GOA and other pro-2A groups are suing the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives.
Honest citizens should enjoy the right to assemble their own firearms for lawful purposes, and they should be able to do so without being terrorized by their government.” — GOA’s Erich Pratt, AmmoLand, December 11, 2020.
For years, Polymer80 has been producing “80% complete” lower receivers which the ATF determined to be incomplete and non-regulatable by the ATF as firearms. These receivers require holes to be drilled and surfaces filed before they become an actual, usable receiver, hence the term 80% receiver.
You might have heard an anti-gunner refer to a completed homemade firearm as a “ghost gun” before.
According to the ATF in numerous letters to Polymer80, their 80% receivers did not require a manufacturer’s license, the unconstitutional Pittman-Robertson tax, a serial number, or a NICS check before purchase.
Anti-gunners have been advocating for a ban on homemade firearms for years, even recently appealing to the Trump Administration.
Once again, the ATF appears to be reversing its longstanding interpretive guidance and is arbitrarily redefining a crucial term to enact a gun ban.
The ATF did raid or show up at other companies that sell other kits that include 80% part kits, barrels, and slides that are not Polymer80. AmmoLand News sources inside the ATF say that the agency is now considering 80% kits with all the parts needed to finish a pistol as a firearm. None of the companies had any warning on the change to ATF’s regulations before actual agents showed up making attempts to retrieve customer information.
Apparently, the ATF now considers an 80% lower receiver sold with a parts kit — such as the one offered by Polymer80 as a Buy Build Shoot Kit — to be a firearm requiring a background check. .
But the statute defining a firearm hasn’t changed.
ATF Leadership 2020 Acting Director Regina Lombardo & Associate Deputy Director Marvin Richardson
What did change?
ATF is arbitrarily redefining firearms using interpretive guidance. Acting Director of the ATF Regina Lombardo must feel emboldened by the apparent victory of presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Her reported priorities? Pistol braces and 80% receivers.
But this is more than cooperating with a transition team. Lombardo has begun advancing the Biden-Harris gun control agenda during the Trump Administration!
Aidan Johnston Director of Federal Affairs Gun Owners of America
About Gun Owners of America
GOA spokespeople are available for interviews. Gun Owners of America, and its sister organization Gun Owners Foundation, are nonprofits dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. For more information, visit GOA at www.gunowners.org.
An unprecedented “major leak” of official records has uncovered a register of 1.95 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, many of whom are now living and working all over the world, including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The data lists names, party positions, date of birth, national identification number, ethnicity and — in some cases — their telephone number.
As reported by Australia’s Sky News on Sunday, the database “lifts the lid on how the party operates under President and Chairman Xi Jinping.” The leak “shows that party branches are embedded in some of the world’s biggest companies, and even inside government agencies,” the outlet reports.
“Communist party branches have been set up inside western companies, allowing the infiltration of those companies by CCP members — who, if called on, are answerable directly to the communist party, to the Chairman, the president himself,” said Sky News’ Sharri Markson.
“Along with the personal identifying details of 1.95 million communist party members, mostly from Shanghai, there are also the details of 79,000 communist party branches, many of them inside companies.”
Markson also inferred that this security breach would likely embarrass both Xi Jinping and “some global companies who appear to have no plan in place to protect their intellectual property from theft.”
According to the Daily Mail, communist party members swear an oath to “guard Party secrets, be loyal to the Party, work hard, fight for communism throughout my life…and never betray the Party,” are “understood to have jobs in British consulates,” and that “Beijing’s malign influence now stretches into almost every corner of British life, including defence firms, banks and pharmaceutical giants.”
“Detailed analysis” has revealed that Pfizer and AstraZeneca employed 123 “party loyalists,” and that “there were more than 600 party members across 19 branches working at the British banks HSBC and Standard Chartered in 2016.” In addition, “firms with defence industry interests” like Airbus, Boeing and Rolls-Royce “employed hundreds of party members.”
In The Mail on Sunday, former British Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith wrote that this discovery “proves that members of the Chinese Communist Party are now spread around the globe, with members working for some of the world’s most important multinational corporations, academic institutions and our own diplomatic services.”
Concluding, Sky News’ Markson said that it “is worth noting that there’s no suggestion that these members have committed espionage — but the concern is over whether Australia or these companies knew of the CCP members and if so have any steps been taken to protect their data and people.”
A spokesperson for the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — a group “which comprises more than 150 legislators around the world who are concerned by the influence and activities of the Chinese government” — released a statement saying that a representative of the organization had “received this list from a non-governmental source, but was not in a position to verify it,” and that journalists had “since investigated and their findings are disturbing indeed.”
You can find whispers of this on Twitter but I’m pretty sure it’s throttled down and, if I had to bet, I would say it will get censored in short order. Especially if the order goes into action.
But it’s not a theory. It is an Executive Order that was issued by President Trump on September 12, 2018. It’s almost as if President Trump saw this situation coming.
The order is titled:
“Executive Order on Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Interference in a United States Election”
I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, find that the ability of persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States to interfere in or undermine public confidence in United States elections, including through the unauthorized accessing of election and campaign infrastructure or the covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Although there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election, foreign powers have historically sought to exploit America’s free and open political system. In recent years, the proliferation of digital devices and internet-based communications has created significant vulnerabilities and magnified the scope and intensity of the threat of foreign interference, as illustrated in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with this threat.
So, what remedies are described in this Executive Order?
Section 1 says the Director of National Intelligence (John Ratcliffe) shall conduct an assessment and report on any foreign related interference in our elections.
Section 1. (a) Not later than 45 days after the conclusion of a United States election, the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the heads of any other appropriate executive departments and agencies (agencies), shall conduct an assessment of any information indicating that a foreign government, or any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, has acted with the intent or purpose of interfering in that election.
We could be approaching 45 days fairly soon depending on when they deem the conclusion of the election to be.
The report will be delivered to the heads of State, Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security, Attorney General, and the President.
The report will then include any recommended remedial actions that the United States take against such actors, other than sanctions described in the order.
Sec. 2. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security:
The actions that could be taken are wide ranging.
Will this Executive Order come into play? The implications could be huge, if so.
GOP campaigns, voter file lawsuit alleging improper votes in Nevada
The original article on LV Review-Journal is currently being blocked from sharing on Facebook.
Two Republican congressional campaigns and a Nevada voter filed a federal lawsuit Thursday night against Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske and Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria, asking the court to stop the use of Clark County’s electronic mail ballot counting machine and making a variety of fraud accusations.
Although President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Nevada Republican Party are not listed as plaintiffs, they held a news conference Thursday morning promising the lawsuit, an event that featured the named plaintiff, Las Vegas resident Jill Stokke.
The campaigns of Dan Rodimer and Jim Marchant, who are challenging Reps. Susie Lee and Steven Horsford, respectively, are two of the other listed plaintiffs.
Their lawsuit alleged “3,000 instances of ineligible individuals casting ballots” in Clark County, including ballots from deceased voters. It offered no evidence of that or any other allegations, and there are no attached exhibits to the filing.
It also does not note whether the cast ballots have, in fact, made it through the county’s ongoing verification process.
A separate letter sent to the Department of Justice on Wednesday by the Nevada Republican Party alleged to have identified 3,062 individuals who cast a ballot in Nevada while living in another state. It includes an attachment that lists only addresses of the allegedly ineligible voters but not names or any other identifying information. The Review-Journal has requested the names but has not yet received them.
There are a variety of reasons why a person residing out of the state may be allowed to cast a ballot in Nevada, including part-time residents of the state with homes elsewhere, attending college in another state, or people who have recently moved.
Complaint about machines
The lawsuit alleged the Agilis software used by Clark County as the initial step in signature verification of mail ballots violates state election law because other counties do not use the same method, which means Clark residents are “at an unequal risk of having their legal votes diluted by votes with mismatched signatures.”
Stokke, the lawsuit said, was stopped from voting in person after an election official told her a mail ballot had been submitted in her name. The filing alleged the Agilis machine verified this signature and allowed it to be counted.
In a news conference after the Trump campaign’s event, Gloria said he handled Stokke’s case personally.
“I personally dealt with Ms. Stokke,” Gloria said. “She brought her claim to me, we reviewed the ballot, and, in our opinion, it’s her signature. We also gave her an opportunity to provide a statement, if she wanted to object to that if she wanted to challenge that. She refused to do so.”
Gloria said an investigator with the Nevada secretary of state’s office also reviewed the matter.
“They had no issue with the assistance we tried to give her,” Gloria said.
Gloria said he was not aware of any illegal votes being counted.
The machine in question, county officials have said repeatedly, is only the first step in the signature verification process. If it rejects a signature, as it does 70 percent of the time, that ballot goes to county staff for verification, with Gloria having the final say.
The lawsuit also falsely asserts that the county is the only one in Nevada that does not verify signatures on absentee and mail ballots in person.
Problems with observation
It also alleged that another plaintiff, Chris Prudhome, listed on the lawsuit as a “credentialed member of the media” but on his Twitter account as a Republican strategist and Fox News guest commentator, was denied his right to observe the counting of ballots.
The lawsuit said that Prudhome attempted to watch the count at 12:45 a.m. on Wednesday, and he was told by Gloria the counting had already completed for that day.
This lawsuit is the fourth filed against either Clark County or both Clark and the state by Republican campaigns and the second seeking some sort of change to the counting or verification of mail ballots, which have trended heavily for Democrats.
As of Thursday morning, Trump trails Biden by about 11,400 votes in Nevada. Another round of vote tabulations is expected to be released Friday morning.
News conference
Trump’s campaign repeated many of the allegations made in the lawsuit at its news conference Thursday morning.
“We firmly believe that there are many voters in this group of mail-in voters that are not proper voters,” Adam Laxalt, former Nevada attorney general and co-chair of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign in Nevada said at the Trump news conference outside the Clark County Election Department vote center in North Las Vegas. “We have received reports of many irregularities across the valley.”
Two Trump representatives spoke but refused to give their names as they alleged that illegal voting had unfolded.
One was former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who declined to offer specifics when asked for evidence of the campaign’s allegations.
The other was Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Stokke also spoke
In response to the Republican news conference, Nevada State Democratic Party Chairman William McCurdy II said Trump’s campaign has “no other recourse than scare tactics and baseless suits.”
“Republicans want to circumvent democracy because things aren’t going in their favor,” McCurdy said. “But the will of the people will not be ignored.”
Settlement in a prior lawsuit
The Trump campaign and Nevada Republican Party agreed to a settlement with the state and Clark County on a previous lawsuit that similarly tried to stop vote counting in the county.
That attempt was shut down in court, but the lawsuit was still technically active.
The campaign filed a motion with the State Supreme Court on Thursday that said Gloria had agreed to allow more observation of the county’s ballot duplication area in exchange for dismissal of the case. Ballot duplication occurs when a staff member finds something wrong with a voter’s physical ballot, which is then duplicated onto a blank ballot and counted.
By Robert Fellner, Nevada Policy Research Institute and Tod Story, ACLU of Nevada
Sunshine Week is dedicated to celebrating the principles of a transparent and accountable government, which makes it the perfect time to announce the launch of the Nevada Open Government Coalition.
The ideologically diverse Coalition was created to continue the success of our efforts to update the Nevada Public Records Act (NPRA) in 2019, and ensure that governments are transparent with the public as we seek information in the pursuit of accountability. The law aims to “foster democratic principles” by requiring that “all public books and public records of a government entity” are open to the public.
The latest example of a government agency trying to avoid their statutory obligations was highlighted in a state Supreme Court ruling from last month.
The case centered around efforts to obtain the results of an investigation by the Clark County School District into reports of inappropriate behavior by an elected school trustee.
While it’s hard to imagine an example of a document that more clearly falls within the realm of public records — the report about the conduct of an elected official seeking re-election was created by a public agency with public money — the school district nonetheless refused to disclose the report in response to a public records request submitted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The newspaper was forced to sue and thankfully obtained the report just two weeks before the election, but only because it had the resources necessary to file a lawsuit.
One reason the newspaper was willing to take on the significant cost of litigation, however, was because of a provision within the Public Records Act that requires the government to reimburse the legal costs incurred by the requesting party, if a court finds that the government did, in fact, violate the law by withholding public records.
Absent this provision, the NPRA would be far less effective because government agencies could unlawfully withhold documents knowing that few organizations would be willing to pay the tens of thousands of dollars it would cost to force the government to comply.
This was precisely what CCSD argued for in its appeal.
Not content with wasting tax dollars to keep the investigation itself secret, the school district engaged in a lengthy appeal asking the Court to require the newspaper to pay its own legal fees.
The Nevada Supreme Court ultimately rejected the school district’s frivolous and self-serving argument. However, the whole ordeal will still end up consuming more than $125,000 of public money that should have gone instead towards education.
More must be done to ensure compliance with the Public Records Act. The importance of this law and government transparency cannot be overstated.
Using the public records law, the Reno Gazette-Journal recently discovered that Tesla defied a court order and search warrant by refusing to allow federal investigators access to their property. Given the enormous subsidies the state has provided to Tesla, the report is of significant public importance, but would never have seen the light of day if not for the public records law.
The Review-Journal used the law to help uncover numerous scandals and examples of corruption that officials would have preferred remained hidden, including failed oversight by the state Dental Board, improper use of government funds at the Las Vegas Convention Visitors Authority that would ultimately lead to criminal charges, and highly questionable activities at the Nevada DMV, where employees are alleged to have sabotaged a botched $75 million computer upgrade in an attempt to obtain bribes.
Thankfully, many public agencies comply with the law without a court order. But as this latest ruling reminds us, some agencies have no problem squandering significant amounts of tax dollars on frivolous legal efforts in an attempt to keep the public in the dark.
By educating, training, and providing resources on government transparency, the Nevada Open Government Coalition hopes to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools they need to hold public officials accountable.
The Coalition will also advocate for legislative changes designed to discourage the type of noncompliance exemplified in the recent CCSD case, which is sadly far too common.
To that end, the Coalition believes that public officials who violate the NPRA should face a penalty for doing so. This would ensure all Nevadans, taxpayers and public officials alike, are treated fairly under the law, while also providing the accountability needed to ensure Nevadans receive the fully transparent government to which they are entitled.
Robert Fellner is Vice President & Director of Policy of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, an independent organization that promotes free markets and individual freedom in the Silver State. Tod Story is the Executive Director of the ACLU of Nevada, which works to defend and advance the civil liberties and rights of all Nevadans. They are founding board members of the Nevada Open Government Coalition.
A growing number of public and private entities are joining a concerted effort to make sure a bill pending before Congress does not inadvertently create a means for Clark County to tap rural groundwater, though Clark County officials protest that is not the intent of the proposal.
According to Great Basin Water Network (GBWN) — a coalition of conservationists, rural officials, tribes and agricultural interests — there are fears that the wording in the proposed Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, whether intentional or not, could skirt a federal judge’s ruling blocking a proposed 300-mile right-of-way for a network of water pipelines.
The bulk of the bill, not yet introduced in Congress, proposes freeing up more than 40,000 acres of public land in Clark County for economic development, but two sections at the end of the 21-page bill call for the Interior Department to give the Southern Nevada Water Authority rights-of-way for an electric power line that “shall be subject only to the terms, conditions and stipulations identified in the existing rights-of-way, and shall not be subject to further administrative or judicial review. The right-of-way shall be granted in perpetuity and shall not require the payment of rental fees.” Opponents fear that a right-of-way for a power line could just as easily be used for pipelines.
Two years ago a federal judge ruled that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) could grant the water agency right-of-way for its network of pipelines to take groundwater beneath White Pine, Lincoln and Nye counties, but first it had to come up with plans to mitigate the potential loss of wildlife habitat due to a draw down of the water table, as is required by the CleanWater Act and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
That might prove to be impossible, since federal studies show the interconnected aquifers are already at equilibrium — meaning water that is now being drawn from the aquifers is being replaced gallon for gallon annually with no leeway for additional withdrawal. The water agency proposes to withdraw 84,000 acre-feet of groundwater per year. The project is projected to cost more than $15 billion and could triple water rates in Clark County.
This past week more than a dozen entities joined in opposition to Congress approving the right-of-way proposal. These include several Nevada and Utah counties, three Indian tribes and a number of environmental groups.
Nevada State Sen. Pete Goicoechea and Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, discuss efforts by Clark County to tap rural groundwater. (Pix by Roger Moellendorf)
“What Clark County is proposing is a pro-pipeline bill,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the GBWN. “Elected officials, attorneys, and non-profit organizations that span Nevada, Utah and the region all agree: The SNWA wants the congressional delegation to carry its water by surreptitiously advancing a project that has consistently lost in federal and state courts. The Nevada delegation deserves better than sneaky end-runs masked as technicalities. For now, the name of the bill should be the Great Basin Water Grab Act of 2019.”
A resolution passed by the Duckwater Shosone Tribe warned, “Science has shown that the pipeline would ultimately destroy B
ashsahwahbee, killing off Swamp Cedars and drying up the Sacred Water Valley’s springs and aquifers that plant and wildlife currently depend upon.”
A spokesman for the water authority told the Las Vegas newspapers there is no intention to use the right-of-way for anything other than power lines. Though he thought the language was sufficiently clear, he said it has been modified recently. Another official offered that it might be further altered to allay concerns.
Clark County could use the economic development. Changing the language in the bill should satisfy the opposition.
You can find whispers of this on Twitter but I’m pretty sure it’s throttled down and, if I had to bet, I would say it will get censored in short order. Especially if the order goes into action.
rappleton@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0276. Follow @RoryDoesPhonics on Twitter. Review-Journal Staff Writer Glenn Puit contributed to this story.
