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kris kobach
Fresh off 'MAGA Field Trip,' Steve Bannon, Erik Prince Among Right-Wing Crew Plotting Out Privatized Border Wall
New reporting by Politico sheds light on big players behind anti-immigrant effort
Feb 05, 2019
What brings together the likes of the president's former chief strategist Steve Bannon; voter disenfranchiser Kris Kobach; notorious Blackwater founder Erik Prince; controversial former sheriff David Clarke; immigration hardliner and former Congressman Tom Tancredo; and offensive meme spewer and former baseball great Curt Schilling?
A move to supplement President Donald Trump's proposed "wall" on the southern border with a privatized wall.
According to new reporting by Politico, the right-wing crew got together--though Prince just phoned in--for the first time last week at the border town of McAllen, Texas for "a kind of #MAGA field trip."
The New York Times reported on the privatized wall effort late last month, but Politico is the first to report on Bannon's involvement.
"Do we have a billion dollars right now? No. But can we raise one- or two-hundred million dollars? No doubt about it," Bannon told the news outlet. As of this writing, the new GoFundMe page has raised a little over $20 million of its $1 billion goal.
Trump has given the effort his "blessing," Kobach asserted to the Times.
The project reportedly got its start in Iraq war veteran Brian Kolfage's GoFundMe page for wall funding. That evolved into a new fundraising effort and the formation of the nonprofit "We Build the Wall."
A FAQ page for new group asserts that it is "presently working with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol experts and other U.S. border security service professionals" to target areas for a wall, which would rely on consenting landowners. "The company will build the wall mile-by-mile in strategic locations based on a variety of factors. We will build as much wall as we can based on feasibility, land use, and funding," it continues.
That company is reportedly the Israel-based Magal Security Systems, which is behind apartheid barriers that besiege Palestinians.
The crew is getting ready to tout their project as soon as Friday at a town hall in Tucson, Arizona and later this month at the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Kolfage, who's listed as a key part of the We Build the Wall team, told Politico, "we're going to give it our all."
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'Smoking Gun': White House Finally Admits Bannon and Kobach Were Racist Minds Behind Scheme to Rig 2020 Census
"Big big deal," said journalist Josh Marshall, in reaction to the news. "So the white nationalists—Bannon and Kobach—are the guys behind the plan to rig the census to disenfranchise blue state voters."
Oct 11, 2018
Despite earlier saying he knew nothing about how the effort was orchestrated within the White House, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has revealed that he does remember putting Steve "Let-them-call-you -racist" Bannon, the white nationalist former top advisor to President Trump, in touch with then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach in order to provide guidance about adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census--an effort that drew outrage from voting rights advocates when it was introduced by the administration earlier this year.
"It's obvious that the administration hates immigrants and wants to deny big, blue states federal resources and political power by undercounting them in the Census. This is a perversion of the Constitution for partisan gain and a direct attack on anyone who doesn't meet Steve Bannon's warped approval." --Steven Choi, NYIC
"Big big deal," tweeted journalist Josh Marshall, in reaction to the news. "So the white nationalists--Bannon and Kobach--are the guys behind the plan to rig the census to disenfranchise blue state voters."
"Trump wants to distract us with Kanye West in the White House, while news leaks that his Commerce Secretary conspired with a white supremacist to rig the Census," said Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. "It's obvious that the administration hates immigrants and wants to deny big, blue states federal resources and political power by undercounting them in the Census. This is a perversion of the Constitution for partisan gain and a direct attack on anyone who doesn't meet Steve Bannon's warped approval."
Journalist Ari Berman, called the revelation--contained in a filing by the Department of Justice as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the administration--a "smoking gun" in proving that the origin story of the policy spun by the White House was false and that it was, as many critics assumed, conceived as a conscious effort to impact future redistricting of communities by suppressing participation in the next census by immigrants and others:
In the filing by the DOJ, obtained by The Hill, as the outlet reports:
Ross recalls Bannon calling him in the spring of 2017 to ask if he would be willing to speak to then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach about Kobach's idea of adding the potential question to the upcoming census.
The document is a response to written questions from the New York Attorney General in the discovery phase of a lawsuit New York and 16 other blue-leaning states have brought challenging the administration's decision to ask about citizenship.
As Talking Points Memo reports, Ross' admission in the filing "is contrary to previous testimony he gave to Congress in which he said he was not aware of being contacted by anyone in the White House about adding a citizenship question."
In fact, Ross was so bent on avoiding the questions demanded by the lawsuit that he, as the Washington Post earlier reported, went to the U.S. Supreme Court "just days before his deposition was to have taken place" to demand reprieve. While the court declined to block Ross' deposition, he was granted a delay -- an extension that ended at 4:00 pm on Thursday.
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'Stunning': Voting Rights Villain and Trump Sidekick Kris Kobach Refuses to Recuse Himself From Overseeing Recount of His Own Election
"If Kris Kobach wins by 191 votes, guessing he'll temporarily forget his longstanding concern about massive voter fraud."
Aug 08, 2018
Once tasked with overseeing the integrity of the United States' electoral system after spending much of his political career creating obstacles for Americans who want to vote, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach launched his latest attack on elections on Wednesday when he refused to recuse himself from a recount effort in a race he himself ran in.
Kobach was one of seven Republicans to run in the state's primary for governor on Tuesday. As of Wednesday morning, Kobach led incumbent Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer by just 191 votes after technical difficulties in one county, signaling that a recount could be called.
At the state level, the Secretary of State's office oversees all elections and recounts. Kobach argued as the close results came in Tuesday night that because officials in Kansas's 105 counties would coordinate each county's vote tallying effort, it was not necessary for him to recuse himself from overseeing the overall recount.
"The secretary of state's office merely serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all but not actually counting the votes," the former Kansas GOP chairman said.
Kobach's refusal drew ire from election experts and other critics.
"It would be good practice even if not required by state law for an election official to recuse from any recount or legal proceedings surrounding his or her own election efforts," Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, told the Kansas City Star. "A longstanding English and American tradition is that 'no man should be a judge of his own case.' That should apply here."
The election comes eight months after the President's Election Integrity Commission, which President Donald Trump appointed Kobach to run last year, disbanded after facing multiple legal challenges and failing to prove Trump's theory that he lost the popular vote in 2016 due to votes being cast illegally.
As the vice chair of the commission--which embraced blatant racism byrequesting Texas officials flag the voter records of residents with Hispanic surnames--Kobach continued a long pattern of using his political power to attack voting rights.
Kobach has championed the Interstate Crosscheck System, a program that compares states' voter rolls and flags voters with the same name and date of birth in different states, recommending voter purges to states. Earlier this year, a federal judge tossed out a law Kobach had proposed requiring Kansans to prove they were U.S. citizens before voting.
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