Seven companies caved to anti-NRA pressure this week and cut ties with the organization, ending discounts for the NRA’s five million members.

First National Bank of Omaha, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Symantec, Metlife, Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Best Western severed ties following the launch of a PR campaign which made the NRA its focal point following the February 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.

Ironically, the PR campaign targeted the NRA even though the NRA is one of the few entities talking specifics about school safety and promoting grants to economically challenged schools to be sure they get the same quality of safety that wealthier schools enjoy.

On February 22, First National Bank of Omaha tweeted it was ending its partnership with the NRA:

Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA. As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card.

— First National Bank (@FNBOmaha) February 22, 2018

On that same day, Enterprise Rent-A-Car announced it would discontinue offering discounts to NRA members:

Thank you for contacting us! All three of our brands have ended the discount for NRA members. This change will be effective March 26. Thank you again for reaching out. Kind regards, Michael

— EnterpriseRentACar (@enterprisecares) February 23, 2018

The next day, February 23, Symantec, a cyber-security company, and Metlife both announced they were terminating their relationship with the NRA.

On February 24 ABC News reported that Delta Airlines, United, and Best Western were breaking with the NRA, too.

This push to drive a wedge between businesses and the NRA began with a Think Progress report suggesting there are “at least 22 corporations that the NRA says offer incentives to NRA members.” That report was followed by an Ed Krassentein tweet listing the Twitter handles of many of the companies and urging anti-Second Amendment activists to put pressure on them and “demand change.”

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.

NEW YORK — David J. Kramer, a former State Department official and longtime associate of John McCain, reportedly invoked the Fifth Amendment to get out of testifying before the House Intelligence Committee regarding the infamous, largely discredited 35-page dossier on President Donald Trump.

FoxNews.com reported:

Kramer, who is a central player in how the unverified Trump dossier made its way to the FBI in late 2016, testified before the committee in December in a closed-door session, indicating he had information about the dossier’s sources. A subpoena was issued for mid-January, as first reported by the Washington Examiner.

The law enforcement source confirmed, however, that Kramer did not appear and has exercised his Fifth Amendment rights.

In addition to being asked to testify on Capital Hill, Kramer last December gave a videotaped deposition as part of a separate court case against BuzzFeed, which first published the dossier.  According to a characterization of the deposition by Fox News, which viewed British court documents, Kramer discussed his communication with Christopher Steele, the former British spy hired by the controversial Fusion GPS firm to produce the questionable, anti-Trump document. However, Kramer’s attorneys have reportedly requested that the deposition be kept private.

FoxNews.com posed the following four questions to Kramer’s Florida attorney, Marcos Jimenez:

Fox News asked why Kramer took the Fifth; why he’s no longer cooperating with the committee; why they want to keep the BuzzFeed deposition under seal; and whether Kramer helped provide the document to BuzzFeed.

On January 10, CNN was first to report, based on leaked information, that the contents of the dossier were presented during classified briefings one week earlier to then-president Obama and president-elect Trump. Just after CNN’s January 10 report on the classified briefings about the dossier, BuzzFeed published its full unverified contents.

Last October, McCain denied providing the dossier to BuzzFeed and said that he only gave the material to the FBI. “I gave it to no one except for the director of the FBI. I don’t know why you’re digging this up now,” McCain told the Daily Caller during what the news website described as a testy exchange.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that Kramer received a copy of the dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in the document. McCain then reportedly passed the dossier directly to FBI Director James Comey.

Those details marked the clearest indication yet that McCain may have known that the dossier originated with Fusion GPS, meaning that he may have knowingly passed on political material to the FBI.

Until now, it has not been clear whether McCain was aware of the origins of the dossier when he hand delivered the unsubstantiated document to Comey.

It is still not clear whether McCain knew that Fusion GPS’s anti-Trump work resulting in the dossier was funded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) via the Perkins Coie law firm.

McCain has not responded to multiple Breitbart News requests seeking comment on the matter.

The details about McCain’s involvement were buried toward the end of a nearly 4,100-word February 6 Post article titled, “Hero or hired gun? How a British former spy became a flash point in the Russia investigation.”  The article was an extensive report describing the work done by Steele, who was contracted by Fusion GPS to produce the dossier. The Post article followed the release of a four-page House Intelligence Committee memo alleging abuse of surveillance authority allegedly utilizing the questionable dossier.

According to the Post, Steele originally sought out Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow and friend of Steele, for advice prior to the election concerning his alleged research into Trump.

In mid-November, following Trump’s victory, Wood reportedly turned to Steele to discuss whether additional steps were necessary to ensure the U.S. government was aware of Steele’s charges about Trump and Russia.

Wood said that he then reached out to Kramer, who was known for his close ties to McCain, according to the Post.

The Post cited Wood explaining that Kramer had arranged for Wood to meet McCain in December 2016 on the sidelines of a security conference in Canada. There, Wood described detailing Steele’s claims at the meeting with McCain, telling the Arizona senator that he could arrange for the politician to review the purported research.

“I told him, ‘I know there’s a document. I haven’t read it, but it seems to me that it’s reliably set up,’” Wood told the Post.

Wood described McCain as being “visibly shocked,” and expressing interest in reading the full report.

Ten days after the Canada meeting, Kramer met Steele at Heathrow Airport in London and then went to Steele’s home, where the McCain associate spent several hours reviewing the dossier claims, according to people familiar with the events who spoke to the Post.

The Post relates that Kramer then received a physical copy of the dossier directly from Fusion GPS Co-Founder Glenn R. Simpson:

Back in Washington, Kramer received a copy of the dossier from Simpson and completed the handoff to McCain. In a private meeting on Dec. 9, McCain gave Comey the dossier — passing along information that Steele had provided to the FBI earlier in the year.

Shortly before Inauguration Day, Comey briefed Trump on the document, alerting him to what the FBI director would later describe to Congress as a report that contained “salacious, unverified” information that was circulating in the media.

The Post’s reporting marks the first public description of McCain’s associate, Kramer, as having received the dossier directly from Fusion GPS.

In a New York Times oped last month, Simpson and fellow GPS Co-Founder Peter Fritch wrote that they helped McCain share their anti-Trump dossier with the Obama-era intelligence community via an unnamed “emissary.”

“After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary,” the Fusion GPS founders related. “We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power.”

Simpson did not write that he directly handed the dossier to any “emissary.” It was not clear from the obscure phraseology in the Times oped whether McCain knew Fusion GPS was behind the dossier or whether the unnamed “emissary” was even aware of Fusion GPS’s connection to the document. The Post’s revelation about Kramer reportedly receiving the dossier from Simpson sheds new light on the topic.

A January 11, 2017 statement from McCain attempted to explain why he provided the Steele dossier to the FBI but did not mention how he came to possess the dossier or whether he knew who funded it.

“Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of the FBI,” McCain said at the time. “That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other government agency regarding this issue.”

Newsweek earlier reported that McCain directly Kramer to meet Steele:

Kramer was reportedly directed to meet with Steele in London by McCain, who then received copies of the Trump-Russia dossier and delivered them to the Arizona senator upon returning home. McCain then gave the dossier to the FBI in December 2016.

Also, Fox News, which saw the British court documents related to a civil lawsuit, reported that Steele testified that an arrangement was made whereby Fusion GPS would use Kramer to deliver hard copies of the dossier to McCain, who in turn gave the dossier to the FBI.

It is still unclear why McCain needed to deliver the dossier to Comey last December. By then, according to the House memo, the FBI had not only already launched an investigation into Trump’s campaign partially utilizing the dossier but Comey himself had two months earlier signed an application using the dossier to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page, who briefly served as a volunteer foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign.

Shortly after McCain gave Steele’s dossier to Comey, the FBI chief updated then President-Elect Trump and President Obama on the dossier in a classified briefing.

