Month: August 2018

Yuma Sector Border Patrol agents continue to disrupt drug and human smuggling efforts at immigration checkpoints on highways leading away from the Mexican border.

On Monday, agents assigned to the Blythe and Wellington Stations scuttled the drug and human smuggling plans of two separate efforts. The agents arrested two human smugglers, a drug runner, and seized more than a $500,000 in opioids and narcotics.

Blythe Station agents observed a 2002 Mercury Milan approaching for an inspection. A Border Patrol K-9 agent alerted to the possible presence of drugs or human cargo, according to Yuma Sector Border Patrol officials. The agents referred the driver of the Milan to a secondary inspection station.

During a search of the vehicle, agents found 96 packages they suspected were filled with drugs. Testing revealed the packages contained more than 120 pounds of methamphetamine and heroin, officials stated. Border Patrol officials estimated the value of the seized drugs to be in excess of $525,000. Officials identified the driver/alleged smuggler as a 38-year-old Mexican national who resides in the U.S. with green card status.

A few hours later, Welton Station agents observed a 2016 Honda Accord approaching a checkpoint. The agents referred the driver to a secondary inspection station following an initial interview. Further questioning revealed the three rear-seat passengers were Mexican nationals with no legal status in the U.S. The agents arrested the Mexican nationals for immigration violations.

Agents learned the 35-year-old driver and the 36-year-old front-seat passenger are both U.S. citizens from Sacramento and San Bernadino, California, respectively. The agents placed both under arrest for human smuggling and alien harboring. A search of the vehicle also revealed about 14.5 grams of methamphetamine inside the car. Officials seized the car and the drugs.

Facebook is expanding its Watch video platform, which currently funds news shows from CNN’s Anderson Cooper and far-left outlet Mic, at the same time that Mark Zuckerberg’s social media powerhouse continues to crack down on conservatives.

“Over the past year, we funded a number of original shows for Watch, and many have found strong, engaged audiences. Our funding strategy has always been about kick-starting an ecosystem of content,” declared Facebook. “We will continue investing in some original shows, and we will really lean into supporting a wide range of amazing video content from creators and publishers around the world to help our partners find success with their videos.”

In June, the company revealed they would be fully-funding original video content from CNN’s Anderson Cooper, far-left news outlet Mic, ABC News, and anti-Trump news anchor Jorge Ramos —whose daughter worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential election campaign.

“Earlier this year we made a commitment to show news that is trustworthy, informative, and local on Facebook. As a part of that commitment, we are creating a dedicated section within Watch for news shows produced exclusively for Facebook by news publishers,” declared the platform’s Head of Global News Partnerships, Campbell Brown, in June. “With this effort, we are testing a destination for high quality and timely news content on the platform.”

Facebook is doubling down on fully-funded video programming as it faces criticism from President Donald Trump about its censorship of conservatives. The platform recently marked a wide range of articles from Breitbart News and the New York Post as “spam,” which the company later called a “bug.” Conservative employees have united to protest what they call the “intolerant” liberal culture of the company.

Facebook Watch rolls out globally on Thursday. The site’s users will have a personalized Watch feed, which will include programming created by pages and creators they already follow, along with Facebook’s fully-funded content inevitably added as suggested viewing.

The Silicon Valley giant is also enabling content creators to monetize their videos by including ads. Similar to YouTube, Facebook will enable ad breaks before videos play and “mid-roll,” or during the video itself. Video ads are immediately available the U.S., U.K., and select other countries, and will expand elsewhere next month.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai refused to testify at the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, which is set to include Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and the company instead offered to send Senior Vice President for Global Affairs, Kent Walker, who was dismissed as not being “sufficiently high up in the company,” according to Fortune.

Despite this, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) claimed he will not subpoena Pichai, declaring, “I don’t normally subpoena people to be part of the solution… Google chooses not to participate and being part of the solution. That’s a decision they made.”

Pichai was criticized by both Republican and Democrat senators for refusing to testify, with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) calling the move a “great mistake.”

“This is the United States Senate, this is an important issue, and we deserve to hear from the decision-makers, not the people who carry out the decisions,” added Sen. Angus King (I-ME).

The Senate hearing may have included tough questions for Pichai about his company’s decision not to work with the Pentagon on drone technology, but still create a censored search app to please the Chinese government.

This week, President Trump warned Google, along with other Big Tech companies.

“I think what Google and what others are doing – if you look at what is going on with Twitter and if you look at what’s going on in Facebook, they better be careful because you can’t do that to people… You can’t do it,” expressed President Trump, adding that they face the “serious charge” of mass-coordinated censorship and political manipulation.

“I think that Google and Twitter and Facebook, they are really treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful,” he continued. “It is not fair to large portions of the population.”

