Report finds that Harry Reid pressured DHS to expedite visas to benefit his son’s client

  Yesterday a new Inspector General report was released which showed us that  Terry McAuliffe and Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, might have received preferential treatment from the Department of Homeland Security. Toward the end of my post on this issue I mentioned that Harry Reid was also mentioned in the report as having received preferential treatment from the department as well.

  However this story deserves its own headline so here we go: According to this story, Harry Reid pressured the Department of Homeland Security to expedite certain visa applications. Here is more:

The report concluded that Reid pressured a compliant DHS official to override normal departmental procedures and rush through 230 EB-5 foreign visa applications, thereby freeing up $115 million the applicants invested in the SLS Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

“At the request of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, [current DHS Deputy Secretary Alejandro] Mayorkas intervened to allow expedited review of investor petitions involved in funding a Las Vegas hotel and casino [SLS], notwithstanding the career staff’s original decision not to do so,”

“The career staff noted that the purported urgency was of the applicant’s [SLS’s] own making and that the decision to expedite fell outside EB-5 program guidelines,” the report stated.

“Nevertheless,” the report concluded, “Mr. Mayorkas pressured staff to expedite the review. He also took the extraordinary step of requiring staff to brief Senator Reid’s staff on a weekly basis for several months.”

  So why was Harry Reid so interested in this land deal? Maybe this has something to do with it:

In 2012 Stockbridge/SBE Holdings hired Harry Reid’s son. Rory Reid was, at the time, a partner in Nevada’s largest law firm, Lawson, Sawyer, and Collins. He represented the company as it prepared to convert the old Sahara it purchased in 2007 to the new SLS Hotel and Casino it planned to launch in 2014.

  This is not really a new story and in fact America’s Watchtower has covered it in the past. Here is an article I wrote in September of 2012, and here is my most recent post on this issue, but now we have government confirmation this story is indeed true and it comes in the form of a report issued by the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security.  

Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium