Trump Insults Restaurant that Booted Sarah Sanders

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was thrown out of Lexington, Virginia’s Red Hen restaurant on Friday night. 

The Red Hen’s owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, declared that the restaurant has to uphold “certain standards.” Wilkinson asked her team if they were uncomfortable serving Sanders and her guests. “Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her [Huckabee Sanders] to leave.” Per the Post, Wilkinson said her staff said they felt uncomfortable. 

Sanders and her party of eight were drinking and eating a cheese board they had ordered. Wilkinson requested Sanders accompany her to the patio area of the restaurant. After explaining herself, Wilkinson asked her to leave. Sanders replied, “That’s fine. I’ll go.” The group offered to pay, but Wilkinson said the meal was “on the house.”  

On Saturday, Huckabee Sanders tweeted about the incident, “Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so”. 

The restaurant’s owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, defended her decision to ask Sanders to leave, telling The Washington Post that she explained to the press secretary that "the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation." 

Trump reacted to the incident on Twitter Monday morning saying, “The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”

Immigration Madness

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and 31 of her colleagues have introduced legislation to keep immigrant families together by preventing the Department of Homeland Security from separating children from their parents at the border. 

The Keep Families Together Act was developed in consultation with child welfare experts to ensure the federal government is acting in the best interest of children. The bill is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), Children’s Law Center, Young Center for Immigrant Rights and the Women's Refugee Commission. 

This bill restricts the prosecution of parents who are asylum seekers by adopting the recommendation of the DHS Office of Inspector General. The bill also delays prosecutions for illegal entry or re-entry for asylum seekers and creates an affirmative defense for asylum seekers. It requires all CBP officers and agents to complete child welfare training on an annual basis. Port Directors and Chief Border Agents, those who are authorized to make decisions on family separations, must complete an additional 90 minutes of annual child-welfare training. 

DHS would also be required to develop policies and procedures allowing parents and children to locate each other and reunite if they have been separated. In cases of separation, it requires DHS to provide parents with a weekly report containing information about a child, and weekly phone communication.

GOP Immigration Bill

House Republican leaders are further delaying a vote on a compromise immigration bill, planning to make changes to the legislation for a vote later this week. The measure was originally scheduled for a vote last Thursday, June 21, but there has been no announcement of when the vote is rescheduled for. 

The Republican Conference met late Thursday afternoon for more than two hours to discuss the legislation. Multiple GOP lawmakers said authors of the bill walked through its contents and members raised concerns about issues the bill doesn’t address. Many members requested the addition of a provision to require employers to use the E-Verify database to check the legal status of their employees.  

“The fundamental problem is a DACA fix does not have a majority of Republicans that are willing to vote yes,” Chief Deputy Whip Patrick T. McHenry said. 

Republicans are working on potential additions to the bill. The idea is to marry a provision that conservatives want, which would require employers to use the E-Verify database to check the legal status of their employees, with the creation of a guest worker visa program for agriculture and other industries where labor is in short supply.

George Will Calls for Americans to Vote Against the GOP

American conservative political commentator George Will is calling for Americans to vote against Republicans in November. In a column posted in the Washington Post, Will writes, “Paul Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it.” 

Will goes on to say, “This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president. The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control…To vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.”

Nunes Not Satisfied with FBI's Response to Subpoena

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), called on Sunday for the Justice Department and the FBI to provide the House Intelligence Committee outstanding information asking: 

“Did the FBI use informants against members or associates of the Trump campaign and if so, how many informants were used and how much money was spent on their activities?” 

Additionally, Nunes wants to know whether FBI Director Christopher Wray or Rod Rosenstein is responsible for complying with the committee's subpoena requests. 

In Nunes’ latest letter to Rosenstein, he said he wants answers to those two questions by 5:00 p.m. on Monday, June 25, 2018. 

On Friday, the FBI sent the House intel committee two letters, one classified and the other unclassified, partially complying with a subpoena issued by the panel. 

In response to the FBI’s information, Nunes wrote a letter to Rosenstein saying: "For more than a year, the Committee has been struggling to get the DOJ, including the FBI, to comply with duly issued subpoenas…In many instances, information provided to the Committee has been incomplete, and the Committee is later told that additional responsive information was not provided because it was not specifically requested. The Committee, however, should not be required to ask, 'the magic question' in order to obtain all relevant and responsive documents that have already been compelled."

Peter Strzok Subpoenaed After Anti-Trump Text Messages

The House Judiciary Committee on Friday subpoenaed Peter Strzok to appear for a deposition, even though the FBI agent said last week that he would appear voluntarily. 

Strzok sent negative text messages about then-candidate Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. One read in part: "There's no way [Trump] gets elected — but I'm afraid we can't take that risk." Those messages have led Republicans, including the president, to label the two bureau employees as biased and the investigation into possible campaign collusion with Russia as a “witch hunt.” 

Strzok is expected to testify on Wednesday. Although Strzok may still appear voluntary, no date was set, and the subpoena was therefore issued as a backstop. A deposition may be negotiated into a voluntary transcribed interview instead, Democratic lawmakers said in a memo to the House Judiciary Committee. 

In a statement from Peter Strzok’s office, they said, “We regret that the Committee felt it necessary to issue a subpoena when we repeatedly informed them that Pete was willing to testify voluntarily.”

Cynthia Nixon Calls ICE a ‘Terrorist Organization’ That Should Be Abolished

Cynthia Nixon appeared Thursday morning on ABC’s The View and made it clear that the practice of separating children from their parents wasn’t just taking place at the border, but that it was happening throughout the United States. “Children aren’t just being separated at the border. They are being separated throughout this country by ICE. I think we need to abolish ICE. That seems really clear.” 

The View’s Joy Behar asked Nixon what she’d replace the ICE agency with. Nixon believes if ICE is abolished, it doesn’t need to be replaced. 

“ICE is relatively new,” Nixon said. “It came in after September 11th. We’ve been handling immigration and customs for a long time here; we don’t need ICE. They have strayed so far from the interests of the American people and the interests of humanity — we need to abolish it.” 

After Nixon’s appearance on The View she gave a speech at a Manhattan Church on Thursday.

New York gubernatorial candidate and former Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon labeled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a “terrorist organization” and called for its abolition. 

“ICE has strayed so far away from its mission. It is supposed to be here to keep Americans safe but what it has turned into frankly is a terrorist organization of its own that is terrorizing people who are coming to this country,” Nixon said during the speech, according to the New York Post.

Nixon’s appearance at the St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church on the Upper West Side was intended as a show of support for a Guatemalan mother of two who is in the country illegally.

Mail Time!

• Bill, why can't President Trump sign an executive order or do something forbidding asylum cases to be processed at illegal border entrances? 

• Bill, why doesn't the President bring the message to the American people about the border fiasco like you wrote about in your column. Do a prime time speech from his desk in the oval office and lay out the facts so everyone understands what is going on at the border and inside Mexico. 

• In regards to the 2020 elections, I've run into some troubling news on news ratings. Although FNC is leading in 2018, MSNBC is not that far behind and while FNC is declining MSNBC is gaining: Fox News and CNN both lost viewers from the first quarter of 2017 to the first quarter of 2018? dropping 16 percent and 13 percent, respectively? as did pretty much every major cable network, according to Nielsen. MSNBC, on the other hand, surged to a 30 percent gain in the same period. Shouldn't we be alarmed?

Word of the Day: Noddy