For months and months, our fake news media have been freaking out over a meeting Donald Trump Jr. took with a Russian lawyer in the hopes of getting some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Again and again, we have been told that this is the smoking gun of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Of course, that is nonsense. Moreover, Don Jr. and the others in attendance caught on to the scheme within a few minutes, and as far as we now know, that was the end of that.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others, who actually have colluded with the Russians as a means to dig up dirt on Trump.
Here are seven American politicians and institutions who have or are at least suspected of colluding with the Russians as a means to destroy President Trump.
The CIA
This former CIA Director lied under oath about unmasking.
Although the far-left New York Times is desperately hoping to control the explosion of this bombshell by shrouding it in a laughable story about the CIA trying to retrieve stolen National Security Agency cyber-weapons, the anti-Trump outlet is still forced to report that after “months of secret negotiations, a shadowy Russian bilked American spies out of $100,000 last year, promising to deliver stolen National Security Agency cyberweapons in a deal that he insisted would also include compromising material on President Trump, according to American and European intelligence officials.”
And that $100,000 was only supposed to be the first down payment towards a cool million.
The CIA was hoping for images of Trump urinating on hookers in Moscow hotel rooms. All they got was a 15-second clip of some guy in a hotel room talking to some women.
The payoff happened in September of last year.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Tell me that this pervert and liar should not be investigated.
In early 2017, Democrat Adam Schiff, the ranking member of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (so you would think he would know better), thought he was colluding with Ukrainian officials to get compromising materials against Trump. The Ukrainian officials ended up being Russian pranksters. The best you can say about Schiff is that he colluded with Russians to make a horse’s ass of himself.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
The horse man was working with the Russians to bring Trump down. Look at those damn horse teeth.
In March of last year, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence committee, colluded with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to dig up dirt on Trump.
Naturally, because he has no spine, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) immediately ran to Warner’s defense. “Sen. Warner fully disclosed this to the committee four months ago,” the jellyfish tweeted. There is just one problem… If you look at the timeline, that “full disclosure” came a full seven months after the collusion occurred.
Rubio fired off another non-sequitur in Warner’s defense. “Has had zero impact on our work,” Rubio wrote, as though that means anything when it comes to the fact that Warner colluded with Russians to harm a sitting president and hid that information from the committee for more than a half-year.
Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele
Steele is the former British spy hired by the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put together the phony Russian dossier that even disgraced former-FBI Director James Comey declared “salacious and unverified.”
To compile these lies, Steele reportedly worked directly with Kremlin officials:
How good were these sources? Consider what Steele would write in the memos he filed with Simpson: Source A—to use the careful nomenclature of his dossier—was “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure.” Source B was “a former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” And both of these insiders, after “speaking to a trusted compatriot,” would claim that the Kremlin had spent years getting its hooks into Donald Trump.
In other words, Steele and Fusion GPS colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump. Steele then leaked those lies to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Fusion GPS also “spearheaded the campaign to undo the Magnitsky Act, American legislation imposing sanctions on Russian officials and other figures close to Vladimir Putin. Their work featured a smear campaign against the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, financier William Browder.”
If successful, this Fusion GPS campaign would have been of great benefit to the Russian government and countless oligarchs who want the Magnitsky Act’s sanctions lifted.
The Hillary Clinton Campaign
This woman should me handed after being shot.
Hillary’s 2016 presidential campaign hired Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the Clinton campaign’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The Democrat National Committee (DNC)
Why is Little Debbie and Simpson not been indicted?
The DNC hired the D.C.-based Fusion GPS to put that dossier together. In other words, the DNC’s paid agents colluded with Kremlin officials to manufacture lies about Trump that would then be leaked to a complicit media in the hopes of manipulating the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
The FBI
You can trust the honest sex symbol James Comey right?
Our own FBI not only put Steele on the payroll, a guy who colluded with the Russians to manufacture lies about Trump, the FBI used lies and the dossier — including Kremlin lies — to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump campaign affiliates.
DOJ’s Rosenstein OK’d Surveillance of Ex-Trump Adviser
This corrupt looking child molester.
A controversial and classified memo shows that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein okayed an application shortly after taking office last year to monitor a former Trump campaign associate, according to a report.
The Department of Justice under President Trump extended surveillance on Carter Page, believing that he was acting as a Russian agent, the New York Times reported late Sunday, citing people familiar with the memo’s contents.
