Category: Bureaucraps

15 States Vow to Protect Oil, Gas Industry From ‘Woke’ Banks

A coalition of 15 states announced a commitment to scrutinize future business with banks that divest from the fossil fuel industry.

The coalition of top state financial officers, formed by West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore, collectively represents more than $600 billion in public assets under management, according to the announcement. The officials wrote a letter to banking industry leaders Monday, warning that they would begin considering institutions’ boycotts of fossil fuel companies before awarding state contracts.

“Reckless attacks on law-abiding energy companies cut off paychecks for workers and take food off the tables of hard-working families,” Moore and the other officials wrote. “The Biden Administration has resumed these attacks by attempting to ban energy exploration on public lands and reportedly pressuring U.S. banks and financial institutions to limit, encumber, or outright refuse financing for traditional energy production companies.”

“These misguided political schemes have impeded economic growth, driven up consumer costs, and regressed our country to foreign energy dependence,” the letter continued. (RELATED: America Is Becoming More Dependent On Foreign Oil Under Biden)

The fossil fuel industry provides jobs, health insurance, infrastructure and quality of life to Americans nationwide, they added.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has blocked major pipelines, ditched oil drilling projects, introduced sweeping regulations and banned new oil and gas leases on federal lands. His administration is also pushing the Build Back Better Act, the budget bill passed by the House last week that includes several green energy handouts and a tax on methane emissions.

In August, the Treasury Department issued guidance saying the U.S. would oppose multilateral development banks’ involvement in future fossil fuel projects, a move applauded by environmental activists. Moore and the other financial officers said the move would cede future development “Chinese interests.”

“Woke capitalists and globalist actors have been using the guise of climate change to press for anti-American reforms that reduce our country’s competitiveness against hostile nations like Russia and China,” Moore said in a statement.

“As a result, in less than a year our country has gone from energy independence to having a President who is begging OPEC and Russia to pump more oil,” he continued. “It’s time we fight back to protect our economies, jobs, tax revenue and energy independence from these increasing attacks on our critical industries.”

Major financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Citi Bank and Bank of America, have committed to environmental and sustainability goals that involve divestment from fossil fuel companies.

Top financial officers in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming signed the letter.

Comment O’ The Day

Tacked on the end: China’s July test of a globe-circling hypersonic vehicle that was able to launch a separate missile while traveling at more than five times the speed of sound alerted Washington that Beijing might have technologies the United States has yet to develop.

But we’re getting pretty good at pronouns.

Inexplicable Phenomena Spur Pentagon to Launch New UFO Investigation Force.

The Pentagon is creating a new office to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs) amid concerns that after broad probes it cannot explain mysterious sightings near highly sensitive military areas.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, working with the US director of national intelligence, ordered the new investigatory body to be established in the US Defense Department’s intelligence and security office, the Pentagon said late Tuesday.

The order came five months after a classified US intelligence report on possible alien UFOs came up inconclusive: it could explain some reported incidents but was unable to account for other phenomena, some filmed by pilots near military testing areas.

The new office will focus on incidents in, or near, designated “special use airspace” (SUA) areas strictly controlled and blocked from general aviation due to security sensitivities.

The US military is worried some of the unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) spotted by military pilots in the past may represent technologies of strategic rivals unknown to US scientists.

“Incursions by any airborne object into our SUA pose safety of flight and operations security concerns, and may pose national security challenges,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The Defense Department “takes reports of incursions – by any airborne object, identified or unidentified – very seriously, and investigates each one,” it added.

The new office was dubbed the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG), the successor to the US Navy’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.

It will be overseen by a panel of experts from the military and intelligence community.

A mostly classified official review of UFO reports released in June determined that most of around 120 incidents over the past 20 years could be explained and had nothing to do with unknown or secret US or foreign technology.

But it could not explain some beguiling reports and videos made by military personnel.

Last year, the Pentagon released a still inexplicable video taken by navy pilots of objects moving at incredible speeds, spinning and mysteriously disappearing.

China’s July test of a globe-circling hypersonic vehicle that was able to launch a separate missile while traveling at more than five times the speed of sound alerted Washington that Beijing might have technologies the United States has yet to develop.

I recall someone on a BBS  joking about eventually having booster shots be a perpetual thing. Comedy; Daily becoming reality.

Fauci Prepares to Move the Goalposts—AGAIN

The only consistency there has been in the pronouncements of Dr. Antony Fauci, the public face of the pandemic since Donald Trump was president, is their inconsistency. Fauci is now saying that being “fully vaccinated” may mean getting a booster shot as well. Previously, Fauci said that being “fully vaccinated” meant receiving two shots of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines or a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Fauci says this is how you follow the science.

Fox News:

“People should not be put off by the fact that as time goes by and we learn more and more about the protection that we might modify the guidelines,” he explained. “That’s what we’ve been saying all along by follow the science, things change and you have to follow the data.”

But that booster shot still may not be enough. We may need boosters every six months or every year, according to “Follow the science” Fauci.

Fauci later said on ABC’s “This Week” that he hopes the booster shot will not wane the same way the initial regimens did, which would allow Americans to avoid more regular booster shots at either six months or even a year.

“We would hope, and this is something that we’re looking at very carefully, that that third shot with the mRNA not only boosts you way up, but increases the durability so that you will not necessarily need it every six months or a year,” Fauci said. “We’re hoping it pushes it out more.”

“If it doesn’t, and the data shows we need to do it more often, then we’ll do it, but we want to make sure we get the population optimally protected and you do whatever you need to do.”

The reason some of us need new flu shots every flu season is that the virus that causes the flu changes significantly from year to year. However, the coronavirus hasn’t changed significantly — not even the “variants” that have arisen in some areas. It’s basically the same animal with different disguises.

Fauci isn’t wrong when he says science means learning more about the virus, and the more we learn, the more it may become necessary to adjust our strategies to deal with it. What makes Fauci the absolute worst choice to continue to be the spokesman for any administration COVID policies is his inability to articulate the state of the knowledge we have regarding the coronavirus and what the government is doing about it.

It’s not just a matter of Fauci not knowing when to keep his mouth shut or when to stop talking. His failures have killed people and will continue to kill people, because few Americans trust what he says.

That’s a singular failure for which Joe Biden bears equal responsibility.

Federal Reserve Encourages Americans to Replace Thanksgiving Turkeys With Soybean Products

The Federal Reserve is encouraging Americans to combat soaring meat price inflation by swapping turkeys for soybean products this Thanksgiving.

Yes, really.

“Between 1990 and the time of this writing, the average global price of poultry has been 6 times higher than the price of soybeans,” reports the St. Louis Fed.

“As of the third quarter of 2021, a hearty Thanksgiving dinner serving of turkey costs $1.42. A tofurkey (soybean) dinner serving with the same amount of calories costs $0.66 and provides almost twice as much protein. Keep in mind that this plant-based meal would be almost 3 times larger by weight than the poultry-based meal and may either keep you at the dinner table longer or provide you with more leftovers.”

The very company the administration touts and the Peter Pan look-a-like Secretary of Energy cashes in on a stock sale of. And it’s ‘legal’  because she is exempt by law.

Granholm’s Green Energy Millions

Biden energy secretary nets $1.6 million after offloading admin-backed electric bus company

Energy secretary Jennifer Granholm has finally sold hundreds of thousands of shares in a green energy company that has received the backing of the Biden administration.

On Wednesday, Granholm confirmed she earned a $1.6 million profit on her shares of Proterra amid a firestorm over her financial ties to an electric vehicle company repeatedly promoted by the Biden administration. In selling off her shares, Granholm was able to defer paying capital gains taxes on the $1.6 million sale because cabinet officials are not penalized with the tax on assets they are required to sell as a condition of joining the administration. The Biden administration is seeking to raise the capital gains tax on America’s wealthiest families.

On May 11, Granholm filed an Office of Government Ethics divestiture certificate. She confirmed the sale Wednesday. The former Michigan governor reported selling more than 240,000 shares in the electric bus manufacturer to an unnamed buyer. She valued the stake at up to $5 million in a January financial disclosure.

The Department of Energy did not return to requests for comment.

While Proterra is slated to go public within the next few weeks, Granholm’s sale of the shares of the yet-to-be publicly traded company likely occurred in an off-market private sale. The Washington Free Beacon reported that major Democratic donors are invested in the company taking Proterra public, including at least one member of the megadonor Pritzker family who stands to own up to 7 percent of the company when it finally becomes public.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Granholm’s divestment comes weeks after President Joe Biden toured Proterra, prompting ethics concerns from federal lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) compared the Biden administration’s ongoing promotion of the company to the Obama administration’s pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into Solyndra, a failed solar panel company. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) wrote to the Department of Energy’s inspector general demanding a review of Granholm’s stake in the company.

“Energy Secretary Granholm held millions of dollars of investments in an electric bus company. During her nomination hearing, she committed to the Senate that she would avoid the appearance of any conflicts of interest,” Barrasso told the Free Beacon. “Even though Secretary Granholm has now sold these stocks, her actions appear to be a significant conflict of interest.”

Rep. Ralph Norman (R., S.C.) wrote directly to Granholm requesting key documents about any Department of Energy promotion of Proterra. Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) called for Granholm to offload her Proterra shares on May 5.

Granholm played a leading role in shaping the administration’s infrastructure package. Biden tasked her specifically with “identifying risks in the supply chain for high-capacity batteries, including electric-vehicle batteries, and policy recommendations to address these risks.” The legislation includes a $174 billion investment in the electric vehicle market and creates a Clean Buses for Kids program in order to “electrify” at least 20 percent of the nation’s school buses. Proterra opened a battery manufacturing plant in California just weeks after Biden’s election.

In addition to Biden’s virtual tour of Proterra’s South Carolina factory, the president in May hosted company CEO Jack Allen at the White House’s Leaders Summit on Climate. National climate adviser Gina McCarthy praised Proterra for its “amazing” work at the summit and asked Allen “what role” the federal government can play in “spurring the demand for zero emission electric vehicles, including school buses.”

Granholm and Allen spoke at the conference, with Allen thanking Biden for his “longstanding support of electric transit buses and zero emission transportation.” While Granholm has denied any involvement of planning Proterra-related events, the White House has yet to say who was involved in planning them.

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

Bureaucraps, inspiring confidence

FDA Says It Needs Until Year 2076 To Reveal Data Pertaining To Pfizer Vaccine Approval.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested Monday for the courts to give them until 2076 to review and fully release the documents pertaining to the approval of the Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The FDA denied Sept. 9 a request for an expedited release of the vaccine’s approval records from a group of doctors and scientists, the Public Health Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT). The PHMPT has since filed a lawsuit against the FDA for failure to complete their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The agency had determined that there were a total of 329,000 pages that needed to be reviewed in order to fulfill the plaintiff’s FOIA request, and proposed that they would be able to “process and produce the non-exempt portions of responsive records at a rate of 500 pages per month.” The FDA said they would provide the plaintiff with prioritized documents and release the non-exempt portions of the records on a “rolling basis.” This rate of review places the FDA’s release of the documents at nearly 55 years.

“This rate is consistent with processing schedules entered by courts across the country in FOIA cases,” said the FDA, explaining that the plaintiff’s request for documentation within a 4-month timeframe would force the FDA to have to work through 80,000 pages per month.

Due to an inability to reach an agreement on a set disclosure schedule, the plaintiffs have called for a hearing to argue their case before a judge, according to The Epoch Times.

It must have really really hurt to write this and acknowledge he was a dupe that believed lies merely because they fit his politics.

