The federal government has been spying on millions of private gun sales and spying on American citizens without a constitutionally-mandated warrant as part of a nationwide gun control scheme.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee reports committee chairman Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) sent a letter to Acting ATF Director Daniel Driscoll, “requesting information on a secretive program that appears to allow the federal government to monitor law-abiding Americans attempting to exercise their Second Amendment rights.”
“This kind of backdoor surveillance of American citizens—without due process or public disclosure—should alarm every single person who values the Bill of Rights,” said Paul. “The ATF and FBI have no business creating secret watchlists for law-abiding Americans seeking to purchase firearms. It’s unacceptable, and I intend to get answers.”
“An activist judge subjected GOA to a ‘gag order’ after the Biden Administration mistakenly gave us information related to its unlawful NICS Monitoring program. ATF and FBI have no business monitoring the gun purchases of American citizens. GOA has since learned that the FBI abused NICS Monitoring to enforce California’s ‘assault weapons’ ban. We are thankful to Chairman Paul and the Senate Homeland Security Committee for opening an investigation into this egregious violation of Second and Fourth Amendment rights,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs, Gun Owners of America.
The committee reports Paul’s letter “follows reporting based on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Gun Owners of America, which revealed the existence of the NICS Audit Log Review (Monitoring) system. The Biden Administration’s ATF mistakenly released unredacted documents exposing the system, and has reportedly spent years trying to cover it up ever since.”
“According to the exposed documents, the program enables ATF agents to request that the FBI flag and monitor specific individuals using data from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), often for extended periods of time—without those individuals ever knowing,” the committee reports.
The committee reprots Paul “demands that the ATF provide unredacted records showing how many Americans have been subjected to this monitoring, for what reasons, the legal basis for the program, whether it has led to prosecutions, and whether there has been any misuse by ATF personnel or contractors. The records must be submitted to the committee no later than 5:00 pm on April 24th, 2025.”
Dr. Paul highlights in his letter that “the existence of this surveillance program, and the ATF’s longstanding push to conceal it from the public, raise questions about its general use and its potential to infringe on Americans’ civil liberties.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk.
That’s the thing about celebrities, they never seem to recognize when their immense wealth and status have officially removed them from what would be considered a “common man.”
Drew Barrymore, a longstanding name in Hollywood, thanked President Joe Biden for a “great year.”
ANALYSIS – Just months after the Department of Justice (DoJ) opened an investigation on her for posting leaked Pentagon intelligence on Ukraine, a US Navy veteran-turned-pro-Russian propagandist is back online.
Sarah Bils, a divorced 38-year-old New Jersey native, and former Navy technician, was unmasked in April after falsely posing as a Russian Jew reporting from occupied Ukraine. And deplatformed shortly thereafter by X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube.
But the attractive Bils, who had a security clearance while in the Navy, is back online on both platforms, as well as Telegram, spewing anti-American and pro-Putin propaganda under the name ‘DD Geopolitics.’
She has repeatedly posted since the relaunch faithfully parroting the Kremlin line. Bils has also encouraged followers to donate to the Russian army and the brutal Wagner Group mercenaries.
In a bizarre rant on September 4, she lashed out at the United States, blaming it for ‘constant meddling’ and provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Pekka Kallioniemi, an expert on Russian disinformation at the University of Tampere in Finland, questioned how Bils was able to restart her pro-Kremlin operations so soon after the opening of that DOJ probe.
‘I find it surprising that the FBI appears to be turning a blind eye to the online activities of people who are clearly working on behalf of America’s enemies,’ he said.
Well, it is called freedom of speech, and as we have seen under the Joe Biden regime, one person’s disinformation is another’s strongly held political convictions.
The best way to combat false information in a free society is with truth, not government or social media censorship.
It comes after a ten-month investigation into her online activities by volunteers from the pro-Kyiv open-source intelligence group, ‘The UnIntelligence Agency.’
She has already garnered more than 200,000 followers across X – formerly known as Twitter – YouTube, and the social media messaging platform, Telegram, which draws in a wide range of guests.
They include Moscow’s envoy to the UN and Alexander Dugin, a far-right political philosopher, described as the Russian president’s ‘brain’ on foreign policy.
‘Donbass Devuskha hasn’t pulled a disappearing act, she’s just had a fabulous makeover,’ Bils wrote earlier this summer.
