The Cascade of False Claims by Trump/Pence to Support Trump's Wall

There's still 20 minutes before Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, a/k/a the liar-in-chief, commences his Oval Office address to the nation stunt, and a piece in CNN looks at the lies and falsehoods floated to date to support Trump's wall which is only wanted by Trump's racist, ignorant, white supremacist base.  It's worth a read so that you will be prepared for the lies that Trump may likely repeat (assuming you watch it and don't simply wait for the Democrat response before tuning in). Here are article excerpts:

Donald Trump and his allies have launched a full-court press to convince Americans, and skeptical lawmakers, that there is a crisis on the Southern border, and the only way to fix it is to approve billions of dollars for Trump's signature border wall.

But senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have relied on misleading statements to make their case. Trump, who is also prone to repeating debunked talking points about immigration, is set to deliver his Oval Office address about the topic on Tuesday night. Here's a breakdown of the most recent misleading claims, the half-truths and everything in between, along with the fuller picture, based on official statistics and reporting from CNN.

Illegal border-crossings. In each of his three television interviews Tuesday morning, Pence led his argument that there is a crisis on the southern border with one figure: 60,000. . . . Pence's use of that statistic is misleading at best because it gives the impression that 60,000 people are caught trying to sneak in every month. He is lumping in people who presented themselves at ports of entry in addition to those who were apprehended illegally crossing the border.

Official statistics from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tell the fuller story.

Of the 62,456 individuals who were apprehended or deemed inadmissible at the southern border in November, 10,600 presented themselves at legal US ports of entry and were ultimately deemed inadmissible. [W]hile border apprehensions increased in those months, they didn't surge in an unprecedented fashion as the administration is claiming.  Even including the number of individuals denied admission at designated ports of entry, there were comparable increases and decreases in previous years. The numbers surged to similar levels in late 2016 only to drop again in early 2017, according to CBP numbers.

Terrorists entering the US from Mexico.For months, Trump has raised the specter of "terrorists" crossing the US-Mexico border. He brought this up repeatedly before the 2018 midterms when a caravan of migrants, primarily from impoverished Central American countries, marched through Mexico toward the US border. These claims were debunked at the time as exaggerations and speculation. Though they've made a comeback this year. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was fact-checked live on Fox News when she said Sunday "nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border." Recent reporting revealed that the actual number encountered on the southern border is nowhere near the staggering 4,000 figure. An administration official told CNN that only about a dozen non-citizens on the terrorism watch list who were stopped at the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2018. That is a tiny fraction of all known or suspected terrorists who tried to enter or travel to the US in that timeframe. Additionally, a State Department report from 2016 said there was "no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico" to sneak into the United States. 'Special interest alien' semantics.
In a fact sheet released Monday, DHS reiterated claims that last year, the agency "encountered more than 3,000 'special interest aliens'" at the southern border. Nielsen touted this number last week from the Rose Garden after Trump publicly pressed lawmakers to fund his wall proposal. There's no uniform definition of the term "special interest alien," but DHS defines a "special interest alien" as a non-US person "who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially pose a national security risk to the United States or its interests."  Someone might be flagged for additional vetting because of where they're traveling from or how they arrived in the US.  That doesn't mean, however, that all "special interest aliens" are terrorists, according to DHS. . . . a Syrian Christian who asks for asylum, for example, would be classified as a "special interest alien" simply because he/she is from Syria. According to a report from the libertarian think tank, no "special interest alien" has produced a terrorist attack on US soil.

Drugs coming across the border.The influx of illegal drugs is another key element of the Trump administration's case for building a wall to address what they describe as a crisis at the border. Pence said Tuesday that "90% of all the heroin that comes into this country, that claims the lives of 300 Americans every week, comes through our southern border."

The majority of hard narcotics seized by Customs and Border Protection come through ports of entry either in packages, cargo or with people who attempt to enter the US legally. . . . the majority of the heroin flow on the southern border into the US is through privately owned vehicles at legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods, according to the DEA's 2018 annual drug threat assessment.