As Breitbart News documented, Comey’s dossier briefing to Trump was subsequently leaked to the news media, setting in motion a flurry of news media attention on the dossier, including the release of the document to the public. The briefing also may have provided the veneer of respectability to a document that had been circulating for months within the news media but widely considered too unverified to publicize.

 Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.

Written with additional research by Joshua Klein.

President Trump told attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday that he would like to arm teachers who love and want to protect their students.

According to the Daily Mail, Trump said, “When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones it just puts our students in far more danger.” His statement comes just over a week after Nikolas Cruz carried a rifle into a gun-free zone and opened fire, killing 17.

Trump said, “Well-trained, gun-adept teachers and coaches and people who work in those buildings” should be allowed to carry guns to quickly end such attacks in the future.

Trump pledged during the 2016 presidential campaign to get rid of gun-free school zones. More than once, he indicated that teachers should be armed to shoot back at attackers and defend children’s lives.

On February 21, Trump began a steady push for armed teachers as part of his response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School attack. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) described the effort as “absolutely abhorrent.” According to the Hill, Blumenthal also described arming teachers as “an anathema.”

But Trump assured the CPAC audience that his push to arm teachers is based on teachers’ love for their students; because they love them, they will also protect them. Trump said, “[Teachers] love their students! They don’t want their students to be killed and to be hurt.” He described teachers as “patriots” who “could become schools’ first line of defense against crazed attackers.”

During his CPAC speech, Trump again mentioned a focus on background checks and mental illness, but he made no mention of raising the minimum purchase age for long rifles.

He did take time to point out that Democrats “will take your Second Amendment” if given control of Congress.

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.

OXON HILL, MD — The Arab world must shoulder the responsibility of the Palestinian people, who they have for years used as pawns against Israel, and the world must stop using the phrase “two-state solution,” according to guests at a panel discussion at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday.

The panel, titled, “The New Jerusalem: Alternatives to the Two State Solution,” was moderated by Erielle Davidson, a scholar at Stanford’s conservative Hoover Institution. Lisa Daftari, editor-in-chief of The Foreign Desk, and Jeff Ballabon, of the American Center for Law and Justice, joined them.

Ballabon argued that the world must refrain form  using the phrases like two-state solution and said the question of what the alternatives to a two-state solution are “is really a question of what methods we are using.” He added, “If what you’re trying to achieve is suffrage, a Palestinian state, you are not going to achieve anything.” He noted that that responsibility should fall on the Arab world.

“Israel is the model of the solution; not the problem,” despite efforts to paint it otherwise, Ballabon said. He noted that other examples of the is are the Kurds and the Alawites and condemned Barack Obama for destabilizing the region.

“Until 2015 we called for a two-state solution. Why are we calling for any solution?” he asked. “America’s objectives should be to stabilize and protect Israel. If there’s any country in the world that looks like American exceptionalism, it’s Israel exceptionalism.”

President Donald Trump’s historic recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital was a turning point in history. Yet, Daftari argued that there will still “many on both the left and right were not satisfied with his answer which was I want what both sides want… That’s a very profound and accurate way to tread lightly on the situation.”

She spoke about efforts across campuses nationwide that seek to justify the Palestinian struggle. She said, “None of the kids on the grounds of these school campuses in favor of a Palestinian state are Palestinian.” She recalled having spoken with one student who happened to be of Palestinian descent at a college campus who told her, “I wish they would all go home. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Daftari said this whole situation “would be much easier if they were stripped of this leadership that has haunted them,” speaking of Hamas. She added that political Islam uses the model of hatred for Israel as its guide and cited Iran and Hezbollah as examples of this.

“We don’t have any responsibility that is picked up by the Arab countries” for the Palestinians to eradicate terrorism off their borders, which requires “making the situation in Israel is stable first,” Daftari said. She said the Europeans must also take responsibility for this.

“If Saudi Arabia wants to keep the Iranian regime at bay… they have to understand that they have to help Israel,” she noted.

