that point no longer an Intelligence Community issue, this was an FBI issue, which is why I believe that the hearings in Judiciary is the proper forum to look at how the FBI handled this entire process and figure out if there was any wrongdoing in the way it was approached.”