Category: Bureaucraps
BLUF
We will not forget. And the families of the 13 U.S. service members killed during withdrawal operations as well as the thousands of families of those that were killed during Operation Enduring Freedom will not forgive.
Why the Afghanistan Withdrawal Was the Perfect Storm of Bureaucratic Incompetence.
It’s been nearly one year since the world witnessed the worst foreign policy disaster to occur in generations. One year since thousands of Afghans rushed a C-17, resulting in bodies falling from the sky. One year since a suicide bomber made his way through a Taliban-controlled checkpoint to the Kabul airport gates, killing 13 U.S. service members who were helping Americans and Afghan nationals trying to flee Afghanistan. One year since 10 Afghan civilians (seven of which were children) were targeted and killed in a U.S. drone strike after the Pentagon tracked and wrongly identified a vehicle they suspected was an ISIS-K threat. One year since hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans were left behind to fall victim to Taliban brutality.
President Biden wants you to forget about what happened in Afghanistan. He wants you to forget about the bureaucratic incompetence and incompetent decision-making by nearly every senior leader. To this day, no one has been held accountable. Accountability, even verbally, would mean admitting failure and taking ownership, something the Biden administration refuses to accept.
The botched withdrawal wasn’t a mistake or a one-time bad call. The catastrophe occurred due to consistent and specific inept leadership failures at the Department of Defense, Department of State, the White House, and the Intelligence Community. Failure to plan. Failure to be realistic about the strength and capabilities of the Taliban. Failure to adequately prepare and vet people to get them out of the country before the U.S. military departed. The Biden administration failed to connect the dots and keep agencies in sync. Pentagon leadership downplayed the truth about the shell the Afghanistan government and military was, as well as the reality that without the U.S. dollar and military propping them up, they would all come crashing down. Washington was hoping for an Afghanistan that they wanted – that should have been after 20 years of war and $2 trillion – but wasn’t. The withdrawal wasn’t a mistake – it was a catastrophic failure of epic proportions.
Uncovered Documents Should Destroy the Government’s Case in the AutoKeyCard Saga
Washington, DC – -(AmmoLand.com)- Gun Owners of America (GOA) has released multiple documents that torpedo the Government’s case against Matthew Hoover and Kristopher Ervin in the AutoKeyCard case.
In March of 2021, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents arrested Kristopher Justin Ervin for selling a credit-card-size metal card with an etching of the outline of a lightning link, a device that, when installed in a semi-automatic rifle, allows it to function like a machine gun. Ervin sold the item as a novelty item through autokeycard.com. Some of the AutoKeyCards featured things such as bottle openers. The ATF claims that the cards are machine guns.
The ATF claims that the cards are machine guns.
The ATF claims that, since the AutoKeyCard had a picture of a lightning link drawn onto the metal, someone in theory could cut out the device, bend it into shape, and use it to convert a semi-automatic AR-15 into a machine gun. The Bureau believes that if a device can be used to convert a firearm into a machine gun, the device itself is a machine gun. Of course, the AutoKeyCard is not such a device, but rather a drawing of a device. It cannot, by itself, be used or installed on a firearm without significant further manufacturing.
At the time that Ervin began selling the AutoKeyCard, he contracted Hoover to advertise the product through his popular YouTube channel, CRS Firearms. Mr. Hoover never sold an AutoKeyCard, but instead simply talked about the cards in videos. Ervin’s company, in turn, sponsored Hoover’s channel.
Can a GOP Congress Stop the New IRS Gestapo?
Since the Mar-a-Lago raid, Republican leadership has been bloviating at every opportunity about how they will “investigate” crimes of the Democratic Party and their three-letter agency allies like The Erinyes should the GOP win back Congress, as widely predicted, in November.
Fine.
But investigations mostly end up as just more bloviating accompanied, at best, by useless recommendations for action by a Justice Department that’s as likely to follow them as I am to be writing my next column from Alpha Centauri.
Something has to be done that’s concrete. Congressional investigations, necessary as they may be, add up to little more than virtue-signaling—in this case from the right—and can create the illusion that something has happened when it hasn’t. That might be useful for the politicians involved but means little to the rest of us.
How about some actual actions, difficult as that may be? How about exercising the famous congressional “power of the purse.” Yes, it may be too late, but technicalities like that rarely stop our adversaries.
Other than Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 committee, the latest—and ultimately quite possibly the biggest—elephant in the room is the legislation that’s nearing passage with a name straight out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth: the Inflation Reduction Act.
Forget for a moment all the ridiculous “green” featherbedding in this legislation. The administration’s version of “the science” is about as scientific as the Greek myths, possibly less. It’s the same pro forma collection of hand-outs to the usual pseudo-environmental suspects that ultimately add up to more orders for, frequently defective, Chinese solar collectors.
