Leading senators on Monday petitioned multiple Obama administration agencies to stop stonewalling a congressional investigation into the immigration histories of at least 113 foreign-born individuals implicated in terrorist operations after legally entering the United States, according to a copy of the letters.
The latest investigation comes just days after the Washington Free Beacon disclosed that an additional 41 foreign-born individuals who legally entered the United States had been arrested for planning a number of terror attacks.
Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) disclosed Monday that they had been pressuring the Obama administration for months to disclose the immigration histories of these foreign-born individuals implicated in terror plots.
Agencies including the Departments of State and Homeland Security have stonewalled these efforts, declining since mid-2015 to provide Congress additional information. This move has prompted speculation among lawmakers that the administration is withholding information to prevent the exposure of major gaps in the U.S. screening process for new immigrants.
“The American people are entitled to information on the immigration history of terrorists seeking to harm them,” Cruz and Sessions wrote to the secretaries of State and Homeland Security and the attorney general.
Similar requests for information issued sent in August and again in December have not been answered by the administration
The letter cites a recent Free Beacon report detailing that an additional 41 foreign-born individuals had been snagged on terrorism-related charges since 2014. The disclosure of these previously unknown accused terrorists brings the total number of foreigners brought up on terrorism charges to 113.
Sessions and Cruz note that at least 14 of those foreigners accused of terrorism were granted legal entrance to the United States as refugees.
[…]The letter comes amid a debate over immigration and an Obama administration plan to boost the number of refugees granted residence in the United States. Under the administration’s plan, an additional 170,000 new migrants from Muslim-majority countries will enter the country in 2016.
[…]The United States has issued 680,000 green cards to immigrants from Muslim-majority nations during the past five years.
Something to think about, given the permissive attitude of members of the Democrat party when it comes to acts of terrorism committed by radical Islamists. It’s almost as if they would rather punish people who have concerns about safety than do anything to make it harder for terrorists to harm us. Is this what we are paying taxes for? So that politicians can be nice to people who want to kill us? I understand that Democrats love to embrace evil and shame good, in order to achieve their goal of equality, but I don’t think we should be paying them to do it. We’re paying them to protect us, not to expose us to harm.
I think there are a lot of Cruz supporters who are worried about whether Cruz has the financial support to win this race. If we were voting with our hearts, we would pick Cruz because he is the most conservative. But we don’t want to support someone who will run out of money and fold halfway through the campaign.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign raised $20 million during the final three months of 2015, according to the Cruz campaign. The end of the year fundraising total represents a marked increase compared to his third quarter fundraising sum of $12.2 million.
Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe wrote a memo to campaign staff that details how the campaign hauled in $45 million during the 2015 calendar year. More than 300,000 supporters donated to the Cruz campaign, and the average donation amounted to $67.
“Some campaigns are focused solely on a man, some on a movement. Ours is a hybrid of the two built to win,” Roe wrote. “There’s still plenty of work to be done to make Ted the Republican nominee and the next President, but as 2015 comes to a close, we are exactly where we want to be. Go. Fight. Win. This is OUR time!”
Roe’s memo also notes that the campaign has coordinators in each of the 163 congressional districts in the 24 states with nominating contests scheduled before March 15th. The campaign also boasts its success in recruiting more than 175,000 volunteers, and a donor base residing in two-thirds of all zip codes in the United States.
Cruz ranks first in the Washington Examiner‘s newest GOP presidential power rankings.
Cruz’s rival Marco Rubio is getting a lot of big money from pro-gay-rights donors and pro-amnesty donors. He is the favored candidate of the Republican establishment. He is famous for trying to push through an amnesty deal. Cruz is the outsider, and he doesn’t have the support of billionaire establishment donors. Cruz fought to stop Obama’s executive amnesty, so the establishment Republicans hate him and they are giving him no support. That’s why this donation-related news is so encouraging. Cruz is keeping up with the billionaire-backed candidates like Rubio because he has the support of so many individual conservative donors.
But there is even more good news if you look at the state of the PACs who are supporting Cruz.
In the mid-year reports, Cruz’s super-PACs disclosed nearly $38 million [in] donations, which put him second only to former Florida Gov. Bush in outside support.
