Jake Tapper Confronts DHS Sec.: Do You Regret Lending Credibility to ‘We Build the Wall’ Now That It’s Being Called a Scam?

CNN’s Jake Tapper confronted acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf over his past comments praising We Build the Wall, the group now facing serious charges of fraud.

The indictment against Steve Bannon, group founder Brian Kolfage, and two others said they defrauded “hundreds of thousands of donors” with the crowdfunding effort to raise money to build a border wall. Bannon has since claimed the indictment is just a “political hit job.”

Tapper pressed Wolf on his past comment on the group that “I welcome all that want to be part of the solution” before asking, “You were lending your credibility and the credibility of the Department of Homeland Security to what prosecutors say is a scam. Do you regret that? Are you embarrassed by it?”

“No. Again, I think you hit it on the head, which is I said, and I’ll continue to say I welcome all that want to be part of the solution. I did not specifically endorse this particular organization or what they are doing,” Wolf said.

“But you went there,” Tapper noted.

Wolf said during that trip he wanted to get a sense of everything going on in El Paso and said, “I wanted to understand how a private organization, if they were going to build this on their own using their own funding, how it integrated with what CBP was doing on the border… I did not endorse any particular one group or another.”

“Well, you certainly don’t welcome the support of scam artists who want to be part of the solution, do you?” Tapper asked.

“Absolutely not,” Wolf said.

Tapper pointed out the group had touted his support. Wolf responded that “we had asked them to take that down time and time again” because it wasn’t accurate.

Tapper continued pressing Wolf on whether he regrets going in the first place and asked, “Shouldn’t somebody at DHS have vetted this group before sending you there?”

Wolf continued defending his El Paso visit and said again, “I wanted to go there to understand what my men and women are seeing, any concerns that they had there, and then moved on.”

You can watch above, via CNN.