That’s bad enough but the real danger in this legislation is the massive infusion of cash ($80 billion) into the IRS, yielding an extraordinary expansion (an army of 87,000 new agents) and the literal weaponization of the tax agency.
The weaponization part was already demonstrated by the help wanted advertisement for “Special Agents” that appeared on the three-letter agency’s website that appeared almost simultaneously with the legislation:
“Major Duties
• Adhere to the highest standards of conduct, especially in maintaining honesty and integrity.
• Work a minimum of 50 hours per week, which may include irregular hours, and be on-call 24/7, including holidays and weekends.
• Maintain a level of fitness necessary to effectively respond to life-threatening situations on the job.
• Carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary.
• Be willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.”
Deadly force? What business the IRS has in such activities is, to say the least, unclear when there are numerous law enforcement agencies already in place that could handle such situations. It’s as if a new Gestapo were being formed: native-grown brownshirts. Wasn’t the FBI enough? It’s beyond un-American. It’s purely fascistic.
We can assume, however, that these armed special agents will be a minority among the new 87,000 employees, hopefully anyway. What will the others do? Who will they be investigating in a more non-violent manner that could give years of anguish to any subject, not to mention incur them significant legal and accounting fees, no matter how honest the audit subject might be? (For another Greek reference, even Diogenes himself, under this new regime, could be trapped in an audit process that goes on and on without resolution, destroying his life.)
Naturally, conservatives are alarmed, even terrified, that the IRS could be so politicized. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been rushed into the fray to reassure us, through a “directive”:
“Specifically, I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” she said.
Would Yellen, the woman who told us inflation was transitory and that there was no recession, lie to you? Or if she has issued such a “directive,” does it have legal force? And what are these historical levels anyway? What part of history is she referring to?
I have a two-word of rebuttal to Ms. Yellen: Lois Lerner.
From the Daily Mail:
“After nearly two years of jockeying with Congress over the IRS’s history of discriminating against conservative nonprofit groups, former official Lois Lerner won’t be charged with a crime for defying a congressional subpoena and refusing to answer questions.
“U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen, on his last day in office, told House Speaker John Boehner in a seven-page letter that Lerner could wrap herself in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, even though she offered a self-serving opening statement before clamming up during a May 22, 2013, hearing.”
With 87,000 new employees, almost all avid statists—who else would join the agency—we are headed for déjà vu all over again, i.e., Lerner’s “historical level,” only worse in a yet more divided time. (As someone once said, “Personnel is policy.”)
So to Republicans in the House and Senate, speechify all you wish, but start really acting now, being concrete, even before you might have majorities. Get with the smartest conservative tax lawyers you can find and figure out some way to put a halt to as much of this as possible. Throw a wrench in the machine.
Keep America free. It’s barely hanging on.
Another Huge Red Flag in the Trump Raid Story
When he spoke to the media on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland took offense to those who questioned the professionalism and integrity of the Department of Justice and the FBI.
“Let me address recent unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents and prosecutors,” he said. “I will not stand by silently when their integrity is unfairly attacked. The men and women of the FBI and the Justice Department are dedicated patriotic public servants every day. They protect the American people from violent crime, terrorism and other threats to their safety while safeguarding our civil rights. They do so at great personal sacrifice and risk to themselves. I am honored to work alongside them.”
Well, Mr. Attorney General, if they’re so professional and full of integrity, can you explain why the Wall Street Journal apparently knows the contents of all the classified documents and supposedly “top secret” documents removed from Trump’s home and has apparently reviewed some of them?
“FBI agents who searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,” the outlet reported. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger Stone, a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the ‘President of France,’ according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.”
Breaking: FBI agents searching Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only kept in special government facilities, according to a copy of the inventory reviewed by WSJ https://t.co/n6veD2OVSt
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) August 12, 2022
Gee, if these documents were so incredibly sensitive and secret that the FBI had to conduct an armed raid of Trump’s home in order to retrieve them, how come the press is allowed to know the nature of the documents? These documents are apparently too sensitive for Trump to possess but not so sensitive that FBI agents can’t show them off to the media.
CDC Admits Scary Truths About Vaccine
First reported by the Epoch Times, the CDC is finally admitting that it gave false information about the Wuhan Coronavirus vaccine.
The CDC has been caught with blood on their hands.
They wrongfully said it conducted a certain type of analysis of the vaccine over one year before the CDC actually did.
A spokesperson for the CDC said that they are revising several Information of Freedom Acts (FOIA) and issuing corrections for information it previously claimed was being observed “by the most intense safety monitoring efforts in U.S. history.”
Take for instance myocarditis. For several months report after report was released about an athlete dropping dead on the court or field after suffering chest pains.
Heart problems such as heart inflammation is a known life-threatening side effect of the Covid vaccine, a fact mainstream media so blatantly ignored.