Bils began her rise as the preeminent English-language pro-Russian disinformation queen just eight months before she was demoted and discharged from the Navy in November 2022. She had been serving since 2009.
While the Navy hasn’t provided reasons for her demotion and discharge, divorce papers filed in the state of Washington show that prior to her discharge she had been suffering from a variety of health problems.
Still, many suspect that her pro-Russia postings, and possible connections to Jack Teixera, the ex-U.S. Air National Guardsman who leaked a treasure trove of highly classified materials online, were related to her being demoted and dumped from the Navy.
Soon thereafter, DoJ opened an investigation into Bils earlier this year when she distributed stolen, classified documents about U.S. arms deliveries to Ukraine.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – In the immediate wake of one of the most horrifying terror attacks ever filmed, a coalition of 34 leftist Harvard student groups stupidly and offensively circulated a letter that stated that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
This, as stomach-churning images, and reports surfaced hourly of the vile murders and atrocities committed by the Hamas jihadists against over 1,000 Israeli civilians, entire families, children, even babies.
Not to mention over 25 Americans were killed and scores kidnapped.
Well, this time, things didn’t go as planned for the lefty Ivy League students accustomed to being coddled by woke corporate executives.
The response from Wall Street leaders, and soon other titans of corporate America was swift.
Bill Ackman the billionaire founder and CEO of hedge fund giant Pershing Square Capital Management, wrote on his X social media account on Tuesday:
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure [sic] that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their… https://t.co/7kzGOAGwp9
“If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known.”
Ackman, a Harvard grad worth $3.5 billion, added: “One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.”
Soon, other CEOs were joining him.
Jonathan Newman, CEO of salad chain Sweetgreen, quickly seconded Ackman in urging that the signatories of the letter be banned from future employment.
“I would like to know so I know never to hire these people,” Newman wrote in response to Ackman’s post on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday.
“Same,” David Duel, CEO of health care services firm EasyHealth, wrote in response to Newman.
Many other executives posted agreement with Ackman, such as Stephen Ready, CEO of marketing firm Inspired who posted “this is a must” and Michael Broukhim, CEO of FabFitFun, who said to Ackman: “We are in as well.”
Meanwhile, as The New York Post reported, others signaled their approval of his post with a supportive emoji or a gesture of agreement. These included: Hu Montague, founder, and vice president of construction company Diligent; Art Levy, head of strategy at payments platform Brex; and Jake Wurzak, the CEO of hospitality group Dovehill Capital Management.
The Post added that after the online fusillade from so many potential future employers, many of the spineless lefties responsible for the letter quickly ran for the hills.
“The backlash and possible blacklisting has led to a flurry of backpedaling by four of the initial student organizations attached to the inflammatory statement — while board members of other groups have quit in an effort to distance themselves.”
Amnesty International at Harvard, Harvard College Act on a Dream, the Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Student Association, the Harvard Islamic Society, and Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo, are among the groups that have since recanted according to the Harvard Crimson.
In fairness, many organizations didn’t know one of their representatives had signed on the group’s behalf.
To Harvard’s credit, many other student groups and faculty expressed outrage at the letter, and their fellow students and colleagues.
According to the campus paper, at least 17 other Harvard groups have joined 500 faculty and staff and 3,000 others in signing a counterstatement attacking the other groups’ letter as “completely wrong and deeply offensive.”
This was followed by 160 faculty members bashing Harvard’s response to the scandal, writing in their own separate letter that it “can be seen as nothing less than condoning the mass murder of civilians based only on their nationality.”
Its good to see that some at Harvard still have common sense as well as decency and humanity. Its also good to see corporate America responding in the way it has to these snively terror enabling leftist college students and staff.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
By Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) - Director Wray Installation Ceremony, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63667603
The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 was, for the entrenched political class, a thunderclap. It was not supposed to happen. The experts, the pollsters, the seasoned operatives had assured the country that Hillary Clinton’s victory was inevitable. Yet by the morning of November 9, the White House was preparing to receive a president unlike any in modern history: a political outsider with no government experience, an instinctive distrust of Washington, and a willingness to discard its conventions. For some in the outgoing administration and the permanent bureaucracy, this was not merely a surprise. It was a crisis to be managed, or better yet, undone.
