A Bill Clinton Moment in Joe Biden’s Border Scandal
By Todd Bensman
AUSTIN, Texas — Infamously now, former President Bill Clinton’s defense for his 1990s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky rested on his artful, lawyerly definition of “sexual relations.” The president cleverly argued that, at least in his mind, he hadn’t perjured himself when he denied engaging in those acts based on a pretzel-twisting definition of “sexual relations” that almost no one else in the world shared.
It is now clear that Vice President Kamala Harris, also a lawyer, has plagiarized that page from the Clinton definitions play book with her recent declaration on NBC News’ Meet the Press that “The border is secure.” Almost certainly, Harris has yoga-twisted a definition of “secure” that few others in the world share and so therefore she is only telling her truth.
Which happens to be a bald-faced lie by the objective standards of everyone else with two feet planted on Planet Earth and access to an Internet browser.
The consensus truth comes to us via U.S. Customs and Border Protection public databases, which show that apprehensions of illegal aliens on the Southwest Border have smashed every record on the books by hundreds of percentage points. America is in the midst of the greatest mass migration crisis in its history, all of it traceable to White House policies implemented on Inauguration Day 2021. Border Patrol has laid hands on nearly four million illegal border crossers in the 19 months since, well over two million of them that we know of now living inside America.
Harris is hardly alone in the Biden White House in masking a lie behind the twisted definition of “secure” when it comes to describing the southern border’s utter pandemonium. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas also has infamously declared “the border secure” multiple times and always during months that had marked the most ever of one statistic or another.
Listening to these people, it becomes clear that they’re definition of “border security” is not at all deterrence, deportation and obstruction so that no one is crossing. Their definition comes to us by way of, for instance, Fox News Sunday on May 1, 2022. Anchor Bret Baier asked Mayorkas if the administration’s objective was to “sharply reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming across the southern border.”
The leader of the American homeland security enterprise had to veer sharply away from saying that was his ideal for border security. No, the Mayorkas definition of border security was “that we have safe, legal, and orderly pathways for individuals to be able to access our legal system.” Meaning, everyone who wants to claim asylum is quickly ushered in and resettled across America.
Baier gave the DHS chief a second bite at the apple, just to make sure. Asked to identify legislation that could “help you deport more illegal immigrants,” Mayorkas reiterated that deportation was not a priority.
“What we are talking about when we talk about legislation is building the orderly legal pathways for people to obtain relief under our laws,” Mayorkas replied.
So when the Secure Fence Act of 2006 defines border security as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States…,” Mayorkas and the vice president expect that, if ever pressed, they’ll just explain how they could say such a thing by trotting out this other new alternative definition about ushering in everyone in a “safe, humane, and orderly” fashion.
Avoiding backups and lines and Del Rio migrant camp crises with a conveyor belt that hauls border-crossers from water to cities across America is this White House’s new definition of “border security.”
See how that works? Just like when Bill Clinton swore under oath that he had not had “sexual relations with that woman.”
An important difference between then and now is that no special prosecutor or civil litigators are breathing down the necks of these latest White House officials demanding that they explain how they could possibly say such a thing out loud against all evidence. I am sure that if any media reporter or litigious lawyer ever pressed Harris, Mayorkas, and the President (who also has claimed the border is secure) what we would hear is their twisty new Bill Clinton definition. And if they ever had to answer under oath in depositions and grand juries — or an impeachment effort next year — they would explain that “safe, humane and orderly” torrents of people is what they always meant by border security.
But this explanation is just as much a big fancy lawyerly lie today as it was then.