In July, the Epoch Times submitted a FOIA to the CDC to obtain reports of a study that showed post-vaccination heart inflammation.
However, the CDC said that their team did not conduct any reports through October 2021, admitting that “an association between myocarditis and mRNA COVID-19 vaccination was not known at that time.”
By now it is apparent that the CDC withheld information to prevent vaccine hesitancy. The White House played along with their games as well. Mr. “the vaccine will prevent you from getting Covid” Joe Biden, first claimed that all you need is the first shot. Then that quickly turned into two shots then a follow up booster and then another booster. And now the CDC is preparing for another round of infections this winter saying people need another shot to protect themselves.
The madness won’t end, not as long as Democrats have control of Washington.
It will take decades to find out the truth about the vaccine’s long-term side effects and why the left was so worried about pushing it on the country without proper studies being done.
Biden’s new “ghost gun” rule faces a new legal challenge
In less than two weeks the ATF”s new rules on unfinished frames and receivers are set to take effect, but the Firearms Policy Coalition is hoping to put a halt to the agency’s attempt to redefine what a firearm is under federal law before the new regulations kick in on August 24th.
On Thursday, the Second Amendment organization filed a federal lawsuit challenging the legality of the new rules, arguing that the Biden administration overstepped its executive branch authority by imposing the new rules, which FPC says is the proper purview of Congress, not DOJ or ATF.
“The Final Rule defies the plain language of the [Gun Control Act] and longstanding agency interpretation suggesting that the items at issue here, sometimes colloquially referred to as receiver blanks, unfinished frames or receivers, or 80% frames or receivers, are not firearms,” says the complaint. “Through this rulemaking, however, the Agencies are attempting to create a broad, sweeping definition by including items that are not yet the ‘frames or receivers’ of such weapons and by including ‘frame or receiver kits.’”
“Neither the president nor any federal agency has the power to make law,” said FPC’s Senior Attorney for Constitutional Litigation Cody J. Wisniewski. “The Constitution is clear–Congress has the power to make law, and the Executive Branch is limited to enforcing that law. But here, President Biden openly admitted that he would circumvent Congress and have the DOJ and ATF issue new regulations that go well beyond congressionally-established law and seek to greatly expand the ATF’s reach. FPC will not stand idly by while the federal government tramples the rights of peaceable individuals through agency rulemaking.”
As bad as the new rules are, my bigger concern is that they’re being used as a sort of test case for the Biden administration to see just how much they can get away with. If the courts allow for these rules to be enforced (as well as the pending rule on pistol stabilizing braces set to take effect next month), it will be a green light for Biden and officials like ATF Director Steve Dettelbach to use the regulatory power of the agency to go after semi-automatic firearms by claiming they’re “readily convertible” to fully-automatic machine guns, and therefore must be regulated under the National Firearms Act.
Gun control activists are already pushing for this interpretation in multiple lawsuits that have been filed against gun makers, and the Michael Bloomberg-funded anti-gun outlet The Trace recently offered up a history lesson that they say proves the agency already has the power to act.
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, law enforcement agencies started recovering huge numbers of converted RPB Industries SM10 pistols. The popular semiautomatic pistol was a near-perfect replica of the Mac-10 submachine gun, and by shaving down a small internal component with a steel file, it could be modified to fire on fully automatic. At nearly a quarter of the price, it became a hot commodity among drug traffickers.
Law enforcement recovered at least a thousand of the machine guns in crimes across the nation by 1980. That same year, the ATF linked 60 of the guns to drug related murders in Florida alone.
To curb the proliferation of these military-grade weapons, the ATF took an unprecedented step. It reclassified a handful of easily converted semiautomatic pistols and rifles as machine guns. The ruling legally grandfathered the weapons already in circulation, but forced an ultimatum on their makers: Redesign future iterations to be less susceptible to automatic conversion or face selling them under the strict regulations of the National Firearms Act.
… Norm Bergeron, another former ATF agent, said it’s true that the agency is reluctant to regulate large companies. “You have to have clout to go up against the U.S. government,” he said. “It really comes down to money. Money buys you lobbyists, it buys you attorneys.”
Democrats believe that reluctance is in part due to the ATF’s perpetual leaderlessness over the last 16 years and its historically lean budget.
“Any regulatory agency without permanent leadership is vulnerable to not fully fulfilling its mission,” said Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey, a Democrat who also signed the congressional letter to the ATF in April. Watson Coleman said she believes a regulatory path like the one tried during the 1980s could curtail automatic conversions of particular firearms.
Well, the ATF is no longer “leaderless” now that Steve Dettelbach has been confirmed as permanent director of the ATF, and we may very well see the Biden administration move in this direction, especially if the sweeping new rules dealing with unfinished frames/receivers and pistol stabilizing braces are upheld by the courts. Of course even if they are struck down the ATF may still try to take the “unprecedented step” of declaring that many of the most popular semi-automatic pistols and rifles should be considered machine guns under federal law, but defeating these new rules in court would do a lot to undermine the gun control lobby’s argument that the ATF possesses the power to reclassify the most commonly-sold firearms in the country as machine guns.