But unlike Bush’s super-PAC Right to Rise — which has been spending its $103 million rapidly on TV advertising — Cruz’s super-PACs have been sitting on their cash.
Bush isn’t getting any kind of bump in the polls for all this spending by his PACs. Meanwhile, Cruz is in first or second place in so many states even though Cruz PACs have not been spending much money at all!
Here is the latest poll from Real Clear Politics that just came out on Wednesday:
Latest poll for the Nevada Republican primary
I think for people who would like to vote for Cruz but are worried whether he can go the distance, the answer right now is a resounding YES. He’s in a much better position financially than all of the other GOP candidates.
Wow. If you missed tonight’s two CNN debates, you missed two great debates. Wolf Blitzer and Dana Bash show very little if any liberal bias, and the most biased moderator was actually the moderate RINO Hugh Hewitt. Substance, substance, substance.
Let’s look at the two biggest clashes of the night, both between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Cruz vs Rubio on amnesty and border security
The Washington Examiner was the most interesting exchange of the night between Cruz and Rubio, about Rubio’s past support for amnesty.
Excerpt:
Ted Cruz continued his fight with Marco Rubio over immigration and the Florida senator’s initial support of the Gang of Eight bill, which died in 2013.
The Texas senator told CNN’s Dana Bash that “border security is national security.”
“He has attempted to muddy the waters,” Cruz said of Rubio. “But I think that anyone who watched the battle that we had. … There was a time for choosing, as Reagan put it, where there was a battle over amnesty, and some chose to stand with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and support a massive amnesty plan. Others chose to stand with Jeff Sessions and Steve King and the American people and secure the border.”
Cruz then pivoted to tie the immigration issue to national security, arguing that the proposed immigration plan in 2013 had inadequate vetting, including the lack of mandated background checks for those entering the country.
“This issue is directly connected to what we’ve been talking about because he front line with ISIS isn’t just in Iraq and Syria, it’s in Kennedy Airport and the Rio Grande,” Cruz said. “Border security is national security, and one of the most troubling aspects of the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight bill is it gave President Obama blanket authority to admit refugees, including Syrian refugees, without mandating any background checks whatsoever. Now we have seen what happened in San Bernardino when you are letting people in and the FBI can’t vet them, it puts American citizens at risk.
“I tell you if i’m elected president, we will secure the border. We will triple the border patrol,” Cruz said. “We will build a wall that works and I’ll get Donald Trump to pay for it.”
I have the video clip (7 minutes):
You can hear Fiorina trying to jump in there, and I think she hurt herself quite a bit in the debate with her frequent interruptions. Yes, she is well-informed on foreign policy, but no, interruptions did not make her look presidential.
Now, Rubio did try to attack Cruz, claiming that he supported amnesty, and Cruz said that it was false. Who is right?
According to Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review, Cruz is right, and Rubio is lying:
Cruz has cast himself as the Republican field’s most consistent voice against “amnesty” for illegal aliens. Yet Rubio, with an assist from former Senator Rick Santorum, claims that Cruz has actually advocated granting legal status to illegal aliens.
Taken out of context, the charge seems colorable. But under the circumstances as they actually occurred, the proposal Cruz made was a case of intelligent legislating designed to expose the fraudulence of the pro-amnesty position. It was, in this way, reminiscent of smart legislating by Rubio (and, for that matter, by Cruz) that highlighted the folly of President Obama’s Iran deal.
He explains the whole story in the article, and concludes:
Cruz’s objective was to illustrate the fraudulence of the “out of the shadows” blather. Obviously, if the Gang of Eight had been sincere, a grant of limited legal status would have accomplished their purported humanitarian objective. But Cruz knew the Left would bitterly object, revealing that the true “comprehensive immigration reform” agenda was to mint new Democratic voters.
Indeed, Cruz made clear in proposing his amendment that the Gang of Eight would betray millions of legal immigrants who sought U.S. citizenship properly and that it therefore undermined the rule of law. And as the amnesty-friendly Huffington Post reported at the time, the point of Cruz’s amendment was to “take away one of [the Gang of Eight bill’s] central purposes: giving a pathway to citizenship to 11 million undocumented immigrants.”
