The Lucrative Border Wall Business

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — Last Thursday, President Trump was asked by reporters about the arrest earlier that day of his former campaign manager and early White House aide, Steve Bannon.  Bannon and three associates had been charged with allegedly defrauding donors to an organization called We Build the Wall, Inc.  Back in 2019, when the administration was having trouble getting money from Congress, the group raised private contributions to finance sections of Trump’s border wall with Mexico.

At first, Trump said, “I know nothing about the project, other than I didn’t like — when I read about it, I didn’t like it. I said, ‘This is for government. This isn’t for private people.’ And it sounded, to me, like showboating.”

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