Former First Lady Melania Trump refused to meet with Republican Rep. Steve Scalise at the White House after he was shot in 2017
at a congressional baseball practice because she’d already visited him
once in the hospital, according to a new book, an early copy of which
was obtained by Insider.
Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who also served
as Melania Trump’s chief of staff, wrote that Scalise and his family
went to the White House for an unscheduled visit shortly after Scalise
had recovered from the shooting.
Grisham wrote that the first
lady’s staff asked her if she wanted to visit the Scalises, who were
gathered in the Blue Room, and that she declined.
“Her response
was, ‘No, I already said hello,’” Grisham wrote. The first lady was
referring to when she and then-President Donald Trump visited Scalise at
the hospital when he was recovering from the shooting. According to
Grisham’s book, Melania Trump’s response became a running joke in the
East Wing.
“Whenever the first lady said no to something, we would say to each other, ‘Well, she already said hello!’” Grisham wrote. …
…
Grisham served as Melania Trump’s chief of staff before going on to
become the third Trump White House press secretary, following Sean
Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She served in the role from July 2019
to April 2020 and drew sharp criticism for not holding a single press
briefing in that time. …
The Canadian government has invoked a decades-old treaty with the United States in its latest bid to save a pipeline that critics warn could be environmentally catastrophic if it were to fail.
For nearly 67 years, Calgary-based Enbridge has moved oil and natural gas from western Canada through Michigan and the Great Lakes to refineries in the province of Ontario.
But
Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, says that one section of the
company’s pipeline – Line 5, which crosses the Great Lakes beneath the
environmentally sensitive Straits of Mackinac – is a “ticking time bomb”
and has ordered it shut down.
Court-ordered
mediation talks between Enbridge and the government of Michigan have
broken down, and as tensions mount, Canada this week invoked a 1977 treaty obliging both countries to allow oil to flow uninterrupted.
By invoking the treaty – which would bring the dispute to binding arbitration – Canada has shown a rare frustration with president Joe Biden’s administration and its refusal to wade into the feud.
“While
Biden may want to duck the issue to please [Whitmer] and keep the
environmentalists in the Democratic caucus on side, the fact is that the
treaty guarantees uninterrupted pipeline transit, except in
exceptionally grave emergencies,” said Lawrence Herman, an international
trade lawyer and senior fellow at the CD Howe Institute. “And even in
those emergency cases, any interruption is only allowed for temporary
periods.” …
I’d call an oil pipeline under the Great Lakes a serious emergency.