The document faulted the FBI and the DOJ for failing to completely explain to the intelligence court judge in seeking the warrant that they were relying on information supplied by Christopher Steele, who compiled the disputed dossier that contains unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s ties to Russia, the newspaper said.
Research for the dossier had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
A number of top DOJ officials can approve such surveillance but the responsibility usually falls to the deputy attorney general, the newspaper said.
The report also said the FBI and the DOJ did nothing improper in seeking the surveillance warrant against Page, who was part of the campaign until September 2016.
A White House spokesman said Trump wants “transparency throughout this process.”
“Based on numerous news reports, top officials at the F.B.I. have engaged in conduct that shows bias against President Trump and bias for Hillary Clinton,” Hogan Gidley told the Times.
“While President Trump has the utmost respect and support for the rank-and-file members of the F.B.I., the anti-Trump bias at the top levels that appear to have existed is troubling.”
The FBI had been keeping an eye on Page for years and an investigation in 2013 showed that a Russian spy tried to recruit him.
But a visit to Russia in July 2016 when he was working with the Trump campaign renewed the bureau’s interest and they began monitoring him again that fall, the Times said.
That surveillance led the FBI and DOJ to seek to renew the application in the spring of 2017, shortly after Rosenstein was confirmed in April, the newspaper said.
Trump has had Rosenstein in his crosshairs, venting to staff his frustration with the DOJ’s No. 2 and mulling whether he should fire him, according to reports.
Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in May 2017 after Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey, who had been heading up the probe.
Trump wanted to fire Mueller last June, but backed off after White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign, the Times reported last Friday.
The White House and some Republican lawmakers are calling for the memo to be declassified and released to the public to show how the agencies are biased against the president.
But Democrats who have seen the four-page memo — written by House Republicans — say they carefully selected information that is intended to discredit the investigation into Russian involvement in the election and any collusion on the part of the Trump campaign.
The DOJ called efforts to release the memo “reckless” without the department and the FBI first being able to review the document to see if it harms national security.
So-Called Conservative Free Beacon Paid Fusion GPS For Anti-Trump Research
Fake republican and Anti-Trump fraud Paul Singer of Free Beacon.
The conservative website the Washington Free Beacon triggered the research into then-candidate Donald Trump by Fusion GPS that eventually led to the now-infamous Trump “dossier,” the publication’s editor-in-chief and chairman acknowledged in a statement Friday night.
The research effort was known to have been supported by Republican allies before the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign picked up the tab for the research, but the original funder of the research was unknown until now. The resulting dossier was compiled by former British spy Michael Steele and contained unsubstantiated allegations about then-candidate Trump’s connections to Russia. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
The Free Beacon’s connection to the dossier was first reported by the Washington Examiner’s Byron York Friday night.
The site began as a non-profit entity before becoming a for-profit enterprise several years ago. It has never disclosed its owners or financial backers, but the New York Times reports hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer provides a large amount of its funding. The site covers national security issues, politics, culture and media criticism, among other topics.
The Free Beacon says Steele was not involved in the research at the time of its involvement, and “none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier.” The Free Beacon also said it had no knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the DNC or Clinton campaign. The Free Beacon has retained third-party firms since its launch in 2012, the statement says.
In the statement, editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb said that the publication retained Fusion GPS “to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.” The statement said representatives of his publication approached the House Intelligence Committee Friday and offered to answer questions.
“But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods,” Continetti and Goldfarb wrote.
Here is the full statement from the Free Beacon:
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers. In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton. All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.
Representatives of the Free Beacon approached the House Intelligence Committee today and offered to answer what questions we can in their ongoing probe of Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier. But to be clear: We stand by our reporting, and we do not apologize for our methods. We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce. The First Amendment guarantees our right to engage in news-gathering as we see fit, and we intend to continue doing just that as we have since the day we launched this project.
Network corrected exclusive story involving Trump and hacked documents
Trump: ‘Their slogan should be CNN – the least trusted name in news’
Donald Trump, in his first tweet on Saturday, said: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?” Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump on Saturday fired more shots in his offensive against CNN, after the network was forced to correct an exclusive report that had seemed to implicate his administration in a scandal involving the release of leaked documents.
