Louie Gohmert: Paul Ryan ‘Tricked’ Trump to Believe Wall Funding Could Not Pass Through GOP House
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told Breitbart News Sunday that when former Rep. Paul Ryan was House speaker, he “tricked” President Donald Trump into believing a spending bill with wall funding could not pass through the House of Representatives.
Congressman Gohmert, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House that former Speaker Paul Ryan told Trump in the run-up to the December government shutdown battle that a spending bill with wall funding would not pass through the GOP-controlled House.
House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC), a staunch Trump ally, correctly predicted that House Republicans had the votes to pass through the House. The House passed a spending bill with $5.7 billion in wall funding in December with 217 in favor of the legislation.
Gohmert told Breitbart News Sunday, “We should have done something when we were in the majority, but we had leadership that was deceiving the president. For example, even the week we finally took a vote with border wall funding in the bill before Christmas, our former speaker was still telling President Trump that we cannot pass a bill in the Republican majority House that has money for the wall. And in the meeting, Mark Meadows says, ‘Just bring it to the floor. We’ll see. We think we do.’ So we brought it to the floor, and we passed it with wall funding money, and that could have been done two years ago. Two years ago, we squandered two years that God gave us this great opportunity, and we elected leadership that was happy sitting on their hands.”
House then asked Rep. Gohmert if he was encouraged to see President Trump call out Ryan and admit that he was tricked by Republican leadership about House Republicans having the votes to pass a bill with wall funding.
“Well, it’s the truth, and he was tricked. For two years, McConnell and Ryan were apparently telling him not to pass a bill with border wall spending in it, and, so, yeah, the president has to be frustrated. And if he could make a few more employee moves and get rid of people that have been stabbing him in the back, he would be able to get more things done,” Gohmert said. “We got to have more House and Senate Republicans who will help support what the president’s trying to do, instead of leading him astray and lying and manipulating him into thinking that he can never achieve the goals he set. He can, and [it is] just unfortunate that more people are finding out now just how deceptive our leadership has been.”
Breitbart News Sunday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
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