Judge Rules in Multi-State Lawsuit Seeking to Halt Publication of 3-D Printed Gun Blueprints

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Federal Judge Robert Lasnik on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against Cody Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed, which would bar the federal government from allowing Wilson’s company to distribute 3-D printed gun blueprints. The decision comes after eight states and the District of Columbia, led by Washington State, sued to prevent Wilson’s Aug. 1 publishing schedule.

“The judge’s rule is clear,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said at a news conference. “We go back to the status quo, before the federal government made the disastrous decision to undo these protections for public safety.” . . .

Gun control advocates are applauding the decision. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, tweeted, urging her followers to call their Congressmen:

(Read more from “Judge Rules in Multi-State Lawsuit Seeking to Halt Publication of 3-D Printed Gun Blueprints” HERE)

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DHS Secretary Issues a Stern Warning About the Election

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By The Blaze. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen issued a stern warning Tuesday to Russia about meddling in U.S. elections, and said that her department was in “crisis mode” over cybersecurity. . .

Nielsen was addressing an audience at a cybersecurity summit when she directly addressed the assessment by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. . .

“Two years ago, as we all know,” she continued, “a foreign power launched a brazen multi-faceted influence campaign to undermine public faith in our democratic process, and to distort our presidential election.”

“That campaign was multi-faceted – it involved cyber-espionage, leaks of stolen data, cyber-intrusions into voter registrations systems, online propaganda and more,” she added. . .

“We are in crisis mode—the Category 5 hurricane has been forecast and now we must prepare,” Nielsen said. (Read more from “DHS Secretary Issues a Stern Warning About the Election” HERE)

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Former Lobbyist Tony Podesta, Others Under Investigation by Federal Prosecutors Over Alleged Foreign Work

By NBC News. Former lobbyist Tony Podesta, Mercury Public Affairs partner and former Minnesota Republican Rep. Vin Weber and former Obama White House Counsel Greg Craig are all under federal investigation by prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, multiple sources with knowledge of the matter told NBC News on Tuesaday.

Those sources say this months-long investigation in New York follows a referral from the Special Counsel’s Office.

The existence of this particular probe was first reported by CNN, which characterized the investigation as looking into whether lobbyists and operatives failed to register their work as foreign agents. None of the people identified as being investigated have been charged with any crime.

In October, NBC News was the first to report that Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta and the Podesta Group were being investigated by Mueller’s office.

Tony Podesta is the chairman of the Podesta Group and the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s former presidential campaign chairman. John Podesta is not currently affiliated with the Podesta Group and is not part of the investigation. (Read more from “Former Lobbyist Tony Podesta, Others Under Investigation by Federal Prosecutors Over Alleged Foreign Work” HERE)

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The Bible Trump’s New VA Secretary Chose to Be Sworn in on Tells You Everything You Need to Know

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. . .During the swearing-in ceremony, Trump said of [Robert] Wilkie:

Robert Wilkie is the proud son of an Army veteran, an artillery officer raised on the base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. That’s a great place. On his daily walk to high school with the woman who is now his wife, he passed by the Fayetteville VA hospital, which bore the inscription: “The Price of Freedom is Visible Here.” It made a big impact. It was a price Robert saw firsthand through his own father, who was gravely injured in combat during the Vietnam War.

Robert went on to serve as an officer in both the Air Force and the Navy, then as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs, and as Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. Robert also serves with distinction as Acting Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

During the swearing-in ceremony, Wilkie produced a worn-looking Bible. The Bible had an incredible story to it, which Wilkie shared with his audience.

“The Bible that I will take my oath on reminds me of the 100th anniversary of the end of the war to end all wars,” Wilkie said, referring to WW1, “It was a Bible taken into battle by my wife’s grandfather who had probably never ventured beyond three or four counties in North and South Carolina. But by the time he was 18, he was marching up the Champs-Élysées into the cauldron of the Meuse-Argonne.” (Read more from “The Bible Trump’s New VA Secretary Chose to Be Sworn in on Tells You Everything You Need to Know” HERE)

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11-Time Deportee Sentenced for Attacking Women in Sanctuary Oregon

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An illegal alien was sentenced to eight years in federal prison Monday for re-entering the United States illegally after previously being deported no less than 11 times.

Sergio Jose Martinez was arrested by police last year after he attacked two women in Portland, Ore., just one week after he had been released from jail where he was held for interfering with police and providing a false birthdate, the Associated Press reports.

In December, he was sentenced to 35 years in state prison for those attacks, pleading guilty to sodomy, kidnapping, sex abuse, and other charges.

Oregon was the first state in the nation to adopt “sanctuary state” policies, passing a law in 1987 that prevents law enforcement from detaining illegal immigrants who have not broken other U.S. laws. Law enforcement officials say that because of Oregon’s sanctuary state policy, police were forced to release Martinez, enabling him to commit his violent crimes. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had issued an immigration detainer asking Oregon police to hold Martinez in jail, but he was ordered to be released by a court.

“He was released consistent with the orders of the court. No federal or state criminal warrants were present at the time he left our custody,” Sheriff Michael Reese said at the time.

Sanctuary state policies prevented this evil man from being held by police until ICE could deport him.

In November, voters in Oregon will have a direct say on whether the state keeps its sanctuary city policies, voting on a ballot measure to repeal the 1987 state law. (Read more from “11-Time Deportee Sentenced for Attacking Women in Sanctuary Oregon” HERE)

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Trump Fired Back Hard After the Koch Network Says It Won’t Endorse as Many Republicans

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After Koch network political organization Americans for Prosperity announced it wouldn’t support the Republican candidate in a key Senate race, President Donald Trump fired back on Twitter on Tuesday morning.

Trump tore into the powerful Koch brothers, saying he didn’t need their support or money for political success. . .

Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, singled out Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) as an example of the type of Republican the organization would no longer be supporting, saying his record on financial issues was inconsistent. . .

Trump’s response to the Koch network criticism of GOP lawmakers was to say the Koch brothers were overrated and not respected by “real” Republicans.

“I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump wrote. “They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made them richer. Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker — a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!” (Read more from “Trump Fired Back Hard After the Koch Network Says It Won’t Endorse as Many Republicans” HERE)

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Whoa: Former U.S. Attorney General, Longtime Clinton Confidante Both Call for End of Mueller Probe

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It’s only Monday, and it has already been an eventful week on the Russia investigation front. We’ll get to the president’s tweets and the DOJ’s response in a moment, but let’s start with a fresh pair of op/eds urging the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s probe. Finding anti-Mueller commentary online isn’t exactly a challenge, but these pieces are noteworthy because of their authors. The first comes from a respected former US Attorney General who served during the last Republican administration, but isn’t known as a partisan fire-breather or bomb-thrower. The other comes from a longtime Democratic strategist with close ties to the Clintons. In an essay penned by Michael Mukasey for USA Today, the former top federal law enforcement officer contends that the current special counsel investigation is operating beyond the bounds of standard operating procedure — and questions its initial legal basis:

Because Attorney General Jeff Sessions had worked on the Trump campaign, he recused himself from the matter, and so the deputy — Rod Rosenstein — took the decision to appoint a special counsel. The regulations require that such an appointment recite the facts justifying the conclusion that a federal crime was committed, and specify the crime. However, the initial appointment of Robert Mueller did neither, referring instead to a national security investigation that a special counsel has no authority to pursue. Although Rosenstein apparently tried to correct his mistake in a new appointment memo, he has thus far refused to disclose, even to a federal judge, a complete copy of it. In other investigations supposedly implicating a president — Watergate and Whitewater come to mind — we were told what the crime was and what facts justified the investigation. Not here.

Nor have any of the charges filed in the Mueller investigation disclosed the Trump campaign’s criminal acceptance or solicitation of help from the Russians. The one indictment that relates to Russian criminality charges that the Russians hacked Democratic Party computers and committed other social media abuse, but says specifically that if the Trump campaign got the benefit of it, that was “unwitting” — i.e., without criminal intent…The ongoing investigation saps the resources and attention of the Trump administration. If the administration cannot function, the burden of this constantly shifting investigation will give rise to a narrative that any failure was due to the Mueller diversion — that the Trump administration was stabbed in the back. That is potentially more damaging to our politics than any salaciousness that might be tossed up by Robert Mueller. For both legal and political reasons, the end of this investigation is overdue.

(Read more from “Whoa: Former U.S. Attorney General, Longtime Clinton Confidante Both Call for End of Mueller Probe” HERE)

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CNN Host Pretty Much Told to Get the H**l out of the Oval Office (Again)

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It seems CNN’s Jim Acosta just loves being trashed by the Trump White House. It does get him to complain on live television, as if he’s some martyr, a beleaguered journalist under the crushing regime of some authoritarian country. He’s not, but here was another instance where White House staffers had to more or less tell Acosta to get the hell out of the Oval Office. It was a press spray event. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte visited President Trump yesterday.

“This audio is a pretty good example of how the WH aides also known as press wranglers are almost screaming as reporters try to ask questions of Trump in our ‘pool sprays,’” he tweeted after the incident.

The press has been complaining about how Trump treats them. It’s a new world for them; we have a man who actually punches back—and his supporters love it. Even here they’ve overreached, claiming his attacks against the media is somehow dangerous to the country. Spoiler: it’s not. And a friendly reminder: it was Hillary Clinton who first coined the phrase “fake news,” not Trump. The New York Times’ publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, recently relayed his concerns to the president:

President Trump and the publisher of The New York Times, A. G. Sulzberger, engaged in a fierce public clash on Sunday over Mr. Trump’s threats against journalism, after Mr. Sulzberger said the president misrepresented a private meeting and Mr. Trump accused The Times and other papers of putting lives at risk with irresponsible reporting.

[…]

“I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” said Mr. Sulzberger, who became publisher of The Times on Jan. 1.

(Read more from “CNN Host Pretty Much Told to Get the Hell out of the Oval Office (Again)” HERE)

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Here’s Another Big Fact the Obama Administration Hid to Pass Obamacare

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Over the weekend, Politico ran a report about how a “Trump policy shop filters facts to fit his message.” The article cited several unnamed sources complaining about the office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and its allegedly politicized role within the current administration.

One of the article’s anonymous sources called ASPE’s conduct over the past 18 months “another example of how we’re moving to a post-fact era.” Richard Frank, a former Obama appointee and one of the few sources to speak on the record, said that he found the current administration’s “attack on the integrity and the culture of the office…disturbing.”

For all its focus on the Trump administration, the Politico article omitted another key story—one I told its reporter about last week, but did not make it into the article. During the early years of the Obama administration, ASPE lay at the heart of the failure of the CLASS Act, a $70 billion Obamacare program.

As a congressional staffer conducting oversight of the CLASS Act in 2011-12, I reviewed thousands of pages of e-mails and documents from the months leading up to Obamacare’s passage. Those records strongly suggest that ASPE officials, including Frank, withheld material facts from Congress and the public about CLASS’s unsustainability, because full and prompt disclosure could have jeopardized Obamacare’s chances of passage. . .

The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program, or CLASS for short, intended to provide a voluntary insurance benefit for long-term care. Included as part of Obamacare, the program never got off the ground. In October 2011, HHS concluded it could not implement the program in an actuarially sound manner; Congress repealed the program entirely as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal enacted into law in the early days of 2013. (Read more from “Here’s Another Big Fact the Obama Administration Hid to Pass Obamacare” HERE)

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The Facts Behind the Trump Tower Meeting Are Incriminating, but Not for Trump

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. . .Don Jr. was emailed by a British music promoter, Rob Goldstone, who promised that the Russian “crown prosecutor” had information that would “incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia.” When the meeting took place, in walked two Russian nationals, Rinat Akhmetshin and Natalia Veselnitskaya, who proceeded to talk to Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and others about how Americans could once again adopt Russian children, if only the Magnitsky Act were repealed. Eyes surely rolled, and the meeting was ended. Kushner even messaged his assistant to try to come up with an excuse to leave the meeting early. . .

CNN’s Chris Cillizza called the anonymously sourced report a “collusion bombshell,” and said it was maybe the “most important [event] of Donald Trump’s presidency.” One wonders how many times CNN and its employees have said similar things, only to see their hopes dashed?

The truth is that it doesn’t matter whether Trump knew of this meeting or not, or whether Mueller can ever prove that he did. Don Jr. and his associates did nothing wrong in setting up this meeting. But the events surrounding the meeting are damning for the intelligence agencies, the media, and the Democrat Party. . .

At the time of this meeting, the public did not know that Democratic National Committee emails had been stolen. Only the DNC and the Clinton campaign knew that. On June 9, 2016, everyone in conservative-ville, including Don Jr., was still hoping to discover the 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from the home-brew server she used while secretary of state. . .

Somebody colluded with Russia, and it wasn’t Donald Trump. Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin were working to repeal the Magnitsky Act for the Kremlin with none other than Fusion GPS, the same opposition research firm the DNC and Clinton campaign had hired in April 2016 to dig up—or create—ties between Trump and Russia. (Read more from “The Facts Behind the Trump Tower Meeting Are Incriminating, but Not for Trump” HERE)

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CNN Host Wonders Why Obama Is Partying While Dems Are in Disarray

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Former President Barack Obama and wife Michelle were spotted dancing at a Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert over the weekend in Maryland. CNN’s Jake Tapper thought it was pretty bad timing. The Democratic Party is currently dealing with a schism that has pitted moderates or mainstream lawmakers against young progressives. Statistics show that the party is well outpaced by Republicans on the national and local level. Yet, there was Obama dancing the night away.

Does Tapper have a point? Should Obama be doing more to address his party’s concerns? They could certainly use some help. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Rep. Joe Crowley in shocking fashion in New York, top Democrats panicked. Some, like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, tried to downplay the young progressive’s victory. Sure, Ocasio-Cortez may represent those radical New Yorkers in the 14th congressional district, but the country as a whole? Don’t get “carried away,” Pelosi said. (Read more from “CNN Host Wonders Why Obama Is Partying While Dems Are in Disarray” HERE)

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