Trump also criticized Google Search’s overwhelmingly biased news results, which prioritized content from CNN and excluded major conservative news outlets.

MSNBC host Ali Velshi mocked Florida gun laws in the wake of the Jacksonville shooting, but the accused attacker used a gun that was purchased in Maryland.

In fact, Jacksonville Sheriff Michael Williams indicated the attacker was armed with two handguns, a .45 and 9mm, and the ATF made clear both were legally purchased in Maryland.

But this did not top Velshi from taking on Florida gun laws in a video he tweeted out Tuesday.

Velshi pointed out that Florida does not have a licensing requirement for gun purchasers, a “firearm registration” requirement, nor does the state require a permit to carry a rifle. He contrasted the last point with the fact that the state does require a permit to carry a handgun, and he never mentioned the practicality of carrying a handgun versus a rifle.

Velshi also pointed out that the state of Florida does not allow cities and municipalities to institute gun laws that are more strict than the laws in place at the state level. This is called preemption, and the NRA-ILA reports that the state of Maryland “generally” limits local gun control in the same way.

Here’s how ridiculously easy it is to get a gun in Floridahttps://t.co/T3HZiWisTl

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) August 28, 2018

Nevertheless, the alleged Jacksonville attacker did not buy his gun in Florida. He bought it in Maryland where he did have to get a license in order to buy the firearm, and he had to register it too. But these things did not hinder him in the least.

A few more interesting facts from the NRA-ILA: Like Florida, Maryland requires no license for long gun purchases, has no registration for long gun purchases, and does not have a “permit to carry” for long guns.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

Jonathan Moffa, an FBI special agent, admitted to Congress his agency leaks stories to the news media, then uses the resulting stories to back up assertions in warrant applications, according to a series of reports Tuesday.

Moffa, who worked alongside fired anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok on the Hillary Clinton email and “Russia” investigations, testified last Friday at closed door sessions of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees. A source with knowledge of those proceedings was quoted by the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) late Monday, claiming Moffa had admitted to representatives that the FBI uses the controversial practice, long-suspected of playing a role in obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against one-time Trump aide Carter Page.

“He more or less admitted that the FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press and then used stories from the press as justifications for FISA warrants,” the source told DCNF’s Chuck Ross.

The admission was then the subject of second report by Fox News, which quotes a source saying Moffa admitted the leak-and-reuse tactic at least “had been a practice in the past.”

It is not clear from either report if the DCNF and Fox News are relying on the same source.

According to Fox News, Moffa was a topic of more than one of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok’s now infamous texts during the waning days of the Obama administration.

House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) released a memo in February containing the bombshell revelation that the FBI had used a September 2016 Yahoo! News article as evidence to convince the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to allow them to wiretap and monitor Page. The FBI’s warrant application suggest’s Yahoo! writer Michael Isikoff’s article corroborates former British spy Christopher Steele’s infamous “dossier” on Trump and his associates, funded by Never Trump billionaire Paul Singer, the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the Democratic National Committee. The dossier contains not only allegations of ties between Trump’s circles and Russian intelligence, but graphic descriptions of deviant practices by Trump in a Russian hotel. Former FBI director James Comey famously labeled the dossier “salacious and unverified.”

But rather than the Yahoo! article providing verification, it became clear with the Nunes Memo that the article had exactly the same source as the dossier itself: Chrisopher Steele.

With Moffa’s reported admissions, it becomes increasingly unlikely the FBI was unaware of this circular sourcing and suggests the Bureau itself may have been involved in the attempt to make the contents of an unverified dossier funded by Donald Trump’s political opponents look like independently reported evidence.

These revelations intensify the political situation surrounding once-senior (now demoted) Justice Department official Bruce Ohr’s testimony before one of the same committees before which Moffa appeared last week. Ohr was scheduled to speak just hours after these reports dropped. His wife, Nellie Ohr, is a senior official at Fusion GPS, the same opposition research firm from which the Steele dossier originates.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) immediately seized on what he saw as a significant development on the eve of Ohr’s testimony on Fox News and on Twitter:

We’ve learned NEW information suggesting our suspicions are true: FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press, and then used those same press stories as a separate source to justify FISA’s

Unreal. Tomorrow’s Bruce Ohr interview is even more critical. Did he ever do this?

— Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) August 28, 2018

The now-fired Strzok’s testimony suggested Ohr was possibly the official who introduced his wife’s firm’s dossier to the FBI’s investigation. Ohr was demoted to a human resources position at DOJ from his role as associate deputy attorney general after the controversy over his involvement  began to be investigated last year. President Donald Trump has continued to call for his complete dismissal.