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.”
When asked later about it, Trump indicated that he had known a bit more. “I was reading — the little I know about it, I got from you [the media]. I was reading, where they were having construction problems with the wall that they were — they had a small area just to show people that they could build a wall, and they were having a lot of problems where it was toppling over and other things. And I didn’t like it because I didn’t want to be associated with that.”
What was not mentioned during Trump’s Thursday exchange with White House reporters was the name of the North Dakota construction firm, Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. Trump was referring to Fisher when he said “they were having construction problems.” Trump was also correct that it was Fisher that had gone to work for Bannon’s We Build the Wall, Inc., and “had a small area just to show people that they could build the wall.”
Why did Trump know so much about Fisher although he failed to use its name? Because Fisher’s president, Tommy Fisher, has been actively working White House contacts and lobbying Congress to get government contracts to build Trump’s wall since 2017, when he first contacted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with his firm’s proposal to build an all-concrete prototype.
Fisher was selected as one of eight firms paid between $350,000-to-$500,000 to construct a sample 30-foot wide by up to 30-foot long concrete prototype of a border wall, which Trump visited in March 2018. In the end, Fisher’s approach was not accepted.
Later in 2018, Fisher upped its activities. Tommy Fisher was then-Rep. Kevin Cramer’s (R-N.D.) guest at Trump’s State of the Union address where the President reiterated his call for building the wall. Additionally, Fisher began what became a series of appearances on Fox News. He appeared 10 times between January 2018 and May 2019, promoting what he claimed were his company’s innovative ways to build a wall.
Most noted was an appearance on The Ingraham Angle when he said: “If [Trump] allows our team, Fisher Industries, to play, I guarantee, no different than Tom Brady—once we get in we never come out, and if we don’t perform, the president can fire us.”
In April 2019, when the first contracts for the wall were awarded by the Corps of Engineers, Fisher filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), claiming a “highly flawed solicitation and award process.” That was because the firm, which primarily was known for building highways, had not built walls in the states involved. Fisher’s complaint was rejected in July 2019.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported on May 23, 2019, “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 four administration officials.”
Fisher, at that time, having lost out on the first contracts to construct Trump’s border wall, connected with We Build the Wall, Inc.
In June 2019, Fisher finished building a half-mile section of a wall near El Paso, Texas, at Sunland, N.M. on hilly private land. The project was funded by the We Build the Wall group. Fisher published a video to its website contending, it had “total control over all major aspects of this border wall construction project including design, steel procurement, fence fabrication, heavy-haul transportation, grading/excavation, fence installment, and all concrete work.
A Trump favorite, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who also served as a board member of We Build the Wall, praised the project. Despite trouble getting construction permits, the group rapidly finished the project demonstrating that Fisher was capable of constructing walls.
In a promotional video in May 2019, Kobach said, “I’ve spoken to the President about this project on three occasions now and he said — the first time I told him about it — he said, 'Well, you tell the guys at We Build The Wall, that they have my blessing.' And he used those exact words."
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf visited the project and called it a “game changer.” Donald Trump Jr. held a fund-raiser for Build the Wall, and visited the El Paso-area fence, calling it “private enterprise at its finest.”
Work on Fisher’s second privately funded wall, began in November 2019, and was more controversial. It’s the wall that Trump described last Thursday as “having construction problems.” It was built on a three-mile stretch along the Rio Grande River near Mission, Texas. While We Build the Wall put up only $1.5 million, Tommy Fisher announced last January that “he’s mostly self-funding the $42 million project in the Rio Grande Valley,” according to the Texas Monthly. That apparently includes purchase of the land.
Fisher at one point called the Rio Grande project the “Lamborghini” of fences. But months after completion, construction experts, according to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, said there were signs of erosion along and under the fence that threatens its stability and could cause it to topple into the river if not fixed.
The Texas Monthly in January 2020, wrote that Fisher is “gambling that he can then flip the wall, selling it to the Trump administration even though it does not meet federal specifications and the feds have already awarded a contract to build another wall a couple of miles north.”
Meanwhile, despite all Fisher’s problems, it was named as one of 11 contractors pre-approved by the Corps of Engineers to bid for up to $5 billion of budgeted work segments. Under that determination, on Dec. 2, 2019, the Corps of Engineers awarded a $400 million contract to Fisher to design and build, 31 miles of a border wall segment in Yuma County, Arizona. It is to be located along the southern perimeter of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and scheduled for completion in December 2020.
Two days later, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, requested the Defense Department Inspector General review the contract with Fisher, saying that it's a company that President Trump has "frequently touted." That inquiry is still underway.
Fisher has continued to acquire new contracts.
On May 6, 2020, Fisher won a nearly $1.3-billion "task order" for 42 miles of wall in an Arizona segment that is the agency's largest single wall building contract to date. And on August 3, Fisher won another contract to build 17 miles of new border wall in Laredo, Texas, this one for $290 million.
With this last contract, the North Dakota firm has become the largest contractor building Trump’s wall with over $2 billion in awards.
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