A closer look at the numbers shows that in fiscal year 2018, Customs and Border Protection seized 67,292 pounds of methamphetamine at legal ports of entry, compared with 10,382 pounds by Border Patrol agents in between ports, based on available data.

Russia’s Oval Office Victory Dance

Among the most bizarre images of Der Trumpenführer this past week was that of him laughing it up with Russian Foreirn minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office just hours after Trump fired FBI Director, James Comey.  Even more bizarre, American journalists were barred for the meeting while a Russian photographer were allowed entrance.  It's as if Trump wanted to rub his Russian ties in the face of every American who questions the agenda and goals of Vladimir Putin.  Especially, since Putin had requested the meeting and the photo op for his own aggrandizement. A piece in Politico looks at the strange and troubling meeting and Trump's apparent desires to promote Russia's interests at the likely experience of America.  Here are article excerpts:

When President Donald Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on Wednesday just hours after firing the FBI director who was overseeing an investigation into whether Trump’s team colluded with the Russians, he was breaking with recent precedent at the specific request of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The chummy White House visit—photos of the president yukking it up with Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak were released by the Russian Foreign Ministry since no U.S. press was allowed to cover the visit—had been one of Putin’s asks in his recent phone call with Trump, and indeed the White House acknowledged this to me later Wednesday. “He chose to receive him because Putin asked him to,” a White House spokesman said of Trump’s Lavrov meeting. “Putin did specifically ask on the call when they last talked.”

The images of Trump putting his arm genially on Lavrov’s back—and a later White House official readout of the meeting that said Trump “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia”—couldn’t have come at a more fraught political moment for Trump, amid a barrage of bipartisan criticism of his firing of FBI Director James Comey.

Lavrov was right where he has always wanted to be Wednesday: mocking the United States while being welcomed in the Oval Office by the president himself.

Russia’s longest-serving foreign minister of the post-Cold War era, Lavrov has worked alongside Putin since 2004 with a single-minded goal: to make Russia great again—and all the better if he could do so at America’s expense. So, for Lavrov and Putin, the scene was more than just a bizarre moment of Washington political theater in which they played walk-on roles. It was vindication, proof that their tilt toward Trump after years of tense dealings with two successive American presidents could yet pay off.

In some key respects, this already is a down payment on the Russian reset Trump promised on the campaign trail.

“For Lavrov, just having this meeting and the photo-op itself is a big demonstration to the world and to the Russian people that Russia is back, and that isolation has failed, irrespective of whether anything gets agreed,” said Alexander Vershbow, who served as ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush and as a top Pentagon and NATO official with the Russia portfolio during Barack Obama’s presidency.

I’ve spent dozens of hours in recent years debriefing American officials about Lavrov, and they are united—Democrats and Republicans alike—in believing that the Russian foreign minister is both a) an ideologically flexible nationalist who is happy to engage in America-bashing when it suits his purposes and equally happy praising someone like Trump if necessary because b) his great value to Putin has been his world-class skills as a propagandist and purveyor of “fake news” on a par with Trump himself.

This is what John Negroponte, a Republican who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations when Lavrov was his Russian counterpart and then as Bush’s director of national intelligence, told me back in 2013: “His two objectives were always the same: Veto things for the greater glory of Russia and to take the Americans down wherever possible.”

[I]f Trump does not have a Russia policy, Putin certainly has a U.S. policy, these experts believe, with priorities that include getting Trump to go along with Putin’s plan for some sort of settlement to the long-running Syria civil war that leaves Russia and its client the Assad regime with control over at least a significant chunk of Syria’s territory. On Ukraine, given that lifting the sanctions against Russia imposed after its takeover of Crimea appears to be a nonstarter on Capitol Hill, Putin seems to be willing to play for time.

Inside Trump’s fledgling administration, all this comes as there are still few top officials who have been appointed to take charge of the Russia portfolio.

Both Trump and Putin, as one of the Russia hands told me, are experts at spinning alternate realities. But will they try to spin each other? How can you get along and really forge a working partnership, he wondered, when for each, “their attachment to the truth is so tenuous”?