It is thus remarkable to find Rubio, of all people, depicting Cruz as an amnesty supporter because of Cruz’s attempt to expose the Democratic agenda that Rubio, whether out of naïveté or opportunism, was then promoting.
The troubling thing is that Rubio is lying about this in televised ads, which I think justifies my decision to drop him off my list of acceptable candidates for me. He is conservative on many other things, but when you take his liberal policies and add it to these lies about Cruz, he should not be elected President.
Cruz vs Rubio on the Obama-Clinton invasion of Libya
And here is is Cruz attacking Rubio on his support for the Obama administration’s interventions in Libya:
I supported a boots-on-the-ground invasion and occupation of Syria to remove Assad when he crossed the red line. But Libya was a huge mistake that did more harm than good, and Rubio should not have supported the Obama-Clinton plan to invade Libya. I like projecting American military power and punishing evil, but not in Libya and not in Egypt. I disagree with Cruz on Syria, as he did not want to topple Assad. That would have been a huge win for us against Iran, which is the real power behind Syria – and Hezbollah, too. But that’s a minor disagreement compared to the foul-up in Libya.
Cruz vs Rubio on defense spending
I could not find the video clip for Rubio’s charge that Cruz did not vote for some defense spending bills, but this piece by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard has more details about it. Those charges are damaging, but it turns out that Cruz is innocent of Rubio’s charges. First of all, both Cruz and Rubio voted against those bills, according to Yahoo News. Lindsay, who I often link to on this blog, is a huge Cruz supporter, and she found an article in the Washington Free Beacon that clears Cruz of the charge of being an isolationist:
Rubio said that Cruz’s votes against the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would defund programs vital to the security of the U.S. and its allies. Cruz was one of only two senators, along with libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), to oppose that defense bill in October.
“Three times he voted against the National Defense Authorization Act, which is a bill that funds the troops. It also, by the way, funds Iron Dome and other important programs,” Rubio said, referring to Israel’s air defense platform, which is supported with financial aid from the U.S.
Cruz responded that he opposed the NDAA to fulfill a campaign promise about indefinite detention.
“I voted against the National Defense Authorization Act because when I campaigned in Texas, I told voters in Texas that I would oppose the federal government having the authority to detain U.S. citizens permanently with no due process,” Cruz said.
Rubio responded that individuals who wage war against the U.S. forfeit the constitutional protections of civilians.
“If you’re an American citizen and you decide to join up with ISIS, we’re not going to read you your Miranda rights. You’re going to be treated as an enemy combatant—a member of an army attacking this country,” Rubio said.
While the candidates feuded over civil liberties, both expressed willingness to project power abroad.
“Radical Islamic terrorism will face no more determined foe than I will be,” Cruz said.
“We are the most powerful nation in the world. We need to begin to act like it again,” Rubio said.
However, Cruz introduced an amendment to the NDAA defense spending bill to remove the part about indefinite detention, so that he could go ahead and vote for the rest of the bill:
Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), both of whom are running for president, have joined up with other senators to introduce an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), currently before the Senate, that would ban indefinite detention of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, without being charged or given a trial, unless authorized by Congress.
Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) also put their names on the provision.
“The Constitution does not allow President Obama, or any President, to apprehend an American citizen, arrested on U.S. soil, and detain these citizens indefinitely without a trial,” Cruz said in a statement. “While we must vigorously protect national security by pursuing violent terrorists and preventing acts of terror, we must also ensure our most basic rights as American citizens are protected.”
The amendment had bi-partisan support, but it did not pass – that’s why Cruz voted against the bill. At least he tried to fix it so that he could vote for it while respecting the wishes of his constituents. I thought he came across as informed and hawkish in the debate on Tuesday night, which works for me, although I am all for the Patriot Act and collection of bulk data.
So it turns out that Cruz’s attitude towards Rubio’s dishonest attacks was warranted, and it falls to me to do the investigating that shows who was right and who was wrong. Cruz comes out of the debate squeaky clean, and Rubio comes out looking dirty.
WINTERY KNIGHT 