Wall, Wall, Wall

President Trump’s outgoing Chief of Staff John Kelly spoke with the Los Angeles Times, in what the paper calls “an exclusive two-hour interview.”

Kelly, who is set to leave the Trump Administration on Wednesday told the L.A. Times, his tenure as COS was “best measured by what the President did not do,” while Kelly was at his side.

Asked about some of the Administration’s most unpopular moves, for example, Family Separation at the Southern Border, Kelly told the paper, “What happened was Jeff Sessions, he was the one that instituted the zero-tolerance process on the border that resulted in both people being detained and the family separation. He surprised us.” 

Former Attorney Jeff Sessions who left the Administration the day after the November Midterms, where Republican’s lost the House of Representatives majority to the Democrats, announced the heavily criticized “zero tolerance,” policy in May of 2018.

Kelly, when asked about the border wall funding fight, as the government remains partially shutdown with signs of little hope it ends before the new Congress is sworn in on January 3rd, 2019, Kelly explains, that it really isn’t a wall, “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” he adds, “The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats. But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”

Kelly also explained that during his tenure he asked Custom’s and Border Patrol what they needed to make the border more secure, he tells the L.A. Times, they requested, “a physical barrier in certain places, we need technology across the board, and we need more people.”

For what it’s worth: Appearing on Fox News, White House Counsel to the President Kellyanne Conway, told them, the argument over the wall is a “silly semantic argument.”

“It is a silly semantic argument because people who just want to say ‘wall, wall, wall’ want it to be a four-letter word and not respect what Customs and Border Patrol and ICE tell us they need, which is enhancements at the border.”

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She goes on to say, “There may be a wall at some places, there may be steel slats, there may be technological enhancements, but always saying ‘wall’ or ‘no wall’ is being very disingenuous and turning a complete blind eye to what is a crisis at the border when it comes to the drugs pouring in.”

On Saturday President Trump via Twitter blamed Democrats for the deaths of two migrant children and added that if we had the wall they would not have happened.