Biden’s War on Guns: A Multi-Generation Florida Family Gun Business is the Latest Casualty.
Master gunsmith James Morrison founded JM Gun Repair 46 years ago, after doing gun repairs in his garage.
The gun shop has been a local institution ever since, offering firearms, black powder and reloading gear, ammunition including hard-to-find calibers and James’ incredible skills as a master gunsmith with 50 years of experience.
The business is perfectly located, straddling the county line between Sarasota and Bradenton, Florida. “This has been a family legacy for 46 years,” said James’ grandson, Noah Morrison. His father and uncle work at the shop too.
Noah, who just turned 21, dreamed of becoming the third generation of Morrisons to operate this family business. However, his dreams were dashed when George Hancock, an ATF Industry Operations Investigator, known as an IOI, walked into the shop, at around the same time Joe Biden announced his war on “rogue” gun dealers.
“During the audit, he found faults in our paperwork,” Noah said. “In in the past, for these types of minor faults, an auditor would have just handed us a pen and told us to fix them.”
A bridge too far for legal gun owners
The whole gun debate can be annoyingly shrill, absolutist and selfrighteous. Both sides are known to generate some eye rolls from the general public, many of whom just want the violence to stop but would rather not trample on the rights of legal, law-abiding gun owners.
Maybe a way forward would be to put county sheriffs in charge of all firearms laws. Sheriffs are elected, so they’re accountable to the people. They understand guns, both their potential to protect and their capability to generate great harm. They know that training and responsibility are
essential. Across the state, sheriff’s offices effectively handle the application and permitting of conceal carry permits for eligible Missourians. Local law enforcement seems to have a certain practicality with guns that the chattering class sometimes lacks. They know that training is good and the filing of paperwork is necessary, but they also seem to know when enough is enough.
Recently, FBI Director Christopher Wray has expressed a desire to conduct audits of concealed weapons records in Missouri. Nothing major, just a little looksie to make sure there is no “misuse of the system.”
Yeah, right. Why don’t you take a look in people’s houses and medicine cabinets while you’re at it? It doesn’t sound like an abuse of the Fourth Amendment.
Actually, the sharing of conceal carry records is a violation of Missouri law, which specifies that conceal carry endorsements or permits are considered personal protected information. It’s probably also a violation of Missouri’s Second Amendment Protection Act, a law that puts limits on sharing firearms information with federal authorities or databases.
SAPA, as its known, contains some overreach that hinders the ability of law enforcement at the local level, but bear in mind it’s requests like this from the FBI or Justice Department that sparks overreach as a response to the overreach. Local sheriffs are right to balk at this unreasonable and unnecessary request. It’s absurd to think that violent felons, traffickers and drug kingpins, the kinds of people the FBI ought to worry about, will mosey over to your local sheriff’s office to fill out a CCW application.
— St. Joseph News Press
The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump — an historical first.
A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady.
Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act.
The Democratic Party is anticipated to suffer historical losses. Trump was on the verge of announcing his 2024 presidential candidacy. In many polls, he remains the Republican front-runner for the nomination — and well ahead of incumbent President Joe Biden in a putative 2024 rematch.
In 2016 then FBI Director James Comey announced that candidate Hillary Clinton was guilty of destroying subpoenaed emails — a likely felony pertaining to her tenure as secretary of state. Yet he all but pledged that she would not be prosecuted given her status as a presidential candidate.
As far as targeting presidential candidates, Trump was impeached in 2020 ostensibly for delaying military aid to Ukraine by asking Ukrainian officials to investigate more fully the clearly corrupt Biden family — given Joe Biden at the time was a likely possible presidential opponent in 2020.
The FBI has devolved into a personal retrieval service for the incorrigible Biden family. It suppressed, for political purposes, information surrounding Hunter Biden’s missing laptop on the eve of the 2020 election.
Previously, the FBI never pursued Hunter’s fraudulently registered firearm, his mysterious foreign income, his felonious crack cocaine use, or his regular employment of foreign prostitutes.
Yet in a pre-dawn raid just before the 2020 election, the FBI targeted the home of journalist James O’Keefe on grounds that someone had passed to him the lost and lurid diary of Ashley Biden, Biden’s wayward daughter.
At various times, in Stasi-style the FBI has publicly shackled Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro, swarmed the office of Trump’s legal counsel Rudy Giuliani, and sent a SWAT team to surround the house of Trump ally Roger Stone. Meanwhile, terrorists and cartels walk with impunity across an open border.
FBI Director Christopher Wray last week cut short his evasive testimony before Congress. He claimed he had to leave for a critical appointment — only to use his FBI Gulfstream luxury jet to fly to his favorite vacation spot in the Adirondacks.
Wray took over from disgraced interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe. The latter admitted lying repeatedly to federal investigators and signed off on a fraudulent FBI FISA application. He faced zero legal consequences.
McCabe, remember, was also the point man in the softball Hillary Clinton email investigation — while his wife was a political candidate and recipient of thousands of dollars from a political action committee with close ties to the Clinton family.
McCabe took over from disgraced FBI Director James Comey. On 245 occasions, Comey claimed under oath before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no memory or knowledge of key questions concerning his tenure. With impunity, he leaked confidential FBI memos to the media.
Comey took over from Director Robert Mueller. Implausibly, Mueller swore under oath that he had no knowledge, either of the Steele dossier or of Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned Christopher Steele to compile the dossier. But those were the very twin catalysts that had prompted his entire special investigation into the Russian collusion hoax.
FBI legal counsel Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of a felony for altering an FBI warrant request to spy on an innocent Carter Page.
The FBI, by Comey’s own public boasts, bragged how it caught National Security Advisor designate General Michael Flynn in its Crossfire Hurricane Russian collusion hoax.
As special counsel, Mueller then fired two of his top investigators — Lisa Page and Peter Strzok — for improper personal and professional behavior. He then staggered their releases to mask their collaborative wrongdoing.
Mueller’s team deleted critical cell phone evidence under subpoena that might well have revealed systemic FBI-related bias.
The FBI interferes with and warps national elections. It hires complete frauds as informants who are far worse than its targets. It humiliates or exempts government and elected officials based on their politics. It violates the civil liberties of individual American citizens.
The FBI’s highest officials now routinely mislead Congress. They have erased or altered court and subpoenaed evidence. They illegally leak confidential material to the media. And they have lied under oath to federal investigators.
The agency has become dangerous to Americans and an existential threat to their democracy and rule of law. The FBI should be dispersing its investigatory responsibilities to other government investigative agencies that have not yet lost the public’s trust.
John Lott nails it again
How the FBI Undercounts Armed Citizen Responders to Mass Killers — and Media Play Along
The shooting that killed three people and injured another at a Greenwood, Indiana, mall on July 17 drew broad national attention because of how it ended – when 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, carrying a licensed handgun, fatally shot the attacker.
Evidence compiled by the organization I run, the Crime Prevention Research Center, and others suggest that the FBI undercounts by an order of more than three the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks, saving untold numbers of lives. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.
“So much of our public understanding of this issue is malformed by this single agency,” notes Theo Wold, former acting assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice. “When the Bureau gets it so systematically – and persistently – wrong, the cascading effect is incredibly deleterious. The FBI exerts considerable influence over state and local law enforcement and policymakers at all levels of government.”
As many on the left seek more limits on gun ownership and use in response to mass shootings and the uptick in violent crime, and many on the right seek greater access to firearms for protection, the media’s reliance on incomplete statistics in covering incidents such as the one at the Greenwood Park Mall takes on new significance.
Greenwood Park Mall: When shooting started, Dicken reacted in 15 seconds, at a distance of 40 yards.
The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively engages in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.
The Bureau reports that only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2021 were stopped by an armed citizen. An analysis by my organization identified a total of 281 active shooter incidents during that same period and found that 41 of them were stopped by an armed citizen.
That is, the FBI reported that 4.4% of active shooter incidents were thwarted by armed citizens, while the CPRC found 14.6%.
Two factors explain this discrepancy – one, misclassified shootings; and two, overlooked incidents. Regarding the former, the CPRC determined that the FBI reports had misclassified five shootings: In two incidents the Bureau notes in its detailed write-up that citizens possessing valid firearms permits confronted the shooters and caused them to flee the scene. However, these cases were not listed as being stopped by armed citizens because the attackers were later apprehended by police. In two other incidents the FBI misidentified armed civilians as armed security personnel. In one incident, the FBI simply failed to mention the citizen engagement at all.
Challenge to Biden’s new “ghost gun” rules heard in federal court
Two weeks from now the Biden administration’s new regulations on 80% completed frames and receivers are set to take effect, but one Texas company that produces the unfinished products argued in federal court this week that the new rules should be blocked from being enforced while the legality of the rules are being litigated.
Pressing for a preliminary injunction, Division 80’s attorney, Cory Liu of the Ashcroft Law Firm in Austin, said in a hearing Tuesday that the company’s owner, Brandon Padilla, has no other job and his livelihood depends on its current business model.
“Why doesn’t he just get the [federal firearm] license?” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown asked.
“There’s a thriving market of people who want to make their own guns and don’t want to go through licensed dealers,” Liu explained. “Padilla’s entire product line would be wiped out; consumer demand wouldn’t be there.”
