The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Top News Executive Summary

• TEAM TRUMP FIGHTS BACK: “The White House plans to fight a subpoena issued by the House Judiciary Committee for former White House counsel Donald McGahn to testify… The Trump administration also plans to oppose other requests from House committees for the testimony of current and former aides about actions in the White House described in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report… White House lawyers plan to tell attorneys for administration witnesses called by the House that they will be asserting executive privilege over their testimony.” (The Washington Post)

• TAX-RETURN DEADLINE COMES AND GOES: “The Treasury Department on Tuesday missed a second deadline from House Democrats to provide President Trump’s tax returns. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a letter that the department can’t act on the request ‘unless and until it is determined to be consistent with law.’ He said that he expects Treasury to provide the House Ways and Means Committee with a final decision by May 6 after receiving legal conclusions from the Department of Justice.” (The Hill)

• SCOTUS AMIABLE TOWARD CITIZENSHIP QUESTION: “The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday appeared poised to hand President Donald Trump a victory on his administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. … Conservative justices signaled during arguments in the closely watched case a willingness to overturn a lower court ruling that blocked the question and appeared untroubled by the administration’s stated justification for using the citizenship question in the decennial population count.” (Reuters)

• ABOUT THAT NEW POLICY ON HOMOSEXUAL LEADERS… “More than 200 individuals have come forward with new allegations of sexual abuse by members of the Boy Scouts of America in recent weeks as a trio of law firms seek to uncover unidentified child abusers. A few of the victims are young, still underage or in their 20s, but many have held their secrets close for decades,” reports USA Today. “Only a handful of the new allegations are related to previously identified perpetrators. About 90% … are new. … The Scouting organization faces 200 lawsuits that its insurance companies threatened to stop covering.” All told, there may be more than 12,000 victims.

• STOCK MARKET REGAINS COMPOSURE: “The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite rallied on Tuesday to notch record closing highs as Wall Street cheered stronger-than-expected quarterly profits from some of the largest publicly traded U.S. companies. … Tuesday’s move toward an all-time closing high comes less than six months after a sharp decline in late December, which led the S&P 500 to its worst annual performance since 2008. But stocks quickly turned around as the Federal Reserve reversed course on monetary policy while the tone around U.S.-China trade talks improved.” (CNBC)

• THE CLOWN CIRCUS GROWS: “Former Vice President Joe Biden will announce his presidential bid Thursday morning with an online video… Biden will then appear in Pittsburgh on Monday for an event at a local union hall, NBC News has learned. Biden will then embark on a tour of the four early voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — in the following weeks.” (NBC News)

• BURGEONING MIGRATION NUMBERS: According to the Texas Tribune, “Less than seven months into the fiscal year, the number of undocumented immigrants who have been apprehended or turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley has already surpassed last year’s total.” The 164,000 illegals arrested just since October is higher than the 2018 aggregate of 162,262. “The increase is the result of an ongoing surge of migrants, most of them from Central America.” Meanwhile, the Washington Examiner reports, “The Mexican government says it has deported 15,000 migrants who illegally entered Mexico from Guatemala and had been traveling as part of caravans in hopes of reaching the United States’ southern border,” though “thousands more people continue to traverse the country intent on reaching the U.S.”

• VILLAGE ACADEMIC CURRICULUM: “Beginning in 2020, many Advanced Placement students will be using an American History textbook that suggests President Trump is mentally ill and that depicts him and many of his supporters as racists. The book asserts that ‘[Trump’s] not very-hidden racism connected with a significant number of primary voters.’ What connected with a significant number of primary voters was Trump’s strong opposition to illegal immigration and his concern over terrorists entering the U.S. The textbook effectively characterizes these concerns as ‘not very-hidden racism’ and those who share them as racists. … The textbook goes further. It says that Hillary Clinton supporters ‘worried about the mental stability of the president-elect.’” (Power Line)

• TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME IN THE UK: “President Trump will pay a state visit to the U.K. in early June, according to Buckingham Palace, which says Trump has accepted an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II to visit America’s closest ally. … Even before Buckingham Palace and the White House issued confirmation of the trip, protest groups in the U.K. announced their plans to demonstrate against the American president and his policies. ‘We have to march in huge numbers against his racism, misogyny, transphobia, and the threat he poses to the planet,’ activist and writer Owen Jones wrote, in a tweet that was shared by the U.K.‘s Stop Trump Coalition.” (NPR)

• SRI LANKA UPDATE: “President Maithripala Sirisena demanded the resignations of two top security officials Wednesday as new details emerged about the nine suicide bombers who carried out devastating attacks that killed 359 people on Easter Sunday. Sirisena asked Pujith Jayasundara, the country’s police chief, and Hemasiri Fernando, the defense secretary, to step down amid a growing furor surrounding the government’s failure to act on intelligence warning of possible attacks on churches by an obscure Islamist extremist group.” (The Washington Post)

• HUMOR: Hillary Clinton almost wins “Wheel of Fortune” but then shouts “Easter worshiper” instead of “Christian” (The Babylon Bee)

• POLICY: Trump’s Iran sanctions are a risk worth taking (National Review)

• POLICY: Elizabeth Warren’s college plan is a dance with elves (National Review)

For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit In Our Sights.

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