October 21st, 2019 Chris Wallace: Top Republican Puts Chances Of Trump’s Removal At 20 Percent

While speaking with Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney on “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace said that a "well-connected" Republican source in Washington had put the chances of enough Republicans voting to remove Donald Trump at 20 percent. The revelation calls into question the conventional wisdom that Republicans will vote to protect Trump in a Senate trial.

During the interview, Wallace cited Senate Majority Leader McConnell’s op-ed in the Washington Post calling President Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds in Syria “a grave mistake” and last week’s House vote rebuking the president in which 129 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote against Trump’s Syria policy. Wallace then said that he had “talked to a very well-connected Republican in Washington, someone whose name you would know well, who says that if the House votes to impeach and it gets to a trial in the Senate, there's now a 20 percent chance enough Republicans would vote with Democrats to impeach the president.”

When asked to respond, Mulvaney said, "That’s just absurd. The comment about the 20 percent is just a person who clearly doesn't know what they're talking about."

Mulvaney added that the president recognized that it was “not politically popular in this town to make the decision that he made to move the troops out of Syria. He ran on it. He told people he would do it if he won and he’s doing it now.”

When Wallace asked if there was concern that the president was losing support in Congress, Mulvaney responded, “The president is extraordinarily popular back home, more popular in the swing districts now that impeachment has started.”

Wallace did not say which Republican had given him the estimate, but Republican elected officials seem more likely to criticize the president in the wake of Trump’s Syria decision and the subsequent Turkish invasion of Kurdish territory. In addition to Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and others have spoken out against President Trump’s policy of retreat.

To remove Trump from office, the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. If all 45 Democrats vote to convict in the Senate trial, it would take at least 22 Republican votes, more than 40 percent of the Republican caucus, to remove Mr. Trump. While that seems like long odds, if the president’s behavior continues to become more worrisome to his own party, the chances of removal could continue to increase.

If Republicans continue to desert the president, it also increases the chances that Mr. Trump will be pressured to resign and leave office under his own terms rather than submit to a Senate trial with its possible humiliating result. Two other presidents have been impeached, but, if convicted by the Senate, Donald Trump would be the first and only president to have been forcibly removed from office.

Recent Gallup polling shows that 52 percent of Americans support Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. In 1998, only 32 percent agreed that Bill Clinton should be impeached and removed. The share of Americans who though Richard Nixon should be impeached and removed was 38 percent in 1974 before he resigned.

In the same interview, Wallace also confronted Mulvaney about his claim and subsequent walk-back that the Trump Administration withheld aid from Ukraine as part of a three-part quid pro quo. Mulvaney first denied making the statement, saying, “That’s what people are saying that I said, but I didn’t say that.”

When confronted with the tape of his words, Mulvaney insisted, “I never said there was a quid pro quo, because there isn’t.”

Originally published on the Resurgent

Chris Wallace Sets Record Straight On Terrorists Illegally Crossing From Mexico

A major talking point of the Trump Administration has been that the border wall is vital to national security. As part of their argument, President Trump has made the claim that terrorists have been apprehended crossing the southern border with Mexico. This and similar claims became the focal point of a heated discussion between White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Chris Wallace of Fox News yesterday.

On Fox News Sunday, Wallace cited Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s statement that CBP had stopped more than 3,000 special interest aliens at the southern border and explained that “special interest aliens” are “people who come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist.” Wallace added, “They aren’t terrorists themselves” and noted that the State Department said that there was “no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico.”

Sanders responded, “We know that there are nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists [that] come into our country illegally and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”

Wallace interrupted, “I know that statistic. I didn’t know if you were going to use it, but I studied up on this. You know where those 4,000 people come from, where they are captured? Airports!”

“Not always,” Sanders retorted.

“The State Department says there hasn’t been any terrorist that they’ve found coming across the southern border,” Wallace fired back.

“It's by air, it's by land, it's by sea, it's all of the above,” Sanders answered.

“But they're not coming across the southern border, Sarah,” Wallace said, ‘They're coming and they're being stopped at airports.”

I had also heard the Homeland Security statistics and Trump’s claims about terrorists coming from Mexico. They didn’t ring true. Think about how the Trump Administration reacts when an illegal alien commits a violent. Both perpetrator and victim are featured prominently in talking points and the president’s tweets. Over the past few years, we have seen this pattern with Kate Steinle, Mollie Tibbets, and the recent murder of police Corporal Ronil Singh in California.

But when it comes to terrorists crossing the Mexican border, the Trump Administration has been astonishingly silent. If terrorists were being captured as they crossed the border from Mexico, it seems likely that the Trump Administration would be marching them before the media to make the case for the border wall. They haven’t.

Instead, we have a bait-and-switch. Trump surrogates like Sanders make two separate claims and link them together. On one hand, Sanders makes the verifiable claim that “there are nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists [that] come into our country illegally.” On the other, she offers an opinion that “our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.” Sanders dishonestly leads the viewer to make the erroneous connection that the 4,000 terrorists were apprehended at the Mexican border, when, in fact, they were apprehended at airports.

Border security is a legitimate concern, both at the Mexican border and at airports, but the revelation that the Trump Administration has been purposely misleading the country about how terrorists enter the country undercuts the already shaky case for a border wall.

In fact, current security at the Mexican border seems to be working pretty well. The migrant caravan, which was pitched as an “invasion” in October, is still sitting in Tijuana where its members are waiting to legally apply for asylum. Illegal border crossings have already been declining for years, hitting a 46-year low in 2017. For more than a decade now, most illegal aliens have entered the country legally and overstayed visas rather than sneaking across the Mexican border. By 2014, two-thirds of new illegals were visa overstays.

While it certainly isn’t impossible that terrorists could sneak across the Mexican border, possibly through one of the innumerable tunnels that run underneath current physical barriers, there is no evidence that they are doing so. If conservatives want to make dispassionate policy decisions and use taxpayer money to the greatest advantage for the country, facts support the idea that border security money should be focused toward tracking aliens who enter the country legally on visas and then drop out of sight.

The Trump Administration loses more of its credibility, which is already in short supply, when they make false claims such as advancing the idea that terrorists are streaming across the Mexican border. Kudos to Chris Wallace and Fox News for setting the record straight.

 Originally published on The Resurgent