Evidently, the president woke up Tuesday morning frustrated by the status quo in Washington and determined to do something about it. He tweeted:

“Illegal immigration costs the United States more than 200 Billion Dollars a year. How was this allowed to happen?”

Of course, the president knows how it happens. It happens because of the resistance of the left and its allies in the media against any meaningful effort to secure our borders.

That said, it seems there won’t be a government shutdown after all. The White House understands that congressional Democrats won’t compromise (they already rejected a grand bargain), and the country isn’t in the mood for another Washington “food fight” at Christmas.

Speaking on Fox News yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that the administration was going to work around Congress, saying it had identified “a number of different funding sources” that could get the $5 billion the president wants for a border wall. 

Sanders added, “At the end of the day we don’t want to shut down the government, we want to shut down the border.”

By the way, the media will attack Trump for saying illegal immigration costs us $200 billion, just like they attack him for saying that an unacceptable number of illegal aliens are criminals. 

Well, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has noted that in one six-year period the state of Texas arrested more than 200,000 people who had entered illegally. It turns out that they committed nearly 560,000 crimes!

In addition, ICE recently announced that it arrested more than 158,000 illegal aliens last year.  More than 1,600 had homicide convictions. Nearly 1,300 had convictions for kidnapping. More than 3,700 had been convicted of sexual assault. More than 54,000 had DUI convictions, and more than 55,000 had convictions for dangerous drug offenses.

The left may refuse to admit it, but illegal immigration imposes enormous costs on American taxpayers, and President Trump is right to fight it!

Flynn’s Hearing

The prosecution of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn took another bizarre turn yesterday. 

Rather than coming to an end, as Flynn certainly hoped it would, Judge Emmet Sullivan excoriated Flynn for acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey and for making false statements inside the White House. 

The contentious hearing ended with Flynn agreeing to postpone his sentencing until Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team is done with him. But we have no idea when that will be. 

On Monday two of Flynn’s former business partners were indicted for lobbying on behalf of the Turkish government. Obviously, lobbying for Turkey has nothing to do with Russian meddling in the election or collusion with the Trump campaign. 

And that gets us back to the fundamental problem with the entire Mueller investigation, which has so far spent more than $25 million with no end in sight. 

Unfortunately, in Flynn’s case, it appears as though the FBI leadership deliberately set out to entrap him regarding his perfectly legal conversations with the Russian ambassador in order to justify its ongoing sting operation against Donald Trump. 

In fact, James Comey recently bragged about it, saying he ordered Peter Strzok and another agent to go to the White House to interview Flynn, adding it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more … organized administration.”

Comey’s Con

Fired FBI Director James Comey has been conducting a con job on the American people. He talks a good game about honor and integrity, but Comey has conducted himself like no other FBI director and continues to conduct himself in ways that bring shame to the Bureau. 

After testifying again behind closed doors about his handling of the Hillary Clinton email scandal and the 2016 Russia election investigation, Comey emerged to bash President Trump and congressional Republicans for daring to question him and the FBI.

He took no responsibility for what has happened at the FBI under his tenure. Yet multiple people who worked for him have been fired, demoted or resigned for things they did before Trump took office. And let’s not forget that Comey is an admitted leaker. 

The fired FBI director also asked when congressional Republicans would stand up for the rule of law. Well, under Comey’s leadership the FBI seemingly embraced the idea that it was a fourth branch of government immune from oversight. 

That’s just not true. Congress created and funds the FBI, and the Bureau is part of the executive branch. 

Yet Comey’s arrogance is indicative of the Deep State’s attitude that led to the myriad of abuses we have seen in recent years, and which congressional Republicans are trying expose.