The first meeting in the new House Oversight Committee is going to be on the southern border, specifically the fentanyl crisis and the "stand down" orders being put on border agents by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the incoming chairman told Newsmax.
"We're focused on some of the decisions Mayorkas has made because we've been communicating with border agents and Mayorkas meets with them regularly; unlike the president or the vice president, Mayorkas does go to the border a lot, but he's basically telling the border agents to stand down," Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., the income House Oversight Committee chair, told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren" in exclusive interview in his Capitol Hill office this week.
Border Patrol agents are "pleading" with Mayorkas, saying the Mexican drug cartels are flooding the border with migrants as a diversion in order to walk drug traffickers across the border undetected.
"They know our schedule; they know that when the Mexican drug cartels bring these 50-100 migrants across the line that the Border Patrol now has to process them," Comer continued. "They take them and then they take them to their facility to process them; therefore leaving the border unpatrolled.
"Then the packers go across with the backpacks full of fentanyl. That's how it ends up here. It happens every day and Mayorkas is basically telling them, 'Well, I know; I get it, but you know, I'm not the one making the final call here.'"
But the buck stops with the DHS secretary when it comes to congressional oversight, Comer said, regardless of the orders from the president.
"Mayorkas is someone that this conference is unanimously trying to hold accountable; I mean, we believe he needs to go," Comer continued. "It's pretty evident that he's not securing the homeland. I don't think anyone would doubt that.
"We've had 100,000 people at least die – since Joe Biden's been president – of fentanyl overdose. We know that fentanyl's coming across the Mexican border. It happens every day. We know this because our Border Patrol agents and our sheriffs and our drug task force agents all say the same thing. Everybody says the same thing: That it's coming across the border, and yet this administration won't do anything about it."
While he might be taking the Democrat orders to give "stand down" orders to Border Patrol, Mayorkas' "job is to protect the homeland," Comer said.
"We have a border that's unsecured – take away all the illegals that are crossing the border," he continued. "Takeaway that. Let's not even talk about it. Let's just talk about fentanyl. People are dying every day. More people are dying of fentanyl than are dying at the hands of guns or anything else that they want to talk about up here in Washington on a regular basis.
"The fentanyl is something that the Democrats have completely turned a blind eye to. Somebody needs to be held accountable, and it's very easy to see who that someone to be. That someone should be Mayorkas."
Comer said he is willing to work with reasonable Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, but someone radical like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., is not it.
"On these investigations, if they want to put somebody like Jamie Raskin in as ranking member, if he wants to defend the indefensible, then more power to him, but if he really wants to get to the truth – if he really wants to try to come up with a legislative fix to ban influence peddling in the future – then I think we can work together."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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