Why Did You Appoint Me When You Knew I Was For Open Borders Damit?
President Trump allegedly laid into Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a White House meeting, as border crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border continue to skyrocket, according to a new report.
In a cabinet meeting attended by advisers Stephen Miller, Kellyanne Conway, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Larry Kudlow, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump blasted Nielsen for failing to secure the southern border, the Washington Postreports:
Trump lashed out at his Cabinet, and Nielsen in particular, when told that the number of people arrested for illegally crossing the Mexico border topped 50,000 for the second consecutive month. The blowup lasted more than 30 minutes, according to a person with knowledge of what transpired, as Trump’s face reddened and he raised his voice, saying Nielsen needed to “close down” the border. [Emphasis added]
“Why don’t you have solutions? How is this still happening?” he said, adding later, “We need to shut it down. We’re closed.” [Emphasis added]
Indeed, border crossings have continued to soar under Nielsen’s direction at DHS. For example, as Breitbart Texas reported, border crossings in March approached Obama-era levels of illegal immigration at the border. Last month, border crossings continued to increase, with nearly 40,000 illegal aliens crossing the border.
The increase in border crossings, coupled with a caravan of Central Americans which stormed the southern border, has reportedly created tensions between Nielsen and Trump. As Breitbart News reported, Nielsen allegedly almost quit after being blamed for not securing the border, though DHS officials say the claim is untrue.
A separate report, however, by Fox News’s John Robert, reveals that Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly had to call Nielsen following the meeting to ask her not to quit.
John Roberts
✔@johnrobertsFox
SCOOP – @WhiteHouse COS John Kelly told me this afternoon that after yesterday’s cabinet meeting where @realDonaldTrump berated @SecNielsen , Kelly called Nielsen to implore here not to quit over it.
While Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have taken tough approaches to illegal immigration and the caravan, Nielsen in her most recent testimony before Congress begged asylum-seekers to use the ports of entry to enter the U.S. legally, a move that experts say was a “colossal mistake.”
“If you are fleeing and you have a need to come to the United States, please come to the ports of entry. You — you — you know, we will process your claim there,” Nielsen said. But if you come across the border illegally, you’ve — you’ve broken the law and we have to prosecute. It’s the only way to keep our border — to have a border.” [Emphasis added]
Nielsen formerly worked for President George W. Bush, when thousands of illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. after Hurricane Katrina to take coveted blue-collar jobs. Nielsen also previously authored a report promoting mass immigration as a win for big business.
Liberals can’t stop calling Trump Crazy and and idiot but he is winning.
CNN’s Jake Tapper Cuts Off Stephen Miller: ‘I’ve Wasted Enough of My Viewers’ Time’
by PAM KEY7 Jan 2018
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” White House adviser Stephen Miller had a heated interview with host Jake Tapper over Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”
Miller said, “The book is best understood as a work of very poorly written fiction.”
Things got heated when Miller said, “Your network’s been going 24/7 with all the salacious coverage and I know it brings a lot of you guys a lot of joy to try to stick the knife in, but the reality is that page after page after page of the book is purely false. I see sections of the book where events I participated in are described and I have firsthand knowledge as they’re described they’re completely and utterly fraudulent.”
Tapper shot back, “Nobody at CNN is sticking knives in anybody.”
After several exchanges where the pair talked over each other, Tapper said, “The only person who has called themselves a genius in the last week is a president.”
Miller said, “Which happens to be a true statement. a self-made billionaire who revolutionized — ”
Tapper quipped, “I’m sure he’s watching and he’s happy you said that.”
Miller shot back “You can be as condescending as you want.”
At one point in the interview, Tapper hushed his guest: “Stephen, settle down, settle down. Calm down.”
Tapper ended the interview saying, “I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time.”
After the segment aired, President Trump tweeted that Miller “destroyed” Tapper.
Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration. Watch the hatred and unfairness of this CNN flunky!
Sadly, they have a lot more influence than Sarah Palin or even the Hildabeast. What are they leaking?
The Brazenness of Trump’s White House Staff Using Private Email
How could six senior presidential aides mimic the strategy for which Trump lacerated Hillary Clinton? Only if they believe they are as immune to the usual rules as he is.
Late Sunday night, Josh Dawsey of Politico dropped a story that, in any other administration, would have been cause for concern but hardly surprise.
“Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December,” Dawsey wrote. “Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records.”
On Monday, Newsweek reported that Ivanka Trump had also used the domain to communicate with at least one government official, Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon.* By Monday night, The New York Times had reported that at least six officials, including former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, former strategist Steve Bannon, and aides Stephen Miller and Gary Cohn, had used personal accounts for at least some official business.
Administration officials conducting business on personal accounts raises concerns because it suggests some intention to skirt public-records laws and conceal things from the public. While troubling, this is hardly unusual. Sarah Palin was busted for using one. So were officials in the George W. Bush administration. Lisa Jackson, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama, used an alias for her email.
Of course, the most famous example of someone using a personal email is Hillary Clinton. The case of the Javanka domain is brazen for its mimickry of Clinton’s actions at the State Department, right down to the use of a domain specifically for the family. The only way it could be more slapstick would be if Kushner and Trump also used BleachBit.
There are significant ways the Kushner-Ivanka domain differs from Clinton’s. Neither of them is a Cabinet secretary. (Trump, despite her title as special assistant to the president, says she doesn’t even want to get involved in politics.) Neither of them is running for office (at the moment). The scale of their usage pales in comparison to Clinton’s, and there’s no indication that they deleted any emails. Nor is there any indication that classified information was sent in the emails.
Yet it takes a special sort of hypocrisy, or dark sense of humor, or lack of self-awareness for Trump’s daughter and son-in-law to do this after watching a race in which Donald Trump campaigned for, and arguably won, the presidency because of Clinton’s imprudent decision to use the private email domain. She was cleared by the FBI and the Justice Department of any crimes, though then-FBI Director James Comey called her “extremely careless” with classified information. It was the political sin of looking like she had something to hide, and was trying hard to hide it, that stuck to Clinton. Somehow, Kushner and Trump still decided to set up their own family domain, and no one convinced them it was a bad idea.This is only the latest example of the Trump administration committing the very sins for which it crucified its political opponents. Trump assailed Barack Obama for taking vacations and playing golf too frequently; Trump vacations, and he plays golf more often than Obama. Trump assailed Obama for laying down red lines and not enforcing them; Trump keeps doing the same. Trump accused Obama of dividing the nation and of distancing America from its closest allies; Trump is a virtuosic divider, and frequently at odds with allied leaders. Trump vigorously attacked Clinton for having a private email account; a handful of his top advisers did the same.If everyone does it, why did the email situation stick to Clinton so badly? In part because the public was already primed to view Clinton as ethically dubious. It was an impression fed by her husband’s scandal-plagued tenure as president as well as things like her speeches to Goldman Sachs, and encouraged by a cottage industry created for that purpose. Fairly or unfairly, the email server made for the perfect attack, aided, as my colleague James Fallows recently argued, by a press corps only too eager to amplify it.
So why doesn’t it stick to Trump? After all, he has his own history of ethical and legal shortcomings, one that is more robust and more concretely documented than anything in Clinton’s record. But the same actions don’t necessarily come off the same way. Some of that is simple partisanship: When your guy does it, it’s different from when the other guy does it. Another compelling explanation for why Trump gets away with the things he critiques is that some of his supporters love that he’s a brawler.
Michael Moore laid this line of thinking out in a recent New York Magazine interview. “They loved the brazenness of it. Even when they didn’t necessarily agree with it, they thought, That took balls. They may not personally think McCain’s a coward, but they think, Wow, that’s who I want. Somebody who’s just going to say shit like that,” Moore said. “Americans, they want somebody who stands up for the things that he or she believes in and says it without any apology.”
The extent to which Trump really is the Teflon Don is debatable. It is true that he has survived things that would have killed a lesser politician’s career a dozen times over; it is also true that his approval ratings are record-breakingly low, his administration is nearly devoid of major accomplishments, and he faces a perilous special-counsel investigation. For now, though, he remains standing.
The question is whether that applies to others. Trump’s aides and advisers seem to have come to believe that the force-field of gravity distortion that protects the president will apply to them too. Whether they are right is less clear.
Think of Michael Flynn’s mixing of private- and public-sector work, his decision not to make required disclosures, and his decision to lie to the vice president—and, perhaps, the FBI. Think of Paul Manafort allegedly advising a Russian billionaire even as he ran the Trump campaign. Think of Anthony Scaramucci’s R-rated circus-act of a 10-day tenure as White House communications director. Each of them behaved as though they too were immune to standard pressures. But Flynn was fired and is under multiple investigations. Manafort is too, and his home was raided before down by FBI agents; he has reportedly been told to expect to be indicted. Scaramucci was fired before he’d had a chance to get off the ground.
Kushner, so far, is still standing, but it’s easy to imagine that if he were not related to the president, he too might have been shoved out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Like his boss and father-in-law, Kushner brings serious liabilities from his business career. He has multiple unexplained contacts with Russian officials, from the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting to a disputed meeting with the head of a Russian state-controlled bank, plus a report that he tried to set up a back channel with Russian officials. His clearance forms were highly incomplete, and he offered an implausible excuse. In fact, there were so many worrying moments that, according to The Wall Street Journal, some of the president’s lawyers wanted Kushner removed from the White House this summer. Trump refused.
A common knock on the Clintons was that they behaved as though the rules did not apply to them. Already, some members of Trump’s inner circle are acting the same way. Feeling immune to ordinary strictures can be alluring, but as Hillary Clinton learned, sometimes you only discover too late that it’s an illusion.
NYT: Immigration Hard-Liners Rising in Trump Administration
Advocates who want America’s immigration laws enforced have found a home in President Donald Trump’s administration, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kulish reports.
For years, a network of immigration hard-liners in Washington was known chiefly for fending off proposals to legalize the status of more people. But with the election of a like-minded president, these groups have moved unexpectedly to offense from defense, with some of their leaders now in positions to carry out their agenda on a national scale.
…
Mr. Trump’s senior White House adviser, Stephen Miller, worked tirelessly to defeat immigration reform as a staff member for Senator Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general. Gene P. Hamilton, who worked on illegal immigration as Mr. Sessions’s counsel on the Judiciary Committee, is now a senior counselor at the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Border Patrol and ICE, where Mr. Feere is working. Julia Hahn, who wrote about immigration for Breitbart — with headlines like “Republican-Led Congress Oversees Large-Scale Importation of Somali Migrants” — has followed her former boss, Stephen K. Bannon, to the White House as a deputy policy strategist.
…
Their influence is already being felt. Mr. Trump is known for his sound-bite-ready pledges to deport millions of people here illegally and to build a border wall, but some of the administration’s more technical yet critical changes to immigration procedures came directly from officials with long ties to the hard-line groups.
…
Even those who have labored for decades to scale back immigration did not expect such a dramatic change. “This is inconceivable a year ago,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Frankly, it’s almost inconceivable six months ago.”
John Roberts
