The U.S. Constitution "is the supreme law of the land" and the bottom line "is we cannot bow to orders, especially when they come out of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, or the World Economic Forum, which is where" pandemic orders were coming from, Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne told Newsmax Friday.
Howard-Browne was arrested for violating the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 by Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister, President-elect Donald Trump's first pick to head the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Chronister on Tuesday announced he was withdrawing from consideration for the position after his nomination angered Republicans. It was "the honor of a lifetime," he said, but "as the gravity of this very important responsibility set in, I've concluded that I must respectfully withdraw from consideration."
Howard-Browne, the pastor of the River Church in Tampa, Florida, said when Hillsborough County announced it was going to lock down, "I actually called our sheriff, who actually was a friend of mine, and I said, 'Listen, I'm not locking down.' I said, 'As long as there's Walmarts open, doctors — there's hospitals, doctors have to see patients.' I said, 'I'm a pastor. I'm going to be open.'
"And I said, 'If they're going to start arrests, they're going to have to arrest me.' Besides that, I bought machines that kill all the viruses because I actually knew about the pandemic in 2005, right after Katrina, which happened August of 2005."
Howard-Browne said members from the Department of Defense visited him that year and told him, "You have a large church; you need to know what's about to happen in America."
He continued, "They gave me a flu pandemic preparedness kit, and inside was two N95 respirators, four surgical masks, and hand sanitizer, which happened to be Purell, and all the directions in it — 15 days to slow the spread, 6-foot separation, everything. And on the mask, it was made ... in China.
"And these guys were from MacDill Air Force Base. And they said, 'Pastor, George Bush is going to shut down whole cities in America.' I said, 'For what? There's no American going to buy that.' He said, 'For the bird flu.'
"And I laughed, but they gave me five of these pandemic kits. Well, I never opened them, so I knew about the lockdowns," Howard-Browne continued.
"So when I spoke to the sheriff, he said, 'Well, come down to the department.' And they swore me in and made me an honorary deputy. And two weeks later, I got arrested."
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