Rosselló says he won’t react to unnamed sources

Governor Ricardo Rosselló said today that he will not give credibility to the information that President Donald Trump does not want to allocate more recovery funds for Puerto Rico until the President himself validates it with some public expression.

In an Axios report on Sunday, further corroborated today by CNN, sources indicated that President Trump has said he does not want to allocate more aid funds for Puerto Rico and that he even intends to recover funds that have already been allocated through some sort of ‘clawback’ procedure.

‘First, if I start to react to whatever source there is, I would not have time to attend to the main issues. Second, if the President has changed his position on Puerto Rico he can, as he has done in millions of previous occasions, take out his phone, open his Twitter application and upload what he thinks of Puerto Rico’, Rosselló said Monday at a press conference originally called to unveil the progress of an entertainment complex ibeing built n San Juan called District Live.

‘Until and as long as the President does not validate these expressions, I do not want to comment on his intention,’ he said.

According to Axios, Trump has been ‘pissed off’ by Puerto Rico since he came into office, but it would have had its most recent boiling point becauseof his interpretation that a recent Wall Street Journal piece on the market’s response to new economic forecasts for the United States territory meantthat local politicians were using recovery funds to pay off older, unrelated obligations. The WSJ piece mentioned that the new Fiscal Plan certified by the Fiscal Oversight Management Board anticipates a higher level of economic growth in the next few years because of an injection of federal recovery funds.

Trump, according to five sources who spoke to Axiuos, interpreted that the Government of Puerto Rico would use federal recovery funds to pay debt to the bondholders and broke out in anger. This would have led him to inform the congressional leadership that he does not want to approve more federal aid to the Island, acording also to a CNN source.

In his reaction, the Governor warned that ‘if someone or something is going to try to stop the resources of the people of Puerto Rico, they will receivemy fierce opposition on all fronts and with all the mechanisms that I have.’

The Governor also said that it is no secret that he has had disappointments with the allocation of aid funds for the Island, but that his relationship withthe Trump Administration is still positive.

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