Two conservative senators will appear alongside President Trump at the White House Wednesday to announce a new version of their bill to restrict and reform legal immigration. Arkansas’s Tom Cotton and Georgia’s David Perdue have been coordinating with the White House on the legislation, which may propose to cut legal immigration levels by about half by 2027.
“Our current immigration system is outdated and doesn’t meet the diverse needs of our economy,” said Cotton aide Caroline Rabbitt. “Senator Cotton and Senator Perdue will join President Trump to unveil legislation aimed at creating a skills-based immigration system that will make America more competitive, raise wages for American workers, and create jobs.”
Cotton and Perdue have worked on the bill with Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and speechwriter, and an immigration restrictionist, Politico reported in July.
Mark It Down— “The president had no knowledge of the story, and it’s completely untrue that he or the White House had any involvement.” – Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, on a retracted Fox News story President Trump is alleged to have known about beforehand, August 1, 2017.
I followed up with Sanders afterward to ask if Trump has ever spoken with the man, Ed Butowsky, who had initially claimed to share the Fox News story with the president before its publication. “Not that I know of but will need time to check to be sure,” she responded.
FBI Watch—Andrew Egger reports for us that Christopher Wray, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate.
In Russia investigation news, Sarah Sanders confirmed Tuesday that President Donald Trump played a role in composing Donald Trump Jr.’s statement about his meeting with a Russian lawyer, a fact first reported Monday by the Washington Post.
At the White House briefing, Sanders denied the Post’s claim that Trump “personally dictated” Trump Jr.’s original statement, which said that they had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” at the meeting. Instead, Sanders said the president “weighed in as any father would, based on the limited information that he had.”
“He certainly didn’t dictate,” Sanders said, “but he weighed in, offered suggestion like any father would do.”
Still, that’s the exact opposite of what President Trump’s own private counsel, Jay Sekulow, said last month. “I do want to be clear the president was not involved in the drafting of the statement,” Sekulow had told NBC News’s Chuck Todd on July 16.
Sanders declined to answer on Tuesday whether the president was aware when he drafted the statement that his son had hoped to gain negative information about Hillary Clinton.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took the opportunity of his first appearance at a State Department briefing Tuesday to address growing concerns about North Korea’s nuclear-weapons capabilities. “We do not seek a regime change, we do not seek a collapse of the regime, we do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, we do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th Parallel,” Tillerson told reporters.
“We are not your enemy,” Tillerson said, addressing Kim Jong-un directly. “But you are presenting an unacceptable threat to us, and we have to respond. And we hope that at some point they will begin to understand that and we would like to sit and have a dialogue with them.”
Op-Ed of the Day—Bari Weiss in the New York Times on the odious views of some of the organizers of the famous Women’s March.
Here’s Weiss on Linda Sarsour: “There are comments on her Twitter feed of the anti-Zionist sort: ‘Nothing is creepier than Zionism,’ she wrote in 2012. And, oddly, given her status as a major feminist organizer, there are more than a few that seem to make common cause with anti-feminists, like this from 2015: ‘You’ll know when you’re living under Shariah law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest-free. Sound nice, doesn’t it?’ She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is ‘not a real woman’ and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.”
So what’s holding up the president from signing a bill of new sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Russia? Sarah Sanders told Olivier Knox of Yahoo! News that a “legal review” of the bill is underway. Sanders added that once that’s complete, Trump “intends to sign it.”
2018 Watch—The announcement video from Democratic House candidate Amy McGrath of Kentucky is getting a lot of positive attention. “Some are telling me a Democrat can’t win that battle in Kentucky, that we can’t take back our country for my kids and yours. We’ll see about that,” says the retired Marine fighter pilot, the first woman to fly an F-18 in combat. McGrath is challenging Republican congressman Andy Barr.
My colleague Lee Smith has a wide-ranging interview with British author Lawrence Osborne, whose new novel Beautiful Animals is getting rave reviews. The whole discussion is fascinating, particularly since Smith and Osborne are friends from their years living in New York. They talk about everything from refugees in Europe, food and wine, and Western civilization.
Song of the Day—“Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones.