The Federal Bureau of Dirty Tricks

[New York Times] Opinion Columnist
This month’s bombshell indictment of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who is charged with lying to the F.B.I. and whose work turns out to have been the main source for Christopher Steele’s notorious dossier, is being treated as a major embarrassment for much of the news media — and, if the charges stick, that’s exactly what it is.
Put media criticism aside for a bit. What this indictment further exposes is that James Comey’s F.B.I. became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.
If you haven’t followed the drip-drip-drip of revelations, late in 2019 Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department’s inspector general, published a damning report detailing “many basic and fundamental errors” by the F.B.I. in seeking Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants to surveil Carter Page, the American businessman fingered in the dossier as a potential link between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Shortly afterward, Rosemary Collyer, the court’s presiding judge, issued her own stinging rebuke of the bureau: “The frequency with which representations made by F.B.I. personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other F.B.I. applications is reliable,” she wrote.
Here a question emerged: Were the F.B.I.’s errors a matter of general incompetence or of bias? There appears to be a broad pattern of F.B.I. agents overstating evidence that corroborates their suspicions. That led to travesties such as the bureau hounding the wrong man in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
But it turns out the bureau can be both incompetent and biased. When the F.B.I. applied for warrants to continue wiretapping Page, it already knew Page was helping the C.I.A., not the Russians. We know this because in August 2020 a former F.B.I. lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, pleaded guilty to rewriting an email to hide Page’s C.I.A. ties.
And why would Clinesmith do that? It certainly helped the bureau renew its wiretap warrants on Page, and, as Clinesmith once put it in a text message to a colleague, “viva la resistance.” When the purpose of government service is to stop “the crazies” (one of Clinesmith’s descriptions of the elected administration) then the ends soon find a way of justifying the means.
Which brings us to the grand jury indictment of Danchenko in the investigation being conducted by the special counsel John Durham. Danchenko was Steele’s main source for the most attention-grabbing claims in the dossier, including the existence of a likely mythical “pee tape.” Steele, in turn, wrote his report for Fusion GPS, an opposition-research outfit that had been hired by a Washington law firm close to the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Translation: The Steele dossier was Democratic Party-funded opposition research that had been sub-sub-sub-sub contracted to Danchenko, who now stands accused of repeatedly lying to the F.B.I. about his own sources while also having been investigated a decade ago for possible ties to Russian intelligence. Danchenko has pleaded not guilty and adamantly denies Russian intelligence ties, and he deserves his day in court. He describes the raw intelligence he collected for Steele as little more than a collection of rumors and innuendo and alleges that Steele dressed them up for Fusion GPS.
Of such dross was spun years of high-level federal investigations, ponderous congressional hearings, pompous Adam Schiff soliloquies, and nonstop public furor. But none of that would likely have happened if the F.B.I. had treated the dossier as the garbage that it was, while stressing the ways in which Russia had sought to influence the election on Trump’s behalf, or the ways in which the Trump campaign (particularly through its onetime manager, Paul Manafort) was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
Instead, Comey used it as a political weapon by privately briefing President-elect Trump about it, despite ample warnings about the dossier’s credibility. In doing so, Comey made the existence of the “salacious and unverified” dossier news in its own right. And, as the University of Chicago’s Charles Lipson astutely notes, Comey’s briefing “could be seen as a kind of blackmail threat, the kind that marked J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure.”
If you are a certain kind of reader — probably conservative — who has closely followed the Durham investigation, none of the above will come as news. But I’m writing this column for those who haven’t followed it closely, or who may have taken a keener interest in tales about Trump being Russia’s puppet than in evidence that, for all of his many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the F.B.I.
Democrats who don’t want the vast power wielded by the bureau ever used against one of their own — as, after all, it was against Hillary Clinton — ought to use the Durham investigation as an opportunity to clean up, or clean out, the F.B.I. once and for all.

OSHA Suspends the Implementation and Enforcement of Biden’s Vaccine Mandate

After a series of court rulings halting President Joe Biden’s vaccination mandate for private companies, OSHA has officially suspended the implementation and enforcement of the requirement. The mandate was scheduled to go into effect January 4, 2022.

“On November 12, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted a motion to stay OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard, published on November 5, 2021 (86 Fed. Reg. 61402) (“ETS”). The court ordered that OSHA ‘take no steps to implement or enforce’ the ETS ‘until further court order,'” the OSHA website states. “While OSHA remains confident in its authority to protect workers in emergencies, OSHA has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of the ETS pending future developments in the litigation.”

After a lawsuit was filed by a number of state Attorneys General, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay on November 6, 2021, and said the mandate has “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”

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House Judiciary GOP: FBI Is Tracking Parent Protesters
“An FBI agent provided a copy of the internal email to several Republican lawmakers, citing concerns that it could open the door for the bureau to collect information on parents voicing their opposition to local school policies during meetings.”

We previously covered the disgusting politicization of the FBI and DOJ to put their criminal prosecution weight to silence the parent protest movement.

The House Judiciary GOP has obtained documents showing the the FBI is executing on the plan, specifically monitoring parents. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has set up a process to track threats against school-board members and teachers, moving to implement a Justice Department directive that some law-enforcement officials and Republican lawmakers say could improperly target parents protesting local education policies.

The heads of the FBI’s criminal and counterterrorism divisions instructed agents in an Oct. 20 memo to flag all assessments and investigations into potentially criminal threats, harassment and intimidation of educators with a “threat tag,” which the officials said would allow them to evaluate the scope of the problem.

The internal email asks FBI agents to consider the motivation behind any criminal activity and whether it potentially violates federal law. Agents should tag such threats “EDUOFFICIALS” to better track them, according to the memo, which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

“The purpose of the threat tag is to help scope this threat on a national level, and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels,” says the email signed by Timothy Langan, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, and Calvin Shivers, the assistant director of the bureau’s criminal division, who retired this month.

An FBI agent provided a copy of the internal email to several Republican lawmakers, citing concerns that it could open the door for the bureau to collect information on parents voicing their opposition to local school policies during meetings.

WSJ further reports:

“The FBI has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now,” the FBI said Tuesday in a statement. “We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech.”

The claim that they only track “threats” is complete BS, as we have seen time and again, parents raising their voices as school board meetings are called threats.

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ATF’s rejection of Michigan CCW permits reversed

Opinion here, from the Sixth Circuit. A win for GOA.

A licensed dealer must perform background checks unless the buyer has a qualifying carrying permit. ATF initially ruled that Michigan permits qualified, then reversed itself. The District Court upheld ATF’s position, but the 6th reversed and remanded for additional fact-finding. I wish the court had reached the Administrative Procedure Act issue, just because ATF has never been good at complying with the APA.

Deceitful bureaucraps forced to admit they’re full of deceit.

FBI Admits In FOIA Request That NICS Background Checks Are Wrong 28% of The Time…

The last few years have seen record numbers of gun sales, and thus record numbers of federally mandated background checks conducted through the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System (“NICS”). The FBI performed about 28 million such NICS checks in 2019, while last year that number jumped to nearly 40 million.

Each year, the FBI denies somewhere around 100,000 would-be firearm purchases — a statistic that the FBI is always proud to report. Those on the anti-gun Left, in turn, often tout this ever-increasing number of persons who have been denied the purchase of a firearm since implementation of the Brady Act on November 30, 1998. Through October 31, 2021, that number now exceeds two million NICS denials.

Gun control advocates point to this figure as proof positive that the NICS system works at stopping criminals from getting their hands on firearms. But their flawed assumption is that those who are denied by NICS are actually prohibited persons — something that is far from the case.

Notably, Second Amendment researcher and economist John Lott has claimed that as many as 99 percent of NICS denials are actually false positives — meaning the person denied is not actually a prohibited person.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Department of Justice tries to paint an entirely different picture, claiming that the FBI’s denial accuracy rate is between 99.3 and 99.8 percent — which, if true, would mean that almost no one is wrongly denied. Yet just about every week, GOA hears from its members and supporters who have been wrongly denied when attempting to purchase a firearm, and so the FBI’s claim seems suspect.

Indeed, documents recently received by Gun Owners of America (GOA) pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that the FBI’s own records undermine its claim to near-perfect accuracy.

In response to GOA’s FOIA request, the FBI responded that “27.7 percent of [NICS] appeals received during the requested time period were overturned and the firearm purchase/transfer transactions were proceeded.”

