Pelosi invokes Ronald Reagan to attack Trump's 'obscene' border wall

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., invoked former President Ronald Reagan to criticize two immigration bills the GOP was set to vote on Thursday. Pelosi cited a speech Reagan delivered on Jan. 19, 1989, one day before he was set to step down from office. "Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors," Pelosi said, quoting Reagan on the House floor. "It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world." "'For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans,' of new Americans, he said, 'that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond," she added. Pelosi didn't quote Reagan's next line, but he said the U.S. leads the world because "we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world."

Democrats have railed against President Trump's policy of tough border enforcement, and have said it has led to the "cruel" treatment of immigrant families, some of whom have been separated as the adults are prosecuted for illegal entry. The Trump administration has said said it's only enforcing border laws that went unenforced under President Barack Obama. While the Trump administration is not looking to shut down legal immigration, it has suggested reducing legal immigration by about half from current levels. Pelosi said the two Republican bills that could get votes today would harm immigrants, and are aimed at helping Trump build his "obscene" border wall. "Today, we are considering … two Republican bills that insult our nation's values and tarnish our heritage, as the president said, as a beacon of hope and opportunity," she said.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/pelosi-invokes-ronald-reagan-to-attack-trumps-obscene-border-wall

House immigration bills on the brink of failure

House Republicans on Thursday were poised to reject legislation that would reform immigration policy, provide border security and end separation of illegal immigrant families. Conservative and moderate opposition to two immigration reform bills was mounting Thursday morning, and key negotiators suggested even the compromise measure designed to collect more GOP votes was headed for rejection. “I don’t know that there is enough time to work it out before the vote today,” Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., who is head of the House Freedom Caucus, a conservative faction of Republicans.

There were no plans as of noon to cancel the vote, and Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., announced Thursday morning the House will move forward with the two bills. When asked whether Ryan would take up a separate bill dealing with family separation at the border if the two bills fail, Ryan said, "we will cross that bridge if we get to it." He said the bills gave lawmakers a chance to express their views on immigration reform and called them "pretty darn good immigration measures," that President Trump would sign. "We are giving members the ability to vote for the bill of their preference," Ryan said.

But Meadows cited major “drafting errors” in the compromise bill as part of the reason he is not going to support the compromise bill, which Ryan wrote. Meadows and conservatives are also angry that they are not going to vote on a modified version of a more conservative bill authored by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

But some moderates are also opposed to the legislation. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, said the bill provides too complicated a path to citizenship for Dreamers, who came here illegally as children. Hurd also opposes the border wall funding and says the bill does not adequately address family separations at the border. “I've said time and time again that a long-term solution must be bipartisan, and I will continue to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle so that we can actually solve these problems once and for all,” Hurd said. Meadows said the House now needs to take up a bill that would make it legal to keep children with parents who are detained for crossing the border illegally. “If both of these bills fail it is incumbent upon us to circle back,” Meadows said.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/congress/house-immigration-bills-on-the-brink-of-failure

Roger Stone: My meeting with Russian national part of Peter Strzok's 'insurance policy'

Trump ally Roger Stone believes FBI agent Peter Strzok set up his meeting with a Russian national offering political dirt on Hillary Clinton in exchange for $2 million as part of Strzok's alleged "insurance policy." “I think it's the first known example of the Peter Strzok insurance policy,” Stone said during an interview on Fox News late Wednesday. “I think it was an FBI plant seeking to entrap me and compromise Trump."

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Stone and former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo were contacted in May 2016 by a man identifying himself as Henry Greenberg, who claimed to have damaging information on Clinton. Stone met with Greenberg at a restaurant in Florida, but told Caputo in a text message afterwards that it had been a "waste of time" because Greenberg wanted "big" money for the opposition research. Both Stone and Caputo allege that the meeting was a setup by U.S. law enforcement during the 2016 campaign to pin then-candidate Donald Trump with Russian collusion.

In a 2015 court filing reviewed by the Post that related to his immigration status, Greenberg said he was a Russian national who had provided information to the FBI for 17 years. However, the Post noted there was no evidence to suggest Greenberg was working for the FBI in his interactions with Stone. The meeting with Stone, who previously told Congress he did not have any contact with Russians in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, is being scrutinized by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the federal Russia investigation. Strzok is the FBI agent, formerly assigned to Mueller's Russia probe, who wrote anti-Trump text messages to Lisa Page, his FBI colleague and mistress, during the 2016 campaign. In one disparaging email, Strzok suggested an "insurance policy" against a Trump victory.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/roger-stone-my-meeting-with-russian-national-part-of-peter-strzoks-insurance-policy

How did Peter Strzok's notorious text stay hidden so long?

It was the most damaging of all the damaging texts exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. On Aug. 8, 2016, in the second week of the Trump-Russia investigation on which both were working, Page texted Strzok to say, "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" Strzok responded, "No. No he won't. We'll stop it." The Justice Department gave Congress Page's "not ever going to become president" text months ago, when it produced thousands of texts to Hill investigators. But lawmakers — and the public — did not learn of the explosive second part of the exchange — Strzok's "We'll stop it" answer — until last Thursday, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on the Clinton email investigation was released. The newly-revealed text was devastating on its face. But it also raised eyebrows among Republicans who immediately asked why it had been not been turned over to lawmakers months ago.

"Why wasn't that given to Congress?" House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked on Fox News the day the Horowitz report was released. "Why did I find out about that today at noon?" Turns out there was more to the story. Horowitz didn't know about the text, either — for quite a long time. The Justice Department failed to turn it over to him, and he didn't discover it on his own until the investigation was nearly over. At hearings before the House and Senate this week, Horowitz told how he found the text, and while he pointed no fingers, his account raised questions about the Justice Department's actions. At the Senate hearing Monday, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah., asked Horowitz how he got the text. The inspector general explained that the FBI first turned over tens of thousands of texts, gathered by the bureau's internal data collection and preservation software. But then it was discovered that there was a period — roughly from mid-December 2016 to mid-May 2017 — when there were no texts at all.

That was, it hardly needs be said, an extremely important time in the Trump-Russia investigation. There had been a flaw in the FBI's collection system, Horowitz said. Searching for the missing texts, Horowitz took possession of Strzok's and Page's phones and "undertook a series of steps to seek to exploit, to extract the missing text messages from the phones." It wasn't easy. First, the IG's office used its own resources to try to recover the missing texts. That was partially successful. Then it went to an outside contractor, who provided some "additional tools" to perform a "second extraction." That picked up more texts.

The IG's office then went to the Department of Defense, and "they gave us those tools and we used that and extracted more text messages," Horowitz said. Finally, Horowitz's staff went back to the FBI and did a final search — this was just a few weeks ago, in May — and discovered that the phone itself "had a database on it that was actually also doing a collection of text messages." Using that method, on their fourth run through the data, the IG staff discovered the "We'll stop it" text from Aug. 8, 2016. "It turned out that the FBI wasn't aware that that database on there, which was supposed to be an operating function, was actually collecting data," Horowitz said. But there was something odd about it all. The Strzok "We'll stop it" text did not come from that period of time, December 2016 to May 2017, when the FBI system was not working. It came from August 2016, when the FBI system was supposedly collecting every message. That was the period of time from which the FBI originally turned over tens of thousands of Strzok-Page texts. And yet, that one-line message — "We'll stop it" — was not turned over to the IG, and not turned over to Congress, either. "It's now clear to us that the — even when the software at the FBI was collecting text messages, because the August 8th period was within the collection period, we had the incoming Page to Strzok text, we didn't have the response," Horowitz told the Senate. "It's now clear to us that even outside this blackout period, we're not convinced that the FBI was collecting, for obvious reasons, 100 percent of the text messages."

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/how-did-peter-strzoks-notorious-text-stay-hidden-so-long