Secret emails obtained exclusively by Breitbart News show the libertarian Cato Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) are colluding on immigration reform messaging in the wake of the Boston Marathon terror attack in order to push the “Gang of Eight” bill that was released this past week.
On Friday afternoon, political consultant Peggy Ellis of Ellis & Company, who is supporting the Gang of Eight immigration efforts, emailed “Talkers from Rubio” to the group of organizations supporting their efforts such as Cato and ATR.
The email was headlined: “Rubio talking points re: Boston terrorists vis a vis immigration reform.” The message contained three talking points from Sen. Rubio, the first of which argued that the immigration bill would prevent people like the Boston Marathon terrorists from getting into or staying in the country.
“These terrorists came here under the existing system, the one opponents of reform want to leave in place,” Sen. Rubio wrote in his first talking point.
The second Rubio talking point argued that the terrorists “didn’t cross the border” to get into America.
In his third talking point, Rubio argued that authorities only know who the terrorists are because they came here legally to begin with.
“The reason we know who they are is because they were here legally,” Rubio wrote. “If they were here illegally, living in the shadows, it would have made them much harder to investigate. The fact is that today there are 11 million people already in this country and we don’t know who they are, why they’re here, and what they’re doing. That is not only an economic problem, it’s a huge national security problem as well.”
Ellis’s email was in response to an email conversation she had with Cato’s Alex Nowrasteh and ATR’s Josh Culling, among others, earlier in the day about the potential effects of the Boston terror attacks on immigration reform.
Nowrasteh is the Cato analyst who has attacked the forthcoming Heritage Foundation analysis that argues that the Gang of Eight bill will add multiple trillions to the entitlement rolls. He wrote to the group on Friday afternoon: “The Boston thing could derail this big time so I’m spending most of today on that,” Nowrasteh wrote, referring to the Gang of Eight bill. “Sorry, gotta run and focus on that.”
The brothers who allegedly carried out the Boston terror attack, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, were granted asylum in the United States. This sparked Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to question the bill in the context of the Boston terror attacks during a Friday morning committee hearing. In response, and Gang of Eight member Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) attacked Grassley's position while using the Boston terror attack to push the bill himself.
As the week ended with police killing one Tsarnaev brother and arresting the other, the Gang of Eight grew more nervous--and that is when Rubio, Cato, and ATR drafted the aforementioned talking points together.
After facing intense criticism over the past week or so, Rubio has backed off and kept a low profile this weekend. But Schumer and fellow Gang of Eight member Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) ended up using what appear to be the exact talking points Rubio, ATR, and Cato drafted during his appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
As Breitbart News' Joel Pollak reported, host Candy Crowley asked Graham if he would consider amendments that improved the bill’s security so that people like the Tsarnaev brothers do not slip through the cracks of the system again. Graham responded that legalizing America’s illegal immigrants would enable better monitoring of immigrants.
“Now is the time to bring all of the eleven million out of the shadows and find out who they are,” Graham said.
Graham blamed the FBI and argued that the Gang of Eight bill would “fix” poor interior immigration law enforcement.
Appearing on the same program, Schumer agreed. “Keeping the status quo is not a good argument, given what happened," Schumer said. "Our law toughens things up."
Even though they say their bill helps fix interior immigration law enforcement problems, law enforcement experts disagree. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents’ union president Chris Crane, an ICE agent himself, said, according to Fox News, that “this legislation again does nothing to resolve that.”
None of the groups involved in crafting the emails, or talking points, responded to a request for comment from Breitbart News.
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