Turns out she's just lying her ass off about Trump's response in Puerto Rico.
EXCLUSIVE: Fellow Puerto Rico Mayor Rips San Juan Mayor — ‘She’s Not Participating In Any Meetings’
EXCLUSIVE: Fellow Puerto Rico Mayor Rips San Juan Mayor — ‘She’s Not Participating In Any Meetings’
The mayor of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico cast serious doubt Saturday on the claims made by San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has repeatedly attacked President Trump and accused him of abandoning Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
Guaynabo’s mayor, Angel Perez, said in an interview with The Daily Caller that his experience with the federal government has been different from Cruz’s, in part because — unlike Cruz — he has been participating in meetings with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other federal agencies.
Cruz, a Democrat, has repeatedly accused Trump and the federal government of abandoning Puerto Rico. She demanded in a press conference on Friday that Trump do more to help the island, adding that “we are going to see is something close to a genocide” if more is not done.
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Mayor Perez told TheDC that the story Cruz is telling the media doesn’t mesh with what he has seen from the federal government.
“My experience is different. I have been participating in different meetings at the headquarters of FEMA and our government and the help is coming in and right now my experience is different from hers. I’m receiving help from the government, we are receiving assistance from FEMA, I got people over here helping us with applications for the people that have damage in their houses. And we have here in Guaynabo, we have thousands of people that lost partially or totally their houses,” said Perez, who is a member of Puerto Rico’s New Progressive Party.
Perez’s comments echoed what FEMA administrator Brock Long said on Saturday. Long defended Trump’s tweets blasting Cruz and indicated that Cruz
has failed to connect with the FEMA command center set up on the island to help with the relief effort.
When asked about Cruz’s “genocide” statement, Perez said, “I don’t know why she is saying that. What I can tell you is my experience. She is not participating in any meetings and we had a couple already with the governors and with representation of FEMA and of HUD, of these whole federal agencies that have given us help and she’s not participating in those meetings and some mayors from her political party have been participating, so I don’t know why she is saying that. My experience is very different.”
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“Some [mayors] would like the help to be faster but we also know that FEMA is dealing with what happened in Houston and in Florida and now in Puerto Rico,” Perez said.
One thing that the mayors are counting on the federal government for is “blue tarps” to patch over damaged and missing roofs, Perez said. He noted that “thousands of people have lost completely their houses but some of them have lost partially their houses so if we have the blue tarps maybe we could help them not to lose everything in their houses.”
“So what FEMA has told us is that [the tarps] are on the way and as soon as they get to Puerto Rico they will get them to us,” Perez said. “Most of [the mayors], that’s what they are asking.”
“Sure, we need gasoline, diesel for our generators and our machines and everything but that’s internal problems with the person that sells the diesel and the gasoline and the everything because they haven’t had the people to drive the trucks,” he added. “It’s been hard to get that over here and I know that the government is helping, so we are expecting maybe by next week that that will be in the past and that we won’t have any problems with that.”
In his interview with TheDC, Perez stressed that Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis has left the island largely unable to solve its own problems.