During a segment on CNN, the former Koch brothers executive turned White House staffer Marc Short said that Americans needed to “have a serious conversation” about “what the definition of a wall is,” in regards to the U.S.-Mexico border wall that President Trump promised to build.
Short, who led the Never Trump movement inside the pro-mass immigration Koch brothers’ organizations, questioned what exactly a border wall would look like under the administration, while also pushing amnesty for nearly 800,000 illegal aliens shielded by the Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“I think that what the definition of a wall is, is something that we all need to have a serious conversation” about, White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.”
Short said, “in some cases,” it would be a kind of fencing.
“It is a myriad of different structures,” Short said.
Short went on to describe Trump’s reportedly newfound commitment to amnesty for illegal aliens, saying “He feels that these are 800,000 people who came to the United States, no fault of their own, who are productive and working in American society. He wants to find a solution for them.”
“I think that it is for the President to make the final determination in that negotiation,” Short said.
Short’s pro-amnesty comments come almost a week after he made similarcomments during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, where he alleged that the administration could cave to amnesty while receiving tax cuts in exchange.
As Breitbart News reported, Short has a long history of opposing the president and his agenda, as well as working alongside the Koch brothers, two pro-mass immigration billionaires who are major donors to the Republican establishment, as the director of the group Freedom Partners.
In May 2016, during the height of the Republican presidential primary, where Trump was taking the country by storm on his populist-nationalist “America First” agenda, Short was heading an effort to derail the then-front-runner.
At the time, National Review exclusively reported that Short was leading an effort inside the Koch brothers’ organizations to take down Trump and his agenda, partly by supporting Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who infamously helped author the Gang of Eight amnesty bill that would have given the 12 to 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S. a pathway to citizenship:
On a frigid Tuesday in February, a team of top political operatives from the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the umbrella group that controls political activities for the sprawling donor network led by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, arrived in Kansas for a meeting that they hoped would turn the tide of the presidential campaign.
They’d set aside $150 million to spend on paid media alone, to be spread across campaigns at the federal, state, and local levels. Yet they had not been authorized to spend a dime on the White House race.
Marc Short, then president of Freedom Partners, wanted to change that. He led a faction inside the Koch network that had become convinced of the need to neutralize Donald Trump before his momentum made him unstoppable. Fresh off Trump’s landslide victory in New Hampshire one week earlier, and staring down another likely Trump win in South Carolina that Saturday, Short and his lieutenants had come to Wichita to present Charles Koch with a detailed, eight-figure blueprint for derailing the Republican front-runner on Super Tuesday, when eleven states would vote. They hoped to get the green light to hammer Trump with ads in the states where he was most vulnerable.
Just a week after Short’s efforts to lead a full-fledged Koch-funded operation against Trump, he signed onto the Rubio campaign.
After Short left the Koch’s Freedom Partners, he praised the open borders, billionaire donors, saying, “Charles and David have built an amazing network of donors and activists, and their investments in future generations will pay huge dividends.”
Short’s appearance on CNN comes after Trump said what a border wall would look like, claiming it is merely “new renovation of old and existing fences and walls,” promptly outraging his supporter base online.
Though Trump has said he now wants the 800,000 DACA recipients to remain in the U.S., denying that the move is ‘amnesty,’ any deal involving legalization of illegal aliens could trigger a flood of at least four to six million legal immigrants, as Breitbart News reported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.