House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi publicly defended House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer after audio surfaced of a call in which he urged a Democrat candidate to drop out of a primary.

The controversy surrounding audio logs of a call between Hoyer and Colorado candidate Levi Tillerman uncovered by The Intercept continues to mount. Pelosi is trying to defuse the same tension that embittered supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.

At her weekly press conference, Pelosi claimed that she didn’t “see anything inappropriate in what Mr. Hoyer was engaged in conversation about.” Further, she dismissed the manipulation as “if the realities of life is that some candidates can do better in the general than others, then that’s a clear-eyed conversation that we should be having.”

Hoyer’s own spokesperson, Katie Grant, said much the same: “Whip Hoyer is committed to taking back the House, and that involves working with local leaders to identify and support the strongest candidate for that district.”

But neither of those statements address the growing divide between the Democratic establishment and the ever-widening current of discontent from progressives in their base. Tillerman’s opposition, U.S. Army veteran Jason Crow, seems to have been the preferred choice for a run against Republican Mike Coffman.

According to Hoyer’s call, he is “for Crow because a judgment was made very early on.” Apparently, that decision is more about toeing the establishment line than personal opinion. Hoyer said, “I didn’t know Crow. I didn’t participate in the decision. But a decision was made early on by the Colorado delegation.”

Now Pelosi is attempting to cast aspersions on Tillerman himself, questioning the legality of recording the call in the first place — despite the recording being completely legal under Colorado law. “I don’t know that a person can tape a person without the person’s consent and then release it to the press. That’s what I’m more concerned about,” she complained.

Meanwhile, The Progressive Change Campaign Committee is taking action against “targeting” by the DCCC. They have called on Hoyer to resign from Democratic leadership and are asking donors to support Tillerman and others being pushed down from within their own party.

In a statement, PCCC co-founder Stephanie Taylor said, “Steny Hoyer and his corporate cronies already lost,” and “they don’t represent the future, and it’s time for them to step aside and make room for a new generation of leadership — one that inspires and motivates the base instead of depressing it.”

Facebook invited a number of conservative think tanks and free market groups to a secretive meeting in Washington, D.C., where they were forced to sign strict legal agreements to prevent discussion of the event.

Facebook invited a number of conservative free market groups and D.C.-based thinktanks to a meeting regarding the company’s recent privacy scandals, according to a source with knowledge of the meeting. All of the groups invited were allegedly forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement if they wanted to attend the event. This NDA included a caveat that those invited weren’t even allowed to mention the existence of the NDA.

A source familiar with the matter told Breitbart News that they believe that the meeting mostly focused on what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his testimony before Congress, the future of privacy on the Internet, and public policy surrounding tech companies such as Facebook. The source told Breitbart News that it seemed as if Facebook was attempting to bring the conservative and Free market communities onto their side ahead of possible debates in Washington relating to the regulation of Facebook.

The NDA that attendees were asked to sign allegedly seemed at first like a standard NDA contract, prohibiting the sharing of any information heard in the briefing, but the NDA also covered the existence of the NDA itself — meaning that attendees could not reveal that they had been asked to sign the non-disclosure agreement. One policy expert remarked to Breitbart’s source, “if it [the meeting] is about public policy — why would I be legally bound to secrecy?”

The full invitation from Facebook can be read below:

Good afternoon friends,

Before today’s hearing gets underway, I wanted to reach out to invite you to a discussion on privacy regulations and legislation on Wednesday, April 25 — here at our offices. I know it’s not lost on anyone in the free market community that with GDPR on the way in Europe and the rapidly changing discussions here in Washington, there’s an increased chance Washington will rush to regulate, with privacy concerns at the top of the radar.

You’ll hear a lot this afternoon about our company’s privacy practices, the privacy updates we’ve made over our history and the ones we’re planning, and our desire to be part of the conversation as privacy experts, lawmakers, and advocates work through complicated questions about best practices in our fast-moving industry. It would be incredibly helpful for our privacy team to hear from you – we’d love to talk through any ideas/advice you have and run our thinking by you as well.

If there are others from your organization who should attend, please let me know! As always, this conversation will be off the record. We’re located at [NOTE: Facebook’s office address was removed due to privacy concerns.] Please RSVP by COB April 24 so that we can get you into our building’s security system. For anyone remote wishing to attend, we can set up our video conference system.

And as the next 24 hours unfolds, if you have any questions about our testimony, the Cambridge Analytica situation, or any of the updates we’ve made in the last week, please reach out. Thanks to all of you who have already contacted me with questions, helpful ideas, and feedback. You can find Mark’s written testimony here.

Thanks very much for your engagement, and we hope to see you on the 25th!

Warmly,

Lori Moylan

Facebook Public Policy | External Affairs

When contacted for comment by Breitbrt News, Facebook did not dispute the event or invitation.

Black Americans and Hispanics are increasingly supportive of President Trump’s immigration agenda that would raise American wages by reducing the number of legal immigrants that enter the United States every year, whereby currently more than 1.5 million legal immigrants arrive annually.

A Harvard-Harris poll reveals that black Americans and Hispanics are increasingly supportive of Trump’s plan to cut legal immigration levels in nearly half by ending the process known as “chain migration,” whereby newly naturalized citizens are allowed to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S.

In total, about 65 percent of black Americans said they support Trump’s immigration compromise that would build a border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, end chain migration and the Diversity Visa Lottery, in exchange for allowing only the nearly 800,000 illegal aliens enrolled in the President Obama Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to remain in the country.

The immigration-cutting, wage-boosting plan has grown in popularity among black Americans, a demographic group that has been hit the hardest by mass immigration. Last month, about 55 percent of black Americans said they supported the plan.

The Visa Lottery program has imported about 30,000 foreign nationals to the U.S. from Iran, Syria, and Sudan, all countries which fund terrorism, as recognized by the State Department.

Under the lottery program, championed by former Sen. Ted Kennedy and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the U.S. randomly gives out 50,000 visas every year to foreign nationals from a multitude of countries, including those with known terrorism problems – such as Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Yemen, and Uzbekistan. Winners have undergone only minor screening from immigration officials, even when their ideology is hostile to Americans laws and culture.

Additionally, Hispanic Americans are even more supportive of reducing immigration than black Americans. The poll found that about 66 percent of Hispanics said they’d like to see the DACA-enrolled population remain in the U.S. so long as chain migration and the Visa Lottery are both ended and a border wall is constructed at the southern border.

Last month, about 61 percent of Hispanic Americans said they supported the plan.

Trump has pushed for the reduction in legal immigration to stem decades of wage stagnation from the Washington, D.C.-imposed economic model of cheap labor that has benefited corporations and the wealthy the most.

Meanwhile, mass immigration through chain migration — whereby the U.S. admits more than one million illegal and legal immigrants every year — has come at the expense of America’s working and middle class, which has suffered from poor job growth, stagnant wages, and increased public costs to offset the importation of millions of low-skilled foreign nationals.

In his own administration, Trump has had to endure pushback on the immigration reduction plan from allies of the Republican establishment. Figures like Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, and House Speaker Paul Ryan have failed to push Trump’s popular immigration agenda, instead securing a tax reform agenda that is much less influential with voters.

Opponents of ending chain migration not only include the establishment media, but also the billionaire GOP mega-donors the Koch brothers, the Democratic Party, the Republican establishment, the Bush dynasty, the big business lobby, and the open borders lobby.