In other words, the FBI admits that its actual error rate is (at least) 138 times greater than it has previously claimed. But even this figure doesn’t fully represent the number of times the FBI gets it wrong.

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Memo Confirms National School Board Group ‘Actively Engaged’ with White House While Drafting ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Letter.

Biden Administration, School Board Association Colluded To Direct FBI Scrutiny at Parents Who Were Critical of School Boards.

Arizona school board president kept secret dossier on parents opposed to CRT and mask mandates that was discovered after he accidentally sent a link to a mom: Private investigator ran background checks and filmed parents.

A school board president in Arizona has been accused of maintaining a secret online dossier containing personal details about parents who opposed mask mandates and Critical Race Theory.

Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg’s access to the Google Drive file was revealed after he accidentally displayed the link in a screenshot he sent to a parent in a heated email chain.

The drive contained files labeled ‘SUSD Wackos’ and ‘Anti Mask Lunatics’ among others in a sprawling database tracking the online activities of parents in the district.

The drive was set to public, allowing anyone with a link to view it, and the contents, including the Social Security numbers, financial information and divorce records of parents, quickly set off a firestorm of calls for Greenburg to resign, according to AZ Free News.

The district blames Greenburg’s father Mark, who shares a home and computer with his son, for creating the bizarre dossier, and the school board president has denied involvement, vowing an investigation by ‘forensic IT staff’.  [oh my foot, that’s a CYA smokescreen]

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This is what you get when corrupt politicians place other corrupt politicians in positions of power as federal bureaucraps. Politicized law enforcement, which is always a prelude to tyranny.

The FBI Raid of Project Veritas Turns Into a Massive Scandal After Privileged Communications Are Leaked.

As RedState reported, Project Veritas has found itself in the crosshairs of the FBI recently. That began with a raid on the homes of several of its journalists under the guise of looking for Ashley Biden’s diary. Apparently, a stolen diary is now in the purview of federal authorities. Will they be investigating bike thefts next?

But what was so disturbing, besides the raids happening in the first place, was how quickly The New York Times knew about them. While O’Keefe was asked by the FBI to keep quiet, the Times knew within hours, pointing to a leaker within the bureau.

But while the Department of Justice requested us to not disclose the existence of the subpoena, something very unusual happened. Within an hour of one of our reporters’ homes being secretly raided by the FBI, The New York Times, who we are currently suing for defamation, contacted the Project Veritas reporter for comment. We do not know how The New York Times was aware of the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home, or the subject matter of the search warrant, as a Grand Jury investigation is secret.

Days later, O’Keefe would have his home raided as well, and sure enough, the Times once again knew it about it before anyone else. Are you noticing a pattern? Because it’s about to become as obvious as a neon sign.

Two days ago, a court ordered the FBI to stop extracting data from O’Keefe’s phones, which had apparently been seized. Again, all of this is being done under the allegation that…a diary was stolen. But then last night, things boiled over into outright scandal. The Times suddenly started publishing privileged communications between Project Veritas and its legal team. Those messages apparently came from one of O’Keefe’s phones.

Yes, you read that right. Project Veritas had recently sued The New York Times over an unrelated matter, and now the Times has Project Veritas’ privileged communications that reveal their legal strategies. Given the circumstances, there could only be one logical source for that information — the FBI.

This is absolutely scandalous, though nothing is really surprising anymore when dealing with the FBI. It appears that a major newspaper has colluded with the federal government to target an investigative reporting outlet. Of course, there are still more dots to connect, but if there’s some other explanation, I’m not seeing it. The pretense of the original raid simply made no sense (really, a diary?), and the Times has been getting leaks from the bureau every step of the way in order to target Project Veritas.

If this isn’t a coordinated political hit job on a journalistic organization, then what is it? So many lines have now been crossed that it’s hard to keep up with them all. Worse, what can Project Veritas even do about it? The Biden-run DOJ is not going to investigate these leaks, and the damage has already been done. The Times now has possession of these privileged communications even as they are being sued by Project Veritas. Think about how absurd that is.

Let this serve as another example of why the FBI doesn’t need to just be reprimanded, but that it needs to be disbanded. The organization simply can not be trusted to uphold the rights of American citizens any longer, a reality that is borne out by its own politicized actions.

There’s a simple solution to this. The less apps you have on your phone, and the less you use the apps you do have, and the less personal information you post online, the less information the goobermint will have access to.

THE U.S. TREASURY IS BUYING PRIVATE APP DATA TO TARGET AND INVESTIGATE PEOPLE
The department will use controversial firm Babel Street to hunt for tax and sanctions dodgers, raising constitutional concerns.

THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT has in recent months expanded its digital surveillance powers, contracts provided to The Intercept reveal, turning to the controversial firm Babel Street, whose critics say it helps federal investigators buy their way around the Fourth Amendment.

Two contracts obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with The Intercept by Tech Inquiry, a research and advocacy group, show that over the past four months, the Treasury acquired two powerful new data feeds from Babel Street: one for its sanctions enforcement branch, and one for the Internal Revenue Service. Both feeds enable government use of sensitive data collected by private corporations not subject to due process restrictions. Critics were particularly alarmed that the Treasury acquired access to location and other data harvested from smartphone apps; users are often unaware of how widely apps share such information.

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50 AFT Employees Processed 500,000+ Comments in Record Time!?

WASHINGTON, D.C. –-(Ammoland.com)- According to a leak supplied by Gun Owners of America (GOA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has finished reviewing all public comments received for pistol stabilizing braces and unfinished receivers. The Free Beacon released the cover sheet.  AmmoLand News has obtained the rest of the document.

AmmoLand News reported earlier that two teams of 50 ATF employees started the review process for both sets of comments on October 1, 2021. The ATF received just under 300,000 for unfinished frames and receivers. Pistol stabilizing braces came in at 50,000 fewer at just over 250,000.

The Documents proving that the ATF processed all submitted comments were verified by GOA about two weeks ago. The documents state that the total number of comments submitted by the public was 500,000, which is 50,000 comments less than submitted to the National Registry. That means 50 ATF employees processed 500,000 to 550,000 comments at an incredible rate.

After the Trump era bump stock rule change, the ATF developed a new system to process comments for future rule changes, but details on the new process remain murky. These two new proposed rules were the first test of the ATF’s new system for processing public comments.

The number of comments breaks down to 10,000 comments reviewed per ATF employee.

Given that the ATF claims it finished reviewing all the comments, it means each employee processed a minimum of 1,000 comments a day if each employee worked five days a week. If the ATF employees worked the standard eight-hour shift, it would mean each employee processed 125 comments per hour. If each employee would receive two hours of overtime each day, it means they would have to process 100 comments an hour.

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City of Boston Settles Carry Permit Processing Delay Lawsuit, Pays SAF’s Attorney’s Fees

From the Second Amendment Foundation . . .

The City of Boston has settled a federal lawsuit filed by the Second Amendment Foundation and other plaintiffs over delays in accepting and processing licenses to carry a firearm, and has agreed to pay $10,000 to cover attorneys’ fees and costs.

SAF was joined by Commonwealth Second Amendment, Inc., and several individuals. The lawsuit was known as Alves v. McNamara. Plaintiffs are represented by New York attorney David Jensen.

“The city had already been very slow processing applications for carry licenses, and when the COVIC-19 pandemic hit, things completely ground to a halt,” SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb recalled. “With things returning to normal, the city has agreed that all individuals who were on the list of applicants as of July 26 will be contacted so they may submit permit applications. The city also agreed to resume its pre-pandemic practice of accepting applications by Oct. 31, which has happened, and they are paying our legal expenses.

“This is one of the many COVID-related lawsuits to protect gun rights that we won,” he added, “and we had also warned several other jurisdictions around the country of probable legal action for similar shutdowns because of the pandemic.”

Nearly all jurisdictions are now returning to normal operation, Gottlieb said. Updates on all SAF legal actions can be found at saf.org

“Hopefully, this sort of thing will never happen again, anywhere,” he commented. “We’re happy with the settlement of this case. It’s just one more example of how SAF is winning firearms freedom, one lawsuit at a time.”

Federal Court Stays Biden Vaccine Mandate for Private Businesses

On Saturday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a temporary stay against the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate using a rule the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to require private companies with 100 or more employees mandate the vaccine or subject employees to regular testing, or else face crippling fines.

The FBI Just Admitted Something Terrifying and No One Seems to Be Noticing

The FBI’s presence in Kenosha sets off a cascade of questions, all of the answers to which should trigger every alarm in the book.

The Rittenhouse trial has been a marvel to watch, simply because the prosecution’s presentation of this case has been a train wreck of dumpster fires.  We’ve watched as the defense has absolutely fileted almost everything the prosecution has presented, as the Judge continues to make statements that will likely benefit the defense’s case.  However, a funny thing happened in the courtroom that went by even me for a bit.  Here we were talking about the various videos that were taken at the scene and what they show.  Here’s the one video of one angle, of one part of the street, and then there’s another of this other angle, showing these people who were involved in the shoot.  Then there’s the FBI drone video directly over the shooting, and there there’s another video on the ground in front of the gas station.  Each of the videos provided its own unique view of…… wait…. go back a minute…. what’s that part about an FBI drone??

Why in the hell was there an FBI drone directly over the shooting?  Have we even considered the ramifications of what that actually means?  Our government, for any reason that they perceive to be a threat, can conduct mass surveillance of you without a warrant?   Certainly, this was a public place and the courts have ruled that surveillance can be conducted in public without a warrant, however, there were local police resources. Why would the FBI be conducting this surveillance if they had no way of stopping or preventing what was happening, from occurring?  Regardless of the legality of it, should we as citizens become comfortable with the idea that this is normal?  Out of an abundance of generosity, let’s just say they were somehow justified with having a drone overhead, why this specific area?  Kenosha riots covered several dozen square blocks of town, so if they were conducting surveillance, were they doing so with multiple drones? There are two very simple answers to the question: Yes and no.

Well, I am a negative guy so let’s start with no. Why this one drone?  Why this one area?  And probably most importantly (and in my least Alex Jones-y voice I can muster), how did you end up directly over this shooting that night, despite all the other areas in the city where bad things were happening?  While I have never been a conspiracy theorist and abhor conspiracy theories, it seems wildly coincidental that of the several dozen square block area of Kenosha where there was violence going down that night, that you end up directly over the one shooting that is going to cause a national debate?  I can’t be the only one here thinking that’s awfully convenient.

If the answer is yes, then the next question we should ask ourselves is then, how many?  Why did the FBI decide on that many drones?  If that many drones, how many in each area?  Why those areas? Was there some specific threat posed in those areas?  Was local law enforcement involved?  Were they aware?  Did they have access to the video feed?  Now again, out of an abundance of generosity, let’s assume those questions are answered in a way that justifies the reasons why, but what about the answer to the question: to what end?  Were local authorities notified of crimes in progress?  Were they dispatched to any of the areas where a crime in progress was occurring?  How many crimes were stopped or prevented by the FBI drones?

We should consider that maybe that wasn’t the objective of the drones.  Maybe they were just there to observe and then use the video to later arrest perpetrators of all of the riots and looting that occurred in Kenosha.  Then how many arrests have occurred?  How many people have been prosecuted as a result of the video?  How many of the business owners have specific suspects they can pursue civil remedies against?  Can we see the video from all of the drones from that night?  What’s that….?  The FBI has lost video from that night in this case? We do know that means the FBI has violated federal law, right?

The point is none of the answers to these questions is any good.  We know they had at least one drone, but if there was one, it was over a really specific area, don’t you think? If there was more than one, why that many, and if that many, what were you able to accomplish with them, and if the answer to that is nothing, WHY THE HELL WERE THEY THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Are you comfortable with random, unnecessary surveillance by an organization that admittedly has broken federal law and has proven to be a cesspool of incompetence?

Good.  Me Neither.