By Samuel Mangold Lenett – The Federalist
The FBI is broken. No serious person who isn’t operating in bad faith would contest this fact. But it also, at least historically, serves an important purpose: solving high-level national crimes that local and state agencies lack the resources or personnel to solve.
That said, following the release of the Durham report and the publication of the “Twitter Files,” it is undeniable that left-wing partisan actors have thoroughly weaponized the nation’s largest intelligence agency against their ideological adversaries. The FBI must not be allowed to continue abusing the public, and in the event that holistically eliminating the institution is not an option, it must be majorly reformed to end its reign of terror.
A soon-to-be-published report written by the former Acting Secretary of Transportation Steven Bradbury for the Heritage Foundation titled “How to Fix the FBI” addresses this head-on.
Exploring various steps Congress could take to rein in this part of America’s rogue intelligence apparatus, Bradbury’s report details specific reforms that could mitigate the federal bureaucracy’s rabid partisan bias through nothing short of a complete structural overhaul of the agency.
Emphasizing how the FBI squandered Americans’ goodwill through systemic abuse, the report states:
Once America’s premier domestic law enforcement agency, dedicated to protecting the American way of life from organized crime and terrorist conspiracies, the FBI has now become an adversary of freedom in the eyes of many Americans, misappropriated for partisan political purposes, abusing its national security powers for the suppression of free expression and religious dissent and for the harassment of law-abiding citizens.…
“The Bureau has expanded the scope and use of its own intelligence-gathering powers in dangerous ways, directing them increasingly at political movements that threaten the Washington establishment and at the exercise of constitutionally protected rights by ordinary Americans,” Bradbury writes.
In recent years, the FBI and the agency it’s housed within, the Department of Justice, notably disenfranchised concerned parents by branding them as terrorists for opposing public school boards’ ideological misconduct, flagged online Covid-19 skepticism, and burned piles of cash investigating and tracking down Jan. 6 protesters instead of prioritizing actual security and safety risks like the flourishing human trafficking and synthetic fentanyl industries.
And referring to the ongoing debate over whether to recertify Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Bradbury raises the point that the FBI abused this process to gather intelligence on Americans who were obviously not engaged in foreign espionage.
He writes, “FBI has improperly queried the database more than 278,000 times, including to gather information about U.S. persons who were crime victims, suspected January 6 rioters, people arrested at Black Lives Matter protests, and even 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.”
The Federalist – July 8, 2023
China’s Field Day With Counterfeiting
China’s latest export, after fentanyl…. is counterfeit postage stamps
Opinion by Chuck Devore – Fox News
‘There’s been an alarming rise in Made in China counterfeit postage stamps here in America’
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has been struggling for years, saddled with an outmoded business model and huge retiree pension liabilities. And now, added to its inflationary and management woes comes a new threat: counterfeit stamps from China marketed online through paid ads on Google and Facebook, among other platforms.
Counterfeiting currency, bonds, or other government paper of value is a form of warfare. The British printed Continental paper dollars to undermine the American economy during the Revolutionary War. The Union encouraged counterfeiting against the Confederacy during the Civil War. And North Korea has been known for passing fake $100 Federal Reserve notes (Supernotes).
To that record of profitable fakery we can add a new entry: Made in China USPS Forever stamps, sold for as little as 7.7 cents each—88% off the official price of $0.63 each. And, better yet, one printer even boasts of featuring anti-counterfeiting detection ink that looks like official postage under ultra-violet light….