“Fake News CNN made a vicious and purposeful mistake yesterday,” the president tweeted. “They were caught red handed.”
He added: “CNN’S slogan is CNN, THE MOST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS. Everyone knows this is not true, that this could, in fact, be a fraud on the American Public. There are many outlets that are far more trusted than Fake News CNN. Their slogan should be CNN, THE LEAST TRUSTED NAME IN NEWS!”
The CNN report said Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr, received an email offering him access to hacked Democratic party emails from WikiLeaks before the documents had been made publicly available.
But in fact, the email was sent on 14 September 2016, after the material was made publicly available – and not 4 September as CNN first reported.
In a statement, CNN said its “initial reporting of the date on an email sent to members of the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks documents, which was confirmed by two sources to CNN, was incorrect. We have updated our story to include the correct date, and present the proper context for the timing of email.”
It was the second major correction in a CNN story involving Trump and Russia. Russia is believed to have been behind the original hacking of the documents.
In June, three CNN journalists resigned after the network retracted a report on alleged ties between Trump officials and a Russian investment fund. “What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS,” Trump tweeted then. The network said the three journalists who reported that story failed to follow editorial procedures.
In his first tweet on Saturday, Trump added: “Watch to see if CNN fires those responsible, or was it just gross incompetence?”
CNN said it would not fire the reportersbehind the Friday story, as editorial procedures had been followed.
The president also attacked “fake news” on Friday night in Florida, at a rally endorsing Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. In particular, Trump zeroed in on an error made last week by ABC News correspondent Brian Ross, over the prosecution of Mike Flynn in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the US election.
ABC suspended Ross but did not fire him. The president suggested that attendees at his rally should sue the news outlet for the stock market losses that resulted from the original story.
“Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making?” Trump said. “They’ve been apologizing left and right.”
Trump also said CNN had “apologised” for its corrected story. It has not.
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‘We want Roy Moore’: Trump endorses controversial candidate at rally – video
Also on Friday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders used Twitter to highlight CNN’s use of a picture of the wrong Raj Shah in a report on her deputy. “CNN this is definitely not @RajShah45 but it is #FakeNews,” she wrote.
Donald Jr added his thoughts in a tweet Saturday morning, writing: “Strange that the #fakenews media never gets stories wrong in favor of Trump. It’s almost like they do it on purpose.”
There is no evidence that reporting errors and corrections have become any more frequent during the Trump presidency. Trump’s embrace of the concept of “fake news”, though, has allowed him to make substantial political hay from every corrected story.
According to an October Politico poll, 46% of Americans said they believed the media was guilty of wholesale fabrications about the Trump administration. More than three-quarters of Republican voters thought so.
David Frum, a former George W Bush speech writer who is now senior editor at the Atlantic, has become one of Trump’s most vociferous critics. He addressed the issue on Saturday morning on Twitter.
While reporters “slip in their work”, Frum wrote, “the work itself is trying to inform the public about the doings of the most systematical untruthful administration in American history”.
Frum continued: “Never forget, though, that the media are not the protagonist in the drama. The protagonists are the officials engaged in the deception, headed by the president himself.”
Plus 10 points for creativity. Minus 1,000 points for a stupid lie with inevitable consequences.
While the media rushes frantically from one manufactured Trump scandal to another, the examination of the deeply troubling lenghts to which Obama Inc. went to sabotage his political opponent and successor using eavesdropping continues. One of the most striking revelations has been the number of ‘unmasking’ requests filed by Samantha Power.
Not only did Power file a whole lot of them, 260 requests to unmask the identities of Americans being spied on is a whole lot, but why would an ambassador to the UN even need such classified info?
And to that, Samantha Power had a simple and incoherent response. “It wasn’t me.”
South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy revealed in an interview on Fox News on Tuesday that Power was “emphatic” on the point that someone else in the Obama administration made the unmasking requests that have been attributed to her.
Fox News recently reported that Power made approximately 260 unmasking requests — a rate of one per business day — in her final year in office, including up through the end of Obama’s term.
Unmasking has become an issue because someone inside the Obama administration unmasked the identities of Trump associates identified in classified intelligence reports collected by the intelligence community during surveillance of foreign targets. Some of those details were illegally leaked to the media.
Gowdy, a member of the Intelligence committee, said that Power “was pretty emphatic” last week in disputing that she made 260 unmasking requests.
“She would say those requests to unmask may have been attributed to her, but they greatly exceed by an exponential factor the requests she actually made,” Gowdy told Fox’s Bret Baier.
“Her perspective, her testimony is, ‘they may be under my name, but I did not make those requests.’”
It’s a really bizarre defense that relies on either challenging the relevant paperwork or suggesting that someone else using her name made those requests. The latter defense is rather crazy. If true, it would constitute a major crime. If untrue, then Power has hung herself. Susan Rice repeatedly lied about her unmasking requests, but what Power is doing here is Hillaryesque. And we know how that worked out for her.
Obama administration knew about Russian bribery plot before uranium deal
The Obama administration knew that Russia had used bribery, kickbacks and extortion to get a stake in the US atomic energy industry — but cut deals giving Moscow control of a large chunk of the US uranium supply anyway, according to a report Tuesday.
The FBI used a confidential US witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed the Kremlin had compromised an American uranium trucking company, The Hill reported.
Executives at the company, Transport Logistics International, kicked back about $2 million to the Russians in exchange for lucrative no-bid contracts — a scheme that violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the report said.
The feds also learned that Russian nuclear officials had gotten millions of dollars into the US designed to benefit the Clinton Foundation at the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government committee that signed off on the deals, sources told The Hill.
The racketeering operation was conducted “with the consent of higher-level officials” in Russia who “shared the proceeds” from the kickbacks, an agent later stated in an affidavit.
But the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder did not bring charges in the case prior to the deals being cut.
At the time, President Barack Obama and Clinton’s State Department were trying to “reset” relations between the two nuclear rivals — an effort that largely failed.
The first deal was wrapped up in October 2010 when the State Department and the Committee on Foreign Investment agreed to sell part of Uranium One, a Toronto-based mining giant with operations in Wyoming, Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, South Africa and elsewhere, to the Russian nuclear company Rosatom.
The move gave the Russians control over roughly 20 percent of the US uranium supply — and gave Russian strongman Vladimir Putin a large and profitable stake in the US atomic power industry.
When Donald Trump slammed Clinton on the campaign trail in 2016 over the sale, her spokesman said she was not involved in the committee review and that the State Department official who handled it said she “never intervened . . . on any [committee] matter.”
In the second deal, in 2011, Obama gave the OK for Rosatom’s Tenex subsidiary to sell the Canadian company’s uranium to American nuclear power plants.
Before, Tenex could only sell reprocessed uranium from dismantled Soviet nuclear weapons to power plants in the US.
“The Russians were compromising American contractors in the nuclear industry with kickbacks and extortion threats, all of which raised legitimate national security concerns. And none of that evidence got aired before the Obama administration made those decisions,” a source told the paper.
Instead of disclosing the racket in 2010, Justice continued investigating for nearly four more years, so Americans and Congress didn’t know about Russian nuclear corruption at the time the deals were completed.
Obama and the Clintons defended their actions in 2015, declaring that there was no evidence that Russians had done anything wrong and there was no national security reason to oppose the Uranium One deal.
The decision to approve Rosatom’s purchase of Uranium One has been a source of political controversy since 2015, when author Peter Schweizer documented how Bill Clinton pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees from Russian entities.
But FBI, Energy Department and court documents showed that the feds had gathered a mountain of evidence well before the committee’s decision that Vadim Mikerin — the top Russian overseeing Putin’s nuclear expansion inside the US — was engaged in crooked behavior starting in 2009.
Holder was also on the foreign investments committee at the time the Uranium One deal was approved — but multiple current and former government officials told The Hill they did not know whether the FBI or DOJ ever told other committee members about the crimes they had uncovered.
Evidence of the illegal conduct was gathered with the help of an American businessman who acted as a confidential witness and who began making kickback payments at Mikerin’s direction and with the permission of the FBI.
The first kickback recorded by the FBI through its informant was dated Nov. 27, 2009, the records show.
In affidavits signed in 2014 and 2015, an Energy Department agent assigned to help the FBI in the case testified that Mikerin supervised a “racketeering scheme” that involved extortion, bribery, money-laundering and kickbacks that were directed by Russia and provided kickbacks to top Russian energy officials with ties to the Kremlin, according to the report.
The case exposed a serious national security breach, The Hill reported, as Mikerin had given a no-bid contract to Transport Logistics Intern
FBI Investigating Radical Terrorists in All 50 States as Threats Hit Peak
Terrorists inside America plotting attacks ‘each and every single day’
Federal authorities have open investigations into radical Islamic terrorists in all 50 states, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which is warning that the threat of terrorism in the United States has reached an all time high with radicalized individuals in the country plotting to strike “each and every single day.”
The FBI has “open terrorist investigations in all 50 states,” according to DHS Secretary John Kelly, who disclosed on Tuesday that there have been at least 37 “ISIS-linked plots to attack our country” since 2013, a number that shows no signs of diminishing.
Kelly, in his first wide-ranging public address on the threat of terrorism in America since taking office, warned that America’s borders remain wide-open and that there is evidence terror-linked individuals are exploiting these national security weaknesses and entering the United States.
“We don’t know their intentions,” Kelly said during an address at George Washington University. “We don’t know why they’re here or why they’re coming. We are completely blind to what they’re capable of.”
Terrorist also continues to sprout inside American communities across the country, according to Kelly, who said that in just the past year, there have been “36 homegrown terrorist cases in 18 states.”
“We’ve seen an unprecedented spike in homegrown terrorism,” Kelly disclosed. “These are the cases we know about—homegrown terrorism is notoriously difficult to predict and control.”
Terrorists in the United States are plotting attacks “every single day,” according to Kelly.
“I tell you, without exaggeration, they try to carry out this mission each and every single day and no one can tell you how to stop it. No one,” he said.
The United States, he continued, is “under attack” from a wide variety of bad actors, including “failed states, cyber-terrorists, vicious smugglers, and sadistic radicals.”
“And we are under attack every single day,” he said. “The threats are relentless.”
Those who slip over the border undetected, including criminals and potential radicalized terrorists, pose an unparalleled threat to the country.
“We don’t get to vet them,” Kelly said. “We don’t know their intentions. We don’t know they’re here. They slip into our country unnoticed, living among us, and we are completely blind as to what they are capable of.”
These threats just scrape the surface of the danger posed to America by terrorists inside and outside of the country, Kelly said.
“This is all bad news, but it gets much worse,” he explained. “Experts estimate that perhaps 10,000 citizens of Europe have joined the caliphate in Syria and Iraq. Thousands more are from nations in Asia, Africa and the Western Hemisphere. They have learned how to make IEDs, employ drones to drop ordnance, and acquired experience on the battlefield that by all reports they are bringing back home.”
These highly trained terrorist fighters are likely to return to their countries of origin and “wreak murderous havoc” across Europe, Asia, and the United States, among other countries.
America lacks the ability to properly vet these individuals when they attempt to enter the country, according to Kelly, who warned that scores of radicalized individuals are trying each day to enter America.
“Many are citizens of countries in our Visa Waiver Program, they can more easily travel to the United States which makes us a prime target for their exported violence,” he said.
The threat to America “has metastasized and decentralized, and the risk is as threatening today as it was that September morning almost 16 years ago,” Kelly warned.
“We are under attack from terrorists both within and outside of our borders,” he said. “They are without conscience, and they operate without rules. They despise the United States, because we are a nation of rights, laws, and freedoms. They have a single mission, and that is our destruction.”
Who’s side are they on? They need to be on Mexico’s side of the wall.
Democrats are winning the war over the wall.
Despite President Trump’s request for more than $1 billion to fund the Mexican border wall this year, GOP leaders are expected to exclude the money in the spending bill being prepared to keep the government open beyond April 28.
Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) says the choice is pragmatic and the money will come later.
But the issue has become a political thorn in the side of GOP leaders who are facing pushback from Republicans voicing concerns over the diplomatic fallout, the disruption to local communities and the enormous cost of the project, estimated to be anywhere from $22 billion to $40 billion.
With Democrats united against new wall funding, it’s unlikely the Republicans have the votes to get it through and prevent a government shutdown.
Among the loudest GOP skeptics are those representing border districts. Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), for instance, hail from districts that span a combined 880 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re pressing the administration to justify the huge costs.
“We recognize the need for robust border security and infrastructure to ensure public safety and increase cross border commerce,” the lawmakers wrote recently to top administration officials. “We also have an obligation to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”
Grover Norquist, a conservative anti-tax crusader who has supported comprehensive immigration reform, told The Hill that payment for the wall has not been an issue in his discussions with allies on Capitol Hill.
And some Republicans are concerned that deteriorating relations with Mexico may be too high a price to pay for the wall.
In a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) expressed concern to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly about a growing resentment in Mexico over the administration’s border policies.
“There is a lot of anti-American sentiment in Mexico. If the election were tomorrow in Mexico, you’d probably have a left-wing, anti-American president in Mexico. That can’t be good for America,” McCain said.
“It would not be good for America, or for Mexico,” Kelly conceded.
The thinly veiled reference to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who tops most polls in the lead-up to Mexico’s upcoming 2018 presidential election, raised eyebrows in Mexico.
Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary Luis Videgaray told Kelly in Washington Thursday that Mexico “expects the United States to respect the Mexican electoral process.”
Videgaray added that, although Mexico considers the wall an “unfriendly gesture,” it is “not part of a bilateral discussion and it shouldn’t be.”
Democrats have latched on to Mexico’s consistent denial that the country will pay for a border wall — various officials and former officials have panned the notion since Trump first brought it up during the campaign — to take swings at the president.
“It’s anywhere between $26 billion and $40 billion to build it, you can’t drive on it, you can’t use it for anything, it doesn’t do anything to drive economic growth and jobs in America beyond the building of a wall itself, and it probably wouldn’t be built using union jobs to begin with,” said Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus.
In its budget request, the White House had sought $1.4 billion in 2017 funds for the wall. But hoping to prevent a government shutdown, Ryan has suggested the Republicans will largely delay the wall funding debate until September, when Congress takes up spending bills looking ahead to fiscal 2018.
“The big chunk of money for the wall, really, is … next fiscal year’s appropriations, because they literally can’t start construction even this quickly,” he told “CBS This Morning” last week.
Democrats are encouraged by those comments, but in the absence of specific legislation they remain leery that some Republicans, particularly those in the White House, will continue to push for wall provisions in the 2017 package.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she’s hopeful the Republicans will punt on the issue, citing recent polls indicating that voters are largely opposed.
“I would hope that they wouldn’t try that because … the American people don’t even support it,” she told reporters Thursday.
A Pew Research poll released in February found that 67 percent of voters oppose the wall, and only 35 percent support it.
Last month, Pelosi visited the border region in Texas and warned that the wall would damage communities without benefiting public safety.
“It’s about commerce. It’s about community. It’s about family. It’s about education. It’s about the environment. It’s about so many things,” she said. “So to put a wall there is really an insult and really an ineffective insult at that.”
In Texas, where much of the land along the Rio Grande is privately owned, the wall has met resistance from many locals, regardless of party affiliation.
Landowners have long fought the federal government exercising eminent domain to acquire land for border fencing. Plus, the river’s natural floodplain would require the wall to be built well north of the border, leaving some land on the Mexican side of the wall.
Land acquisition is less of a concern in other border states, where much of the land is owned by the federal government and, except for a short span on the Colorado River, the border crosses dry land.
Still, past administrations have found a double duty for the wall in some sectors by building border fencing atop levees that protect communities from floods.
In anticipation of potential litigation over border land, Trump’s Department of Justice budget request for 2018 included funding for “20 attorneys to pursue Federal efforts to obtain the land and holdings necessary to secure the Southwest border and another 20 attorneys and support staff for immigration litigation assistance.”
But focus is on the Homeland Security budget that provides for physical construction of the wall. And in that debate, the wildcard remains the question of how hard Trump will push fellow Republicans to help him make good on the central pillar of his campaign.
Democrats see the White House as the biggest threat to a spending deal this month.
“House and Senate Democrats and Republicans have been making very good progress on an appropriations package to fund the government,” Matt House, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), said Friday.
“The only thing that could derail that progress is the White House insisting on their extraneous demands, which would meet bipartisan opposition.”
What is this asshole still doing in Trump’s administration?
WASHINGTON — John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday that it was doubtful that a wall along the full border with Mexico would ever be built, despite an oft-repeated campaign promise by President Trump.
“It is unlikely that we will build a wall from sea to shining sea,” Mr. Kelly told senators on the Homeland Security Committee.
Instead, Mr. Kelly said, the department will look to build physical barriers — including fencing and concrete walls — in places that make sense. He said that the department was still studying the best places to construct such barriers, and that he could not give an estimate of the cost.
The first bids for prototypes of the border wall were due Tuesday. According to people briefed on the agency’s plan, the first new section of the wall will be built on a short strip of federally owned land in San Diego, where there is already fencing.
Congress has not yet acted on the funding request for the wall, and it faces considerable opposition from Democrats and even some Republicans.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Congress probably would not grant the Trump administration’s request for additional money for the border wall this year, adding that it would most likely be included in the next fiscal year’s appropriation.
In his budget released this month, Mr. Trump asked for $1.4 billion to pay for the initial development of the wall. The Department of Homeland Security said enough funding had been moved from other programs to begin construction.
Democrats have vowed to block Mr. Trump’s budget proposals to build the wall and add Border Patrol and deportation agents.
Mr. Kelly’s department has begun implementing key features of Mr. Trump’s executive orders to increase border security and crack down on illegal immigration. Federal judges have blocked the department from carrying out the president’s executive orders seeking to ban travel to the United States by citizens of six mostly Muslim countries.
Nevertheless, Mr. Kelly said the department was proceeding with other efforts to strengthen border security and was starting to see some results. For example, he noted that apprehensions along the southwestern border had declined. Border Patrol agents caught almost 17,000 people trying to cross the border illegally last month, down from nearly 60,000 people in December.
Mr. Kelly said stepped-up enforcement had forced smugglers to raise their prices, which most likely contributed to the decline in crossings.
Under questioning by senators on Wednesday, Mr. Kelly defended several Trump administration policies, including what the Homeland Security Department calls “extreme vetting” of international travelers, the searching of electronic devices at the border, and the possible separation of mothers and children at the border to discourage immigration.
Mr. Kelly told senators that children would not be routinely separated from their families unless the “situation at the time requires it,” such as when the mother is sick or addicted to drugs.
Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the committee, raised concerns that the Homeland Security Department and the State Department were considering asking visitors applying for a visa to the United States for access to their cellphones, financial records and passwords to social media accounts.
Ms. McCaskill called the proposal “un-American” and said it could set off a diplomatic row with other countries.
“I’m worried that if we apply ‘extreme vetting’ procedures like this, American travelers will be forced to undergo the same scrutiny if these countries decide to reciprocate,” she said. “We are doing things that in no way trips up the bad guys.”
Mr. Kelly said that the visa-vetting procedures built on polices that had been in place for years and that foreign visitors could choose not to share their personal details.
“If they don’t cooperate, they can go back,” he said.
Asked about searching electronic devices at the border, Mr. Kelly said that just a small number of people had had their phones or computers searched. And he said the searches had yielded results, catching pedophiles and other criminals.
But that failed to persuade Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who called the policy “obscene” because it also affected citizens and green card holders.
“There is a difference between searching my bags and searching my phones,” said Mr. Paul, who added that he was worried that customs agents were downloading contacts and other information from cellphones.
Mr. Kelly got into a heated exchange with Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, who pressed him to put his policy on separating families into writing for the sake of border agents. Mr. Kelly said he had done so orally and did not need to put it in writing.
Ms. Harris also questioned the use of more intense enforcement efforts to round up undocumented immigrants, including by sending agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement into courthouses to arrest witnesses and victims.
“They are now allowed to do their jobs,” Mr. Kelly replied.
No, you’re not welcome. Stay home and tear your own shit up.
Trump Administration Considers Far-Reaching Steps for ‘Extreme Vetting’
Foreigners entering U.S. could be forced to hand over phones, answer questions on ideology; changes could apply to allies like France and Germany
Foreigners who want to visit the U.S., even for a short trip, could be forced to disclose contacts on their mobile phones, social-media passwords and financial records, and to answer probing questions about their ideology, according to Trump administration officials conducting a review of vetting procedures.
The administration also wants to subject more visa applicants to intense security reviews and have embassies spend more time interviewing each applicant. The changes could apply to people from all over the world, including allies like France and Germany.
The measures—whose full scope haven’t yet been publicly discussed—would together represent the “extreme vetting” President Donald Trump has promised. The changes would be sure to generate significant controversy, both at home, from civil libertarians and others who see the questions as overly intrusive, and abroad, with experts warning that other nations could impose similar requirements on Americans seeking visas.
“If there is any doubt about a person’s intentions coming to the United States, they should have to overcome—really and truly prove to our satisfaction—that they are coming for legitimate reasons,” said Gene Hamilton, senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
Administration officials say fighting terrorism is an urgent task that justifies tough rules. The review under way aims to replace what the Trump administration sees as a presumption toward letting people into the country toward a more skeptical outlook.
The review was called for in an executive order Mr. Trump signed last month banning travel from six-majority Muslim countries, which he said was needed to guard against terrorism. The order also directed security officials to implement a vetting program that allows for a “rigorous evaluation” of whether applicants support terrorism or present a risk of causing harm.
While much of the order was put on hold by a federal judge in Hawaii, the work to enhance vetting procedures was allowed to proceed.
Homeland Security officials say the agency is planning to significantly increase demands for information from all visa applicants, including visitors, refugees and others seeking to immigrate.
The changes might even apply to visitors from the 38 countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program, which requires adherence to strict U.S. standards in data sharing, passport control and other factors, one senior official said. That includes some of the U.S.’s closest allies, such as the U.K., Japan and Australia.
The biggest change to U.S. policy would be asking applicants to hand over their telephones so officials could examine their stored contacts and perhaps other information. Visitors have had their phones examined at ports of entry, but that isn’t routinely requested during the application stage.
The goal is to “figure out who you are communicating with,” the senior DHS official said. “What you can get on the average person’s phone can be invaluable.”
A second change would ask applicants for their social-media handles and passwords so that officials could see information posted privately in addition to public posts. DHS has experimented with asking for people’s handles so they can read public posts, but not those restricted to friends.
“We want to say for instance, ‘What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords,’ so that we can see what they do on the internet,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said at a congressional hearing in February. “If they don’t want to give us that information then they don’t come.”
In response to Mr. Kelly’s hearing, a coalition of about 50 civil liberties and other groups issued a statement that month saying requiring passwords is “a direct assault on fundamental rights,” including freedom of expression. They also complained that the policy could be mirrored by foreign governments demanding passwords from Americans.
In addition, a DHS inspector general’s report this year found that the agency didn’t properly measure the effectiveness of pilot programs that used social media in visa-application reviews, making it hard to determine if they should be expanded.
Former DHS officials who worked on these issues during the Obama administration said that the information gleaned from telephones and social media could be helpful in assessing threats posed by applicants, but they said there are downsides, too. The effort—particularly the social-media hunt—would be time-consuming, they said, and it could drive people with bad intentions to change their practices.
“The real bad guys will get rid of their phones. They’ll show up with a clean phone,” said Leon Rodriguez, who headed the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services until January and was deeply involved in refugee screening. “Over time, the utility of the exercise will diminish.”
Still, one Obama official said, telephone contacts could be particularly helpful in identifying terrorist ties, as their phone numbers could be run against various U.S. databases.
Already, the State Department has taken small steps toward tighter vetting, according to cables sent from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to embassies and consulates. In them, he orders officials to identify “applicant populations” that warrant additional scrutiny, according to documents posted by Reuters in March. The department hasn’t disputed their contents. He also directs offices to limit the number of interviews scheduled each day to ensure each application is properly scrutinized.
Mr. Tillerson instructed officials to ask visa applicants additional questions, such as listing all email addresses and social-media handles used in the past five years, as well as the applicant’s travel history, employers and addresses over the past 15 years. But after the federal court put the travel ban on hold, Mr. Tillerson said in another message that to be cautious, those instructions should be put on hold as well.
The administration is also working to implement an idea first raised by Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate last August for an “ideological test” for people coming to the U.S. Such tests have been used before—for instance, to screen out anarchists, or members of the Communist Party.
“Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted for immigration into the country,” Mr. Trump said in an August speech.
The DHS official working on the review said the types of questions under consideration now include whether visa applicants believe in so-called honor killings, how they view the treatment of women in society, whether they value the “sanctity of human life” and who they view as a legitimate target in a military operation.
The goal, he said, isn’t to filter out people with contrary thoughts but people who might act on them.
That notion draws criticism from civil libertarians.
“It could deprive American citizens with the ability to interact and gain knowledge from the full spectrum of individuals and people who hold diverse beliefs world-wide,” said Hugh Handeyside, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security project.
“Our views and beliefs and opinions are protected,” he said. “Those same principles should drive our decisions about whether people would be permitted to visit the United States.”
