Tag: police state

IRS unmasked: Away from politics, America’s tax agency has lots of warts, and ammunition

The Internal Revenue Service has long been a political football. Democrats alleged that in the 1960s it was used by Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon to subvert civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists, while Republicans alleged a decade ago it wrongly targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups.

More recently, Democrats have argued the tax agency needs $80 billion in new enforcement to end tax cheating and ease budget deficits, while Republicans say the new spending signed by President Joe Biden will only create an army of 87,000 armed agents intent on wreaking havoc on the middle and working classes.

With so much emotion, scandal and political rhetoric, it’s sometimes hard for everyday Americans to sort fact from fiction. So the team here at Just the News did a deep dive to put together a list of facts about the IRS that aren’t in dispute, from whom it audits to why it buys ammunition and arms its agents.

A Simple Plastic Tool Is Undermining New Ghost Gun Rules

It’s been less than a month since new federal rules took effect attempting to rein in the proliferation of so-called “ghost guns,” a catchall term for unserialized, home-built firearms that Democratic leaders, law enforcement officials, and gun control groups say are turning up in the hands of criminals across the United States.

But barely a few weeks into the new regulatory regime, the firearms industry has already adapted and scored an early legal victory. And gun enthusiasts have created and released open-source blueprints for a simple plastic tool that offers a relatively quick, easy—and apparently legal—workaround for anyone who still wants to build an untraceable weapon.

The tool, known as a jig, is designed to help with the assembly of the exact type of Glock-style pistol frames that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) is trying to restrict. One version was posted by Ethan Middleton, a Wisconsin-based 3D-printed gun file designer known online as Middleton Made.

“It’s the biggest middle finger to the ATF,” Middleton told VICE News. “Whatever they’re going to do, we’re going to try to find a way around it.”

The new ATF rules, announced by President Joe Biden earlier this year, are largely aimed at “kit guns,” which include a pistol frame and other essential parts, including a jig and other tools for home assembly. When frames come only partially complete (“80 percent” finished, with some holes left undrilled), they are not legally considered firearms, meaning they do not require a serial number and could be purchased without a background check in most states.

The new rules say that when an unfinished frame or receiver is “distributed, or possessed with a compatible jig or template,” it can be considered a firearm under the law because it makes completing the build process faster and easier. 

As a result, some retailers have responded by selling only the pistol frame alone, while others are selling kits that include the necessary parts and tools but no frame. Jigs are a common tool and factory-made versions are available online, but prices have climbed to over $100, making the 3D-printed version an extremely low-cost alternative.

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SWAT Team Raids Innocent Elderly Couple, Destroys Their Home Because Their Power Bill Was Too Low

Even in states with legal marijuana, law enforcement’s addiction to the drug war still lingers like a dark cloud over over the land of the ostensibly free. Even in California, who has paved the way in legalization of cannabis, police officers still violently, and with extreme prejudice, lay waste to the rights of innocent people who dare grow, use, or sell this most beneficial plant.

Because of their addiction to the war on drugs, cops in Riverside County have just cost the taxpayers of their town $136,000. The money was paid to Chen-Chen Hwang, 67, and her husband, Jiun-Tsong Wu, 75, to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that their two homes were broken into by armed agents of the state and ransacked as officers looked for non-existent marijuana plants.

According to Alex Coolman, the attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the elderly couple, police were monitoring power bills of town residents and used the low amount of the couple’s bill as reason to believe they were growing marijuana.

“This was a very strange and frightening incident,” Hwang said in a release from Coolman’s office. “We did nothing to deserve this, and it made us feel unsafe in our own homes.”

The raid unfolded on August 5, 2021 and caused thousands in damage to the couple’s home.

Apparently police in Riverside County monitor power consumption and when they see low power usage, they automatically assume that people are stealing power to grow marijuana.

“The deputies believed the defendants were stealing power to grow marijuana because their power consumption was low, and they said as much,” Coolman told the Press-Enterprise.

But the couple was not growing marijuana and their power consumption was low because they used solar power and were “thrifty,” according to Coolman.

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Biden extends 9/11 emergency

US President Joe Biden has renewed the national emergency declared by former president George W. Bush in the days following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 for another year.

The “terrorist threat” behind the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people “continues,” Biden wrote in a Thursday memo published in the Federal Register, adding that the “powers and authorities adopted to deal with” the attacks “must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2022.” 

The 9/11 emergency declaration is just one of several Biden has extended this week alone. Also on Thursday, the president prolonged a national emergency he had declared the previous year regarding sectarian violence and human rights abuses in Ethiopia, while on Tuesday he announced the renewal of an emergency declared by his predecessor Donald Trump in 2018 regarding the threat of “foreign interference in or undermining public confidence in” US elections. 

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FBI Hiding Potentially Explosive Records On Jeffrey Epstein, Internet Sleuth Claims After FOIA Denial

A well-followed internet sleuth believes he has uncovered evidence that the FBI could be sitting on potentially explosive secret records involving dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The anonymous Techno Fog, an self-described lawyer and writer who has nearly 400,000 followers on Twitter and also writes a popular Substack column, says a recent response to a Freedom of Information Act request indicates the beleaguered bureau may be hiding something. Techno Fog sought all records relating to any interviews the FBI had done with Epstein.

“The records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records, and release of the information could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” was the answer he said he received, which he posted online.

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New Video Shows Cops Casually Walk Into Unarmed Man’s Home, Wake Him Up, Execute Him

Last week, TFTP reported on disturbing body camera footage out of Columbus, Ohio, released as part of a push for transparency in the city. The footage showed police enter the apartment of 20-year-old Donovan Lewis who was undressed, in bed, and was attempting to raise his hands when he received a fatal, taxpayer-funded 9mm round to the chest.

The video went underreported in the media for several days and now, new video has been released showing the complete and callous disregard for life by officer Ricky Anderson as he casually executed Lewis in his own bed.

Despite the warrant for his arrest, Lewis was innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, he was denied that right.

For some reason, Columbus police thought it was a good idea to serve an arrest warrant at 2:30 a.m. at Lewis’ apartment. Footage shows multiple officers outside Lewis’ door knocking for several minutes before one of the man’s roommates opens the door. Moments later, officers would open the door to Lewis’ bedroom and execute him.

“We need to get rid of middle of the night arrest warrants unless there’s a dangerous emergent circumstance,” said the family’s attorney, Rex Elliot. “We need to have police officers who are trained to come into these communities that understand these communities.”

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It Begins: NYC Mayor Eric Adams and Officials Urge Credit Card Companies to Create Weapon Code for Gun and Ammunition Purchases

The mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, along with other elected officials and state pension fund trustees, have requested that major credit card companies implement a weapon code for the purchase of firearms and ammunition.

“New York City Mayor Eric Adams, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, trustees of the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, Teachers’ Retirement System and Board of Education Retirement System, and elected leaders today called on American Express, MasterCard and Visa, three of the world’s largest credit card companies, to support a proposal to establish a merchant category code (MCC) for gun and ammunition stores,” according to the news release.

Officials in New York City and the state of New York have asked American Express, MasterCard, and Visa to make a four-digit merchant category code (MCC) like the ones used for other retail categories to better identify and report suspicious behavior, such as large purchases of firearms.

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It’s (Almost) Always the Feds: How the FBI Fabricates Schemes To Entrap Would-Be Radicals

Here’s a tip: If you have some radical political views and an acquaintance reaches out, encourages you to act on your convictions, and maybe offers to introduce you to a guy who can sell you some bomb parts, don’t take him up on it. That guy’s almost definitely working for the feds.

For the past two decades, the FBI and federal prosecutors have brought case after case against would-be radicals who were ratted out by informants. They have been enormously successful in obtaining convictions in these cases, despite persistent criticisms that the FBI uses unscrupulous informants, conjures up the very plots it disrupts, and entraps defendants who have little to no ability to actually carry out a terror attack.

It looked like the case against the Michigan militia members who allegedly plotted to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in October 2020 was going to be another data point in that trend: an extremist group riddled with FBI informants set up to take the fall for all their big talk. An unusual thing happened, though. The jury didn’t buy it. When the verdicts were read a year and a half later in March, two of the militia members were acquitted, and the jury deadlocked on the other two.

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FBI secretly pressured Americans to ‘voluntarily’ give up gun rights

The FBI secretly pressured Americans into signing forms that relinquish their rights to own, purchase or even use firearms, according to a trove of internal documents and communications obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The forms were presented by the FBI to people at their homes and in other undisclosed locations, according to bureau documents unearthed through the Freedom of Information Act by the firearm rights group Gun Owners of America (GOA) and shared with the DCNF. At least 15 people between 2016 and 2019 signed the secret forms, which ask signatories to declare themselves as either a “danger” to themselves or others or lacking “mental capacity adequately to contract or manage” their lives.

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