“It’s not just about a license,” the attorney added. “It’s about the ability to build a firearm, a right that’s existed since the nation’s founding.”
But Liu’s arguments were undercut by a disclaimer from Justice Department attorney Daniel Riess, after Liu showed Brown a receiver Division 80 sells for an AR-15 style rifle, the most popular firearm in America.
Riess gave the judge a paper with illustrations taken from the ATF’s final rule, outlining what it does and does not consider to be a receiver.
To qualify as a regulated receiver, Riess explained, the part must come with a “jig” or template – typically a piece of plastic that snaps into place to guide the purchaser on where and how deep to drill holes – drill bits and instructions, making the receiver “readily convertible” within minutes to a fully functional firearm.
Liu was flabbergasted. “That’s news to me,” he said. “For months, we’ve been asking what role do instructions and tools play in this. You can sell a receiver blank without tools and jigs. That’s news to me. Had this handout been posted on ATF’s website that would have cleared up a lot of questions.”
Brown asked if that doomed Division 80’s injunction request: “What if the product can still be sold? Is that fatal to a preliminary injunction? Or are you still saying you want an injunction?”
But Liu said the revelation just proves Division 80’s contention the rule is unconstitutionally vague. He said it is so open-ended the public can’t understand it.
“They want the rule to be as ambiguous as possible. And they’ll just give handouts on a case-by-case basis to meet their need,” he griped.
Liu’s right about the vagueness of the ATF’s new interpretation (and I would argue, unconstitutional expansion) of the Gun Control Act’s definition of “firearm”, which now seems to be something along the lines of “a frame or receiver, even one that is not completed, though an incomplete frame or receiver may not be a firearm if it’s not able to be readily converted into a firearm… we’re not really sure.”
Rather than a sharp, clear line that’s easy for companies like Division 80 to follow, the agency is trying to give itself unchecked authority to determine on a case-by-case basis whether or not unfinished frames or receivers should be considered firearms under federal law; requiring them to both be serialized and sold at retail only after a background check is performed on the buyer.
Division 80’s attorneys contend that regardless of what DOJ attorneys said in court on Tuesday the ATF simply doesn’t have the authority to issue their new rules, and that Congress is the appropriate body to make these substantive changes to the GCA. Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court by Donald Trump in 2019, told both sides that he does expect to issue a decision on the request for an injunction before August 24th, so it shouldn’t be long before we know whether or not the new rules will actually be enforced in a couple of weeks.
This is the job listing for the "new" 87,000 IRS agents that a recent law authorizes them to hire.
Read the last few bullet points ask yourself what you think they'll actually be doing…. 🤨 pic.twitter.com/A4ocai0IPt
— Mrgunsngear (@Mrgunsngear) August 10, 2022
BLUF
Wilkins sees eye to eye with the three-judge 5th Circuit panel that upheld the bump stock ban last December. Like the D.C. Circuit panel, it said “bump stocks qualify as machine guns under the best interpretation of the statute.” But the 5th Circuit vacated that panel decision in June, and it is now reconsidering the case. If the full court goes a different way, the circuit split could prompt the Supreme Court to weigh in.
D.C. Circuit Upholds the Bump Stock Ban, Saying It Is Consistent With the ‘Best Interpretation’ of the Law
It is hard to see how, given the contortions required to deliver the unilateral prohibition that Donald Trump demanded.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday upheld the federal bump stock ban that took effect in 2019, approving the legal contortions required to justify it. In blessing the Trump administration’s redefinition of machine guns to include bump stocks and firearms equipped with them, the appeals court did not merely defer to regulators’ interpretation of an ambiguous statute. It concluded that the new reading of the law—which contradicts the position that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) consistently took before then-President Donald Trump demanded that the agency ban bump stocks by administrative fiat—is “the best interpretation of the statute.”
That is hard to believe. The ATF’s justification for the ban is so implausible that it seems clear the agency rewrote the law to accommodate the president’s policy preferences, criminalizing previously legal conduct without bothering to seek new legislation from Congress.
Bump stocks, which became suddenly notorious after they were used in the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, facilitate a rapid-firing technique in which recoil energy pushes the weapon backward, resetting the trigger, while the shooter maintains forward pressure on the gun, causing the trigger to bump against his stationary finger. Crucially, the gun still fires just one round each time the trigger is activated, and it continues to fire only as long as the shooter deliberately and repeatedly engages the trigger by pushing the weapon forward.
Those points are crucial because federal law defines a machine gun as a weapon that “automatically” fires more than one round “by a single function of the trigger.” The definition also includes “any part” or “combination of parts” that is “designed and intended” to convert a firearm into a machine gun.
It’s barely 24 hours since the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was revealed. My post, This is a provocation. They are trying to get a reaction that allows a further crackdown, has been shared widely.
There’s no doubt that the way the raid was carried out was deliberately provocative. It was meant to get a reaction at multiple levels. But as Andy McCarthy and others have speculated, it’s possible the pretense of the raid leaked to the press — failure to return presidential documents including possibly classified documents — was just a ruse to get the Feds inside the building:
The Justice Department obviously used the potential classified information as a pretext to obtain a warrant so it could search for what it is really looking for: evidence that would tie Trump to a Capitol riot offense – either a violent crime, such as seditious conspiracy to forcibly attack a government installation (which is highly unlikely), or a non-violent crime, such as conspiracy to obstruct the January 6 joint session of Congress to count electoral votes, or conspiracy to defraud the government.
This wide-sweep theory just gained more support, with Fox News reporting the seizure the day after the Mar-a-Lago raid of a cell phone from a close Trump ally, Republican Rep. Scott Perry:
Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania says that the FBI has confiscated his cellphone.
Perry, in an exclusive statement, told Fox News on Tuesday that while traveling with his family earlier in the day, he was approached by three FBI agents who handed him a warrant and requested that he turn over his cellphone.
The confiscation of the congressman’s personal phone comes one day after FBI agents searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
“This morning, while traveling with my family, 3 FBI agents visited me and seized my cell phone. They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish. I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress,” Perry said in his statement.
“My phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, and personal/private discussions with my wife, family, constituents, and friends. None of this is the government’s business.”
National Review notes Perry’s interaction with the January 6 Committee:
Though it is unclear from the Fox News report why agents seized Perry’s phone, the action comes three months after the House committee on the January 6 Capitol riot subpoenaed Perry along with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Andy Biggs of Arizona. All five Republican lawmakers had declined the panel’s requests to voluntarily cooperate. It is extraordinarily rare for a congressional committee to subpoena sitting members of Congress.
Perry condemned the panel’s dramatic move at the time, saying, “That this illegitimate body leaked their latest charade to the media ahead of contacting targeted Members is proof positive once again that this political witch hunt is about fabricating headlines and distracting the Americans from their abysmal record of running America into the ground.”
Perry, who supported Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, was reportedly in contact with the Trump White House numerous times in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot.
This follows the June 2022 search of the home of Trump-supportive Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Clark.
There’s obviously a full-on DOJ-FBI effort to get Trump on something. That’s part of what’s happening here. But there’s probably a lot that we don’t know about how that is going to happen. I think we’ll find out right after the midterms when DOJ/FBI slam down whatever hammer they think they have.
Pay attention to what’s happening to Dutch livestock farmers.
The beauty of climate change, if you’re a wannabe totalitarian, is that, because carbon is one of the building blocks of life, if you control carbon, you control everything. To understand how this works, you must pay attention to what is happening in the Netherlands, where the government is planning to seize 20% of livestock farms, all in the name of climate change.
Holland was once a bastion of liberty on a continent that was subject to total monarchal control and riven by religious wars. It wasn’t freedom as we have come to understand it in America, but, after they threw off Spanish control, the Dutch allowed faiths other than Calvinism within their borders. There was a reason the Puritans Pilgrims fled there first, although they eventually wanted the complete freedom the New World offered them for practicing their particular Protestantism. That sturdy, self-sufficient, independent, sort-of-free little nation is gone.
Now, livestock farmers are up in arms because they’ve finally realized that their government is about to seize their land, all in pursuit of “nitrogen reduction.” We’ve heard about the protests, but Peter of Sweden is the first person I’ve seen who breaks down the numbers and explains what’s really happening (and it’s about power more than “climate change”):
According to calculations done by the Finance ministry, a whopping 11 200 livestock farmers will be forced to shut down by the government to reduce nitrogen emissions in order to meet European environmental rules. Another 17 600 farmers would need to reduce the amount of animals they keep to meet these climate goals.
And this is bad. Because there are about 54 000 farms in the Netherlands, meaning that around 1/5 of all farms will be forced to shut down and almost 1/3 of farms forced to scale down and reduce livestock.
Quite obviously, the government’s move will severely constrict food supplies, which are already likely to diminish due to fertilizer shortages resulting from the Ukraine war. I’m assuming that those who complain will be told that they need to learn to eat grasshoppers. The irony is that grasshoppers need to eat, too — and what they eat is the greenery best fed by CO2 and fertilizer.
Comment O’ The Day
I mean no disrespect to federal magistrate judges – who are not Article III judges and are appointed to 8-year terms – but were I the FBI, I probably would have made the effort to try to get a full-on federal judge with a life term to sign off on a unprecedented search warrant for the former (and maybe future?) President’s house. The point of such life terms is to insulate such judges from political influence, and getting a warrant from someone not so insulated, on something as hot as this, is not a great look.