That undoing began in earnest just four months into Trump’s presidency, when Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, with the approval of FBI Counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap and General Counsel James Baker, authorized a criminal investigation into the sitting president of the United States. This probe did not arise from fresh evidence of presidential misconduct. It rested on the same thin reeds that had underpinned the Russia collusion narrative since mid-2016: opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign, laundered through the Steele dossier, and presented as intelligence. It was a case study in how partisan disinformation can metastasize into official action when it finds a willing audience inside the government.
To understand how extraordinary this was, one must appreciate the context. Intelligence reports later declassified in the Durham Annex revealed that, as early as March 2016, the Clinton campaign had hatched a plan to tie Trump to Russian operatives, not as a matter of national security, but as an electoral tactic. These plans were known to senior Obama administration officials, including John Brennan, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe, before the election. Yet when Trump won, the machinery they had assembled did not wind down. It shifted purpose: from preventing his election to destabilizing his presidency.
The first casualty in this internal campaign was Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Adviser and one of the few senior appointees with both loyalty to Trump and an understanding of the intelligence community’s inner workings. In late January 2017, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama holdover, warned the White House that Flynn had misled them about conversations with the Russian ambassador. The FBI had already interviewed Flynn, in a meeting arranged by Comey that bypassed standard White House protocol. Even Peter Strzok, one of the interviewing agents, admitted they did not believe Flynn had lied. Nevertheless, the incident was used to force Flynn’s resignation on February 13, with Vice President Pence publicly citing dishonesty over sanctions discussions. In hindsight, it is clear this was less about Flynn’s conduct than about removing a man who might have quickly uncovered the flimsiness of the Russia allegations.
Next came Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Trump loyalist but a DOJ outsider with no prior experience in its leadership. Under pressure over his own contacts with the same Russian ambassador, Sessions recused himself from any matters related to the 2016 campaign on March 2. This decision, encouraged by DOJ ethics officials from the Obama era and accepted without challenge by Pence and other advisers, effectively ceded control of any Trump-Russia inquiries to deep state officials and Obama holdovers. It was the opening the FBI needed.
By mid-May, after Trump fired Comey at the recommendation of Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the FBI’s leadership was in open revolt. McCabe, Priestap, and Baker, all veterans of the Obama years, debated whether Trump had acted at Moscow’s behest. They even discussed the 25th Amendment and the idea of Rosenstein surreptitiously recording the president. These were not jokes. On May 16, McCabe authorized a full counterintelligence and criminal investigation into Trump himself, premised on the possibility that he was an agent of a foreign power. This was the first such investigation of a sitting president in US history.
Screenshot via X [Credit: @amuse]
The evidentiary basis for this move was paper-thin, much of it drawn from the Steele dossier, a work of partisan fiction that its own author was unwilling to verify. Baker, the FBI’s top lawyer, was a personal friend of Michael Sussmann, the Clinton campaign attorney who had helped funnel the dossier to the Bureau. Priestap, who signed off on the investigation, had overseen its use in obtaining FISA warrants to surveil Trump associates. They knew the source was tainted and the allegations were fiction. They proceeded anyway.
The day after the investigation formally opened, Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as Special Counsel, locking the inquiry beyond Trump’s reach. Mueller’s team, stocked with Democratic donors and Obama DOJ and FBI veterans, inherited the case and its political overtones. For nearly two years, the president governed under a cloud of suspicion, his every move interpreted through the lens of an unfounded allegation.
The impact on Trump’s presidency was profound. Key legislative initiatives stalled. Allies in Congress, warned privately by Pence and others that the investigation was serious, kept their distance. Figures like John McCain, Paul Ryan, and Jeff Flake acted in ways that hampered Trump’s agenda, from blocking Obamacare repeal to threatening his judicial nominations. Inside the executive branch, FBI Director Christopher Wray, another newcomer with no institutional knowledge of the Bureau’s internal politics, declined to purge the officials who had driven the investigation, allowing them to operate until they were forced out by Inspector General findings.
By the time Mueller submitted his report in March 2019, concluding there was no evidence of collusion, the damage was done. Trump’s first term had been defined in large part by a manufactured scandal. The narrative of foreign compromise, though disproven, had justified a Special Counsel, sustained hostile media coverage, and ultimately greased the skids for an unfounded impeachment over Ukraine.
The Durham Annex, unearthed years later, stripped away any lingering doubt about intent. It documented that the Russia collusion story was conceived as a political hit, that it was known to be false by the time it was weaponized in 2017, