You’ve undoubtedly heard about this, right?
President Donald Trump distanced himself Thursday from Steve Bannon’s efforts to crowdsource private funds for a border wall, saying it was “done for showboating reasons” and “inappropriate.”
Trump made the remarks after Bannon, his former senior adviser, was arrested Thursday morning for allegedly swindling donors on the project, run by the non-profit group “We Build the Wall.” A federal grand jury in New York indicted Bannon on charges of money laundering and wire fraud, alleging he and his partners diverted $1 million away from the group and that he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his personal expenses.
The website, which is still up, is full of pictures of Trump and the project is endorsed by Trump Jr.
And while Trump can run, he can’t hide. He’s in this up to his eyeballs.
He pimped for the contractor that built this wall for months. From May 2019:
President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to four administration officials.
In phone calls, White House meetings and conversations aboard Air Force One during the past several months, Trump has aggressively pushed Dickinson, N.D.-based Fisher Industries to Department of Homeland Security leaders and Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps, according to the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions. The push for a specific company has alarmed military commanders and DHS officials.
Semonite was summoned to the White House again Thursday, after the president’s aides told Pentagon officials — including Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff — that the president wanted to discuss the border barrier. According to an administration official with knowledge of the Oval Office meeting, Trump immediately brought up Fisher, a company that sued the U.S. government last month after the Army Corps did not accept its bid to install barriers along the southern border, a contract potentially worth billions of dollars.
Trump has latched on to the company’s public claims that a new weathered steel design and innovative construction method would vastly speed up the project — and deliver it at far less cost to taxpayers. White House officials said Trump wants to go with the best and most cost-effective option to build the wall quickly.
“The President is one of the country’s most successful builders and knows better than anyone how to negotiate the best deals,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in an email. “He wants to make sure we get the job done under budget and ahead of schedule.”
Fisher’s chief executive, Tommy Fisher, has gone on conservative television and radio, claiming that his company could build more than 200 miles of barrier in less than a year. And he has courted Washington directly, meeting in congressional offices and inviting officials to the Southwest desert to see barrier prototypes.
Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that includes prominent conservatives who support the president — its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach — has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds.
The first section is expected to be unveiled soon. Fisher-branded equipment and workers were visible this week preparing the site outside El Paso, within feet of the International Boundary Monument No. 1, placed in 1855 at the beginning of the effort to delineate the Mexican border. The stretch, part of which is on private land owned by a brick company, is the only area in the region without a barrier, in part because it crosses rugged terrain.
Scott Sleight, an attorney for Fisher, said in a statement Thursday that Fisher Industries is committed to working with the federal government to secure the border and has developed a patent-pending installation system that allows the company to build fencing “faster than any contractor using common construction methods.”
“Fisher has invited officials of many agencies and members of Congress to demonstrate what we believe are vastly superior construction methods and capabilities,” Sleight said. “Consistent with the goals President Trump has also outlined, Fisher’s goal is to, as expeditiously as possible, provide the best quality border protection at the best price for the American people at our Nation’s border.”
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has joined in the campaign for Fisher Industries, along with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an ardent promoter of the company and the recipient of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Fisher and his family members, according to campaign finance records. Cramer, in an interview Thursday, said the Trump administration has shown a great deal of interest in his constituent’s company.
“He always brings them up,” Cramer said, noting that he spoke with Trump about Fisher twice — once in February and again on Thursday. Each time, Trump said he wanted Fisher to build some of the barrier, Cramer said.
[…]
Trump’s repeated attempts to influence the Army Corps’ contracting decisions show the degree to which the president is willing to insert himself into what is normally a staid legal and regulatory process designed to protect the U.S. government from accusations of favoritism. They also show how a private company can appeal to the president using well-placed publicity and personal connections to his allies — and the president’s willingness to dive into the minutiae of specific projects.
But Trump’s personal intervention risks the perception of improper influence on decades-old procurement rules that require government agencies to seek competitive bids, free of political interference.
[…]
The president ordered the reassignment of defense funds to the barrier project after Democrats denied his request for $5 billion. Instead, the agreement to end the government shutdown included $1.4 billion for the barrier. Since then, with Trump promising to build 400 miles of fencing by next year, the Pentagon has pledged to provide at least $2.5 billion more.
Fisher Industries was one of the six companies that built border wall prototypes outside San Diego in 2017, but the company’s concrete design did not afford the see-through visibility that DHS officials wanted. While many of the companies declined to discuss their prototypes with reporters, Tommy Fisher was an eager booster for his plan, criticizing the steel bollard design and professing that a more expensive concrete version would be better.
When Fisher began promoting a steel version of the barrier that he said could be installed faster and cheaper, the Army Corps said the design did not meet its requirements and lacked regulatory approvals.
“The system he is proposing does not meet the operational requirements of U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” an official said. DHS officials also told the Army Corps in March that Fisher’s work on a barrier project in San Diego came in late and over budget.
Fisher Industries has alleged improprieties with the border wall procurement process and sued the government on April 25.
Fisher this week told radio listeners in North Dakota that he was using private donations to build a section of border wall to show off his superior construction methods, which involve using heavy equipment to hold steel panels in place as they are anchored into the ground. He said he knows Trump will be impressed.
“The Corps said it couldn’t be done, but now the Border Patrol has seen it,” Fisher said of his construction project in an interview Wednesday on “The Flag,” a show on North Dakota’s WZFG News. “They’ve been out each day, and the proof’s in the pudding, and after that, it’s going to open up a whole new narrative about how border security should be handled, who should construct it, and the border agents will finally get what they deserve. And we’ll prove it in a half-mile stretch where they said it couldn’t be done.”
Collecting private donations, We Build the Wall has raised $22 million for the cause. The group has announced a raffle for a “wall reveal ceremony” it said will be attended by its “MAGA All Star board of advisors.”
“Witness history made on completion of the first privately funded section of the border wall!” it says. Cramer said Fisher is working with We Build the Wall. The group did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump has repeatedly brought up Fisher Industries after hearing about the company in early 2019, administration officials said.
In an earlier meeting with military and DHS officials in the Oval Office, Trump said that the government was getting ripped off by current contractors — and that Fisher could do it for less than half the price and with concrete. “The president got very spun up about it,” said one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Officials from the Army Corps and DHS then met with Kushner several times to explain why Fisher wasn’t the best deal. Kushner was intimately interested in the cost of the wall and why other companies were being chosen over Fisher, administration officials said. Trump repeatedly told advisers that Fisher should be the company, administration officials said, and he has remained focused on the cost of the wall and how slow its progress has been.
Army Corps of Engineers officials evaluated Fisher’s proposal and said that it didn’t meet the requirements of the project — and that the proposal was cheaper because it wasn’t as high-quality, or as sophisticated, in their view.
Finally, officials, including then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, went into the Oval Office this spring and explained that Fisher could bid but that the company’s proposal needed to change.
Nielsen and Semonite separately explained that the president could not just pick a company. Nielsen did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump remained frustrated, saying that Fisher said it could build the barrier cheaper and faster. “He said these other guys were full of s—,” an official said.
Fisher was added to a pool of competitors after the Army Corps came under pressure from the White House, administration officials said.
On Tuesday, after Semonite was called to a meeting with Cramer on Capitol Hill, the senator posted a photograph of the encounter to Twitter, saying he had “discussed border wall construction” with Army Corps leaders.
Here’s Trump trying to back away after it was shown that this contractor doesn’t know what it’s doing. And also likely because his buddy Barr revealed that the SDNY was investigating:
Trump is a criminal and virtually everyone he surrounded himself with is corrupt as well. Add this to the list of criminal schemes that have to be investigated by the Truth Commission in 2021.
Kris Kobach: I talked with the president, and the “We Build the Wall Effort’’ came up. The president said ‘the project has my blessing, and you can tell the media that.’