(I am ignoring the angle here that he had also represented employees of Jeffrey Epstein – it’s usually not fair to smear lawyers with their clients – but that’s not the best optics you could hope for either.)
Judge who approved FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago once linked to Jeffrey Epstein
The Florida federal magistrate judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort left the local US Attorney’s office more than a decade ago to rep employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein who had received immunity in the long-running sex-trafficking investigation of the financier.
Sources tell The Post that Judge Bruce Reinhart approved the warrant that enabled federal agents to converge on the palatial South Florida estate on Monday in what Trump called an “unannounced raid on my home.”
Reinhart was elevated to magistrate judge in March 2018 after 10 years in private practice. That November, the Miami Herald reported that he had represented several of Epstein’s employees — including, by Reinhart’s own admission to the outlet, Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, who Epstein once reportedly described as his “Yugoslavian sex slave.”
Kellen and Marcinkova were among Epstein’s lieutenants who were granted immunity as part of a controversial 2007 deal with federal prosecutors that allowed the pervert to plead guilty to state charges rather than federal crimes. Epstein wound up serving just 13 months in county jail and was granted work release.
According to the outlet, Reinhart resigned from the South Florida US Attorney’s Office effective on New Year’s Day 2008 and went to work for Epstein’s cohorts the following day. Epstein, who was found dead in August 2019 of an apparent suicide in the Manhattan Correctional Center while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, had hired a stable of high-powered lawyers, including former independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Reinhart was later named in a civil lawsuit that accused him of violating Justice Department policies by switching sides in the middle of the Epstein investigation, suggesting he had used inside information about the probe to build favor with the notorious defendant, the Herald reported in 2018.
In a 2011 affidavit, Reinhart denied he had done anything improper and insisted that since he was not involved in the federal investigation of Epstein, he was not privy to inside information about the case.
However, in a 2013 court filing, Reinhart’s former colleagues contradicted him, saying that he had “learned confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter.” Reinhart noted to the Herald in response that a complaint filed against him by a lawyer for Epstein’s victims had been dismissed by the Justice Department.
In his 12 years as a federal prosecutor, according to his official biography, Reinhart “managed a docket that covered the full spectrum of federal crimes, including narcotics, violent crimes, public corruption, financial frauds, child pornography and immigration.”
Reinhart is one of three federal magistrate judges in the West Palm Beach offices of the US District Court for the Southern District Court of Florida, along with William Matthewman and Ryon McCabe.
Two recent warrant applications were assigned to Reinhart and entered into the court system on Monday, the Miami Herald reported, but those warrants and information about who they targeted remain sealed. Records show another warrant was issued by Reinhart on Friday, but its contents were also sealed.
Trump confirmed media reports of a raid at his Florida resort on Monday evening, saying Mar-a-Lago was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”
The agents were reportedly searching the seaside property for boxes of classified documents Trump allegedly brought to the ritzy resort after he left the White House in January 2021, which would be a violation of federal record-keeping laws.
The National Archives and Records Administration said in February that it found classified documents in 15 boxes at Mar-a-Lago and alerted the FBI.
The removal of classified documents to unauthorized locations is banned under federal law, although Trump had wide powers when he was president to declassify documents.
The raid on Mar-a-Lago comes amid the House select committee’s continuing investigation into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol as Congress met to certify the 2020 presidential election results.
A federal grand jury is also investigating the riot and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election
Sinister move by ATF should serve as warning
I’ve often talked about the animosity many in the gun community feel toward the ATF. It’s a real thing, after all, and the ATF doesn’t seem to care very much about how they’re perceived. Sure, they’ve tried to bust a few supposed myths, but beyond that? They’re not doing much to improve their image.
Then again, it doesn’t help when they decide to overstep their bounds.
It seems that at least some gun stores are receiving the following letter from the ATF:
Now, the law they’re citing does indeed require gun stores to report all denied NICS checks. This is one of those things that few people really have an issue with in the grand scheme of things. After all, a denied check is grounds to at least see if the individual in question is a criminal trying to commit an illegal act.
If it’s not, then hopefully whatever led to the denial can be fixed.
But as the letter notes, the ATF is demanding contact information for delayed NICS checks.
For the uninitiated, this may make perfect sense. After all, we don’t know if those delayed checks are criminals trying to buy guns or not.
Except, that’s literally not how the law works. A delayed background check is supposed to be treated as a passed check. Further, according to a couple of gun store owners and employees I’ve spoken with, something like 95 percent, at a minimum, of all delayed NICS checks are people with no criminal history. The system just created a delay for some unfathomable reason.
And let’s also note that the letter does even differentiate between a two-day delay where the check comes back clean and one where there’s never a return at all. In other words, if you have a delay of a single day when trying to buy a gun, the ATF wants your information sent to them just as if you were a convicted felon trying to buy a firearm.
Taken in a vacuum, this is extremely problematic and worrying.