I wrote about this before, and last night 60 Minutes did a full expose:
This summer, Federal agents arrested President Trump’s former Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut. Bannon and three others are accused of defrauding donors to We Build the Wall, a conservative fund raising campaign that raised millions of dollars to privately build sections of wall on the border with Mexico. Prosecutors say the defendants took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fund for their own personal use. They’ve pleaded not guilty. Before the arrests, We Build the Wall had completed two walls. Less than a mile in New Mexico and three miles in Texas.
Tonight, you will hear about the contractor who built both of those walls, Fisher Sand and Gravel out of North Dakota, and how they leveraged those jobs to earn billions of dollars in government contracts with support from President Trump. Last month, reports surfaced that one of their private walls was falling apart. So, we went to Mission, Texas, to see for ourselves.We drove over the flood levee, down a dusty road that dead-ends at a sugar cane farm. And there it was. The so-called “wall” looks more like a fence. It’s steel spine curves three miles down the banks of the Rio Grande and stretches upwards of 18 feet high. It sits on private property, so the only way for us to get a better look is from the water. From here, it appears fine. But Javier Peña, an attorney who represents neighboring landowners, noticed erosion from summer storms was quite literally covered up. He hired engineers to inspect it.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What have you seen?
Javier Peña: Massive erosion. There’s cracks in the foundation. The foundation is crumbling. There was an 8 foot hole under the fence. There are these trenches all along the wall, the sand just washing away. From the experts that have actually reviewed the site there is no differing opinions.
Sharyn Alfonsi: What is the opinion?
Javier Peña: That it’s not a question of whether it will fail, it’s when it’s going to fail and it already started to fail.
Of course it has.
This is my favorite part. This guy went on Fox repeatedly and said he could build the wall more cheaply:
Tommy Fisher’s showcase wall seems to have paid off. Despite questions about his partners and the quality of his work, Fisher Sand and Gravel has been awarded almost $2 billion in government contracts to build miles of wall.
Javier Peña: We live in a very divided country right now. We Build the Wall, Kolfage and Fisher took advantage of that, found a way to target that fight and profit off of it.
Sharyn Alfonsi: And when you say profit. It’s not just filling the coffers of We Build the Wall. I mean, Fisher now has almost $2 billion of contracts to build more walls–
Javier Peña: Of taxpayer-funded contracts to build more walls when this wall is already falling down.
So how did that happen? Three former administration officials tell 60 Minutes that President Trump quote “pressured” government officials to direct wall contracts to Fisher Sand and Gravel.Those same sources say that on March 7, 2019, the president summoned DHS officials and Lt. General Todd Semonite, who ran the Army Corps of Engineers, to the Oval Office.
Sources inside the room say the president wanted to know why Tommy Fisher, who promised he could build the wall cheaper and faster, wasn’t selected to build it and “exploded into a tirade.”
They say DHS officials explained to the president that it was inappropriate for the president to influence the bidding process. But according to those sources, the “pressure continued” with a handwritten note from the president, an email from his personal secretary and calls from his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Administration officials did not respond to our request for a comment.
[…]
Sharyn Alfonsi: What is the problem with the president advocating for a specific contractor?
Bennie Thompson: It’s against the procurement regulations of the federal government.
Fisher Sand and Gravel has a checkered past. In 2009, the company admitted to tax fraud. They’ve racked up thousands of environmental and safety violations in six states, and almost $2 million in fines.
Sharyn Alfonsi: Do those things figure in typically when you’re– when you’re deciding who should get a contract?
Bennie Thompson: Fisher could potentially have been debarred from bidding on any federal contracts. But they weren’t.Bennie Thompson: The president made no bones about his support for Fisher. And– and guess what? Fisher got the contract. It speaks for itself.
Yes, it speaks for itself.
He unethically harragued the government to give this joker 2 billion in contracts because he saw him on Fox and the guy said he could build the wall cheaper and faster. That’s what impressed him. Nothing unusual in that, of course. He has put a radiologist he saw on Fox in charge of the global pandemic because he backed his view that we can open up the economy fully even as bodies are piling up all over the country.
This is how he’s running the government. And elected Republicans know all about it. They do not care.