Ballabon said, “there are Myths that derive from this narrative that there is a deprived, indigenous people int he region, if they ever existed.”

He said Sunni states have not been racing to develop nuclear weapons against Iran. He said this was because despite using Israel as a foil to rile up their own people, the Saudis, and other Arab nations, know that Israel would never use weapons in a defensive war and that unlike Iran, they use them as mere deterrents, whereas Iran will likely use these weapons to cause mass casualties.

“Israel is the most partisan issue in Washington,” despite these liberal Jews calling it the most bipartisan issue, Ballabon said.

“Republicans are right on this. Conservatives are right on this,” he said. “We need to take a lead based on what we think is right based on our morality and our politics.”

Daftari said, “I think a lot of presidents up to now have wanted to do what Trump very courageously did” and noted that Trump’s Jerusalem announcement highlighted the double standard on the left.

“We have to rewind eight years and say there have to be preconditions. You have to say that Israel has the right to exist before talking about anything,” Daftari said.

The Palestinian Authority continues to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist.

Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, says that Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is “cooperating in evil” and persisting in “manifest grave sin” because of his abortion advocacy and must therefore “not be admitted to Holy Communion until he repents of his sin.”

The bishop’s statement followed on a recent procedural vote on a bill that would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks into pregnancy, a bill that Durbin supported.

The statement cited New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Committee on Pro-Life Activities, who said it was “appalling” that the Senate had failed to pass the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Act in its Jan. 29 vote.

“The U.S. Senate’s failure to adopt the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, prohibiting abortions at 20 weeks post-fertilization, is appalling,” Dolan said in his communique. “Abortions performed in the second half of pregnancy usually involve brutally dismembering a defenseless unborn child, while also posing serious dangers to his or her mother.”

Of the 24 U.S. senators who identify as Catholic, 14 voted against the bill, despite the fact that it directly contradicts Catholic teaching regarding the sacredness of innocent human life and the evil of abortion.

Five Catholic Senators broke ranks with their parties over the bill, with Democrats Bob Casey, Joe Manchin, and Joe Donnelly favoring the measure and Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voting against it.

“Because his voting record in support of abortion over many years constitutes ‘obstinate persistence in manifest grave sin,’ the determination continues that Sen. Durbin is not to be admitted to Holy Communion until he repents of this sin. This provision is intended not to punish, but to bring about a change of heart,” Bishop Paprocki said.

“Sen. Durbin was once pro-life. I sincerely pray that he will repent and return to being pro-life,” he added.

In his explanation of his decision, Bishop Paprocki, who holds doctoral degrees in both civil and canon law, cited canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law, which states that those “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.”

Senator Durbin resides in the diocese of Springfield, which falls under the jurisdiction of Bishop Paprocki. Paprocki reportedly spoke with Durbin in 2014 and the senator told the bishop that he doesn’t go up to receive communion in Springfield because “he doesn’t want to make a scene.”

With this move, the bishop distanced himself from the position of his neighboring bishop, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, who has said he has “no sympathy at all for the whole business of even talking about denying communion.” Cardinal Cupich apparently believes that a history of public support for abortion rights does not constitute “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin,” since Canon Law calls for withholding communion in such cases.

Senator Durbin has earned an impressive 100 percent rating from the abortion lobby group NARAL.

Durbin famously harassed 7th Circuit Court nominee Amy Barrett for her conservative Catholic faith during confirmation hearings last September, in what the LA Times described as a “cringeworthy interrogation.”

“I’m a product of 19 years of Catholic education and every once in a while holy mother the Church has not agreed with a vote of mine and has let me know,” Durbin said.

Taking issue with Barrett’s use of the term “orthodox Catholic” in a paper she coauthored 20 years ago, Durbin asked: “What’s an orthodox Catholic?”

“Do you consider yourself an orthodox Catholic?” he pressed.

The United States is currently one of only seven countries that allow abortions beyond 20 weeks. The other six are North Korea, China, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada and the Netherlands.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome