President-elect Donald Trump filed a brief in federal court Thursday in support of a lawsuit brought by Texas and Missouri to “immediately” stop the Biden administration from selling off border wall materials.
Trump’s attorneys listed multiple reasons in their 22-page court filing why the conduct may be possibly criminal.
Fox News reported, “Texas and Missouri filed a motion earlier this week in a district court in the southern district of Texas to hold a status conference to determine if the government is in breach of the court’s permanent injunction from earlier this year.”
“That injunction barred the Biden administration from using funds obligated for wall construction for anything other than that purpose,” the news outlet added.
The Biden administration has been auctioning off border wall parts since 2023, following President Joe Biden’s executive order issued on his first day in office in January 2021 directing all construction on a southern border wall to cease and a review of how funds appropriated to building it may be spent.
EXCLUSIVE: Weeks before Trump takes office, Biden is racing to auction off unused border wall materials.
Video shows trucks hauling wall materials off the border to a government auction site, where a massive amount of wall is waiting to be sold. pic.twitter.com/ogaQMBHw7R
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) December 12, 2024
Trump made a four-pronged argument in his brief in support of halting any further sales of border wall materials.
First, his legal team argued that it violates the Appropriations Act, noting that legislation passed in 2019 appropriated over $1.3 billion “for the construction of [a] barrier system along the southwest border” at the “highest priority locations.”
Should a complete border wall be one of Trump’s top priorities?
“Dismantling and selling off the materials for building those ‘barrier systems’ with ‘operationally effective designs’ is the opposite of ‘construct[ing]’ barrier systems in ‘the highest priority locations,’” the brief said.
Secondly, Trump’s lawyers pointed to the federal court’s permanent injunction issued in May that stopped the Biden administration’s plan to dispose of a total of $3 billion in funds appropriated to border wall construction.
“Third, to the extent officials in the outgoing Administration are engaging in unlawful behavior to obstruct or thwart the pro-wall policy of President Trump’s incoming Administration, they encroach on the Executive Power that will soon be lawfully vested in President Trump under Article II,” Trump’s brief said.
Finally, the president-elect argued that selling border wall materials off by “five cents on the dollar” is defrauding taxpayers.
His brief said that if officials in the Biden administration are “deliberately selling off border-wall materials at a major financial loss to the Government to obstruct the pro-wall policy of Congress and President Trump, such conduct likely constitutes a criminal act, such as a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Here the reported conduct “raises the concern that government officials may be, in fact, selling off border-wall materials at rock-bottom prices — and thus imposing significant, artificial financial losses on the Government — for the purpose of obstructing both Congress’s and the incoming President’s pro-border-barrier policy.”
“If so, such conduct would appear to both ‘cheat the government out of property or money’ and ‘interfere with or obstruct … lawful government functions by deceit, craft or trickery’,” the brief said.
Trump’s lawyers concluded, “The Court should issue an order directing the [Biden administration] to immediately stop any ongoing sale of border-barrier materials to private parties pending the Court’s review of Defendants’ conduct, and the Court should swiftly conduct a searching examination of the Government’s conduct, by formal discovery if necessary, to examine the Government’s compliance with the law, the Constitution, and the Court’s injunction.”
On Thursday, if the sales go forward, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News host Laura Ingraham Thursday, “I will bid on all of that wall, and we will buy it in Texas, and we will give it to Donald Trump.”
“I’ve got a billion dollars in my pocket to do it,” Patrick stated.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham followed his comments, remarking, “If you buy it, I have a place to store it — on state land! The [Texas General Land Office] is standing by to help!”
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