Quid pro quo fodder for impeachment

Cramer blocks a bill at Trump's behest and then a Cramer donor gets a huge contract that the government had already denied?  I'm sure it was a "perfect" deal.

The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security on Wednesday called for an investigation into a $400 million border wall contract awarded this week to North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, a company President Trump personally urged military officials to hire.

In a letter to the Defense Department Office of Inspector General, Rep. BennieThompson (D-Miss.) said there are reasons to be suspicious of the decision to bestow such a large contract on the company. Thompson cited Trump’s repeated promotion of Fisher to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a recent visit by the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to a span of privately financed barrier the firm built outside El Paso.

[...]

Fisher was not among the companies the Army Corps initially selected as qualified bidders on nearly $10 billion in contracts for border barrier construction. But CEO Tommy Fisher made repeat appearances on Fox News and elsewhere to promote his company, claiming his crews could build the structure faster and for less money.

  

If you want something from the government, get yourself on Fox News.

Fisher, a GOP donor, also enlisted Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) to personally lobby the president. Cramer accused the Army Corps of treating Fisher unfairly, and at one point he stalled the confirmation of a White House budget office nominee to force military officials to provide copies of other construction firms’ contract bids.

Last month, Fisher was included for the first time in the pool of qualified eligible bidders, and the $400 million is the company’s only major border wall contract to date.

[...]

Fisher also has worked with an activist group led by former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and other prominent right-wing Trump supporters who are building new border barriers on private land with millions of dollars in online donations.

[...]

The group, We Build the Wall, completed a span of new barrier outside El Paso during the summer, hiring Fisher to perform the work. Chad F. Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary, visited the privately built barrier last month, and the area’s top Border Patrol official praised the structure as a “game changer.”

We Build the Wall is planning to build a new 3.5-mile span of fencing along the banks of the Rio Grande in southern Texas, on land it says Tommy Fisher purchased.

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order Tuesday to halt Fisher’s bulldozers, siding with the National Butterfly Center, a neighboring wildlife sanctuary whose director says the project will inflict irreparable harm on the local ecosystem.

Maybe that's the wall Trump keeps saying is going up.

By the way....