For ages, Tommy Fisher has dreamed of building an epic piece of infrastructure. A decade ago, Nevada hired him to construct what’s apparently the longest cathedral arch bridge in the world, but it didn’t make him a household name.
This is hilarious.
We Build the Wall (WBTW)
sent Fisher an initial payment of $1.5 million, for what he says ended up being a $30 million job. He ordered a bunch of steel and started clearing vegetation. But the project was soon overshadowed by the group’s antics. Eventually, Fisher got the sense that Bannon’s gang wasn’t necessarily committed to another wall. After he called WBTW for another payment and it never came, he parted ways with the organization, and started funding the project with company money.
Trump fan now wants to
sell his wall for $42m. Trump fan gets sad because
no government agency will buy his boondoggle that Steve Bannon sure as hell ain’t paying for. But Trump fan is hoping he can scam my Governor into wasting my tax dollars on it:
Fisher says he’s also enlisted former CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas Homan as paid consultants in hopes they’ll have influence with Texas Governor Greg Abbott. In June, Fisher was handed a potential lifeline when Abbott announced that Texas was getting into the wall-building business.
Now Trump fan is getting hit with a massive tax bill from the Hidalgo County Appraisal District:
Meanwhile, the tax bill on the land has skyrocketed. The property has been reassessed at 100 times its previous value because of a county quirk that now classifies it as “commercial” rather than agricultural land. Fisher, who says he’s disputing the assessment, is on the hook.
Oh yeah, Trump fan built the wall on the flood plain and cleared all the shrubbery protecting the riverbanks from erosion and now the river is eating at the foundations of his wall despite the initial 30 foot distance from the Rio Grande. Because of that even the Trump Administration was forced to file suit against the wall.
Fisher was sued by an obscure government agency, the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), which argued diverted water could end up displacing the U.S.-Mexico borderline.
And Trump fan was sued by the National Butterfly Center:
Fisher was sued by the National Butterfly Center, which argued his wall could end up diverting water and debris onto its land in the event of a flood.
But don’t forget that Trump fan is a nice guy.
Fisher stands awkwardly outside the booth, hands in pockets. He’s conservative, too, but Midwest-nice about it and not prone to rants.
As Border Report notes:
Fisher is not named in Thursday’s indictment. But he is a co-defendant in the lawsuit filed by Marianna Treviño Wright and the National Butterfly Center, who has filed a civil defamation lawsuit against We Build the Wall that is pending in federal court in McAllen, Texas. They contend that they have been at the center of a smear campaign by We Build the Wall organizers who have labeled them as involved in “human trafficking” and “drug smuggling” through various social media posts.
But Trump fan will be just fine as his company was awarded contracts worth $2.5 billion to build 135 miles’ worth of federal wall sections near Yuma and Nogales in Arizona and El Paso and Laredo in Texas.
Following a request by a Democratic congressman, the U.S. Department of Defense is conducting an audit to determine whether one of the contract awards was politically motivated; in a statement, the Army Corps of Engineers said it goes to “great lengths to ensure the integrity of our contracting process.”
His federal wall contracts are in limbo, too. While border wall construction is currently paused, it’s unclear if it will stay that way. In May the Biden administration announced that it was canceling wall-building contracts Trump paid for by diverting funds from the Department of Defense.
Oh but the grift!
There’s still hope for the big score, too. When we were at the border, Scott Hennen, the radio host, helpfully floated the idea of finding 20 patriotic billionaires to pay $1 million each to help sustain the private wall, but that scheme is thus far 20 billionaires short.
😂