President Donald Trump and the White House immediately moved to make sure the Strategic National Stockpile website was scrubbed and updated to reflect his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s lies during his widely panned coronavirus press conference/campaign rally on Thursday.

During the briefing, Trump let Kushner speak to reporters. And he proceeded to lecture about the national stockpile of medical supplies that states are desperately trying to access right now to fight the pandemic amid their own supplies running low.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Here’s the video via Twitter:

But that’s exactly what the stockpile is for according to the mission statement on the website.

“Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out,” the statement said. “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency. Organized for scalable response to a variety of public health threats, this repository contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.”

This pandemic is precisely the kind of emergency that warrants state and local responders requesting supplies from the stockpile.

Kushner, however, insists that the stockpile is either the federal government’s or his family’s. After all, he didn’t exactly define “our” in his statement.

And it didn’t take long for Trump to cover for Kushner’s lie by changing the mission statement of the website, which now reads:

“The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.”

Now it looks like Trump is going to use Kushner’s lie and the new mission statement to excuse rejecting state requests for assistance at a time when they need it most. People are going to die because of this and every body that drops is Trump’s fault.

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