Exclusive: Fisher Industries, which claims it can build the barrier faster and cheaper than Army Corps of Engineers, has started work on private section of barrier in New Mexico.
Fisher Industries trucks prepare land on private property in New Mexico, near El Paso, on Wednesday, feet from the grounds of the Casa de Adobe Museum, where International Boundary Marker No. 1 sits in the foreground. President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to three administration officials.
“The President is one of the country’s most successful builders and knows better than anyone how to negotiate the best deals,” said Sarah Sanders, White House press secretary. “He wants to make sure we get the job done under budget and ahead of schedule.” Scott Sleight, an attorney for Fisher, said in a statement Thursday that Fisher Industries is committed to working with the federal government to secure the border and has developed a patent-pending installation system that allows the company to build fencing “faster than any contractor using common construction methods.”
Cramer said Trump likes Fisher because he had seen him on television advocating for his version of the barrier: “He’s been very aggressive on TV,” Cramer said, of the CEO.Trump’s repeated attempts to influence the Army Corps’s contracting decisions show the degree to which the president is willing to insert himself into what is normally a staid legal and regulatory process designed to protect the U.S. government from accusations of favoritism.
Trump has taken an intense interest in the border barrier project, expressing frustration with the pace of progress on a structure he views as key to his reelection campaign. Several administration officials have said the president requires frequent briefings from his staff, and has given specific but shifting instructions to Semonite and DHS leaders on his preferred tastes and design specifications.
The president ordered the reassignment of defense funds to the barrier project after Democrats denied his request for $5 billion. Instead, the agreement to end the government shutdown included $1.4 billion for the barrier. Since then, with Trump promising to build 400 miles of fencing by next year, the Pentagon has pledged to provide at least $2.5 billion more.
Fisher has alleged improprieties with the border wall procurement process and sued the government on April 25. “The Corps said it couldn’t be done, but now the Border Patrol has seen it,” Fisher said, of his construction project, in an interview Wednesday on “The Flag,” a show on North Dakota’s WZFG News. “They’ve been out each day and the proof’s in the pudding, and after that it’s going to open up a whole new narrative about how border security should be handled, who should construct it, and the border agents will finally get what they deserve.
In an earlier meeting with military and DHS officials in the Oval Office, Trump said the government was getting ripped off by current contractors — and that Fisher could do it for less than half the price, and with concrete. “The president got very spun up about it,” said one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Nielsen and Semonite separately explained that the president could not just pick a company. Nielsen did not respond to a request for comment. Cramer said he was glad the president is so involved in the process. Cramer said he was elected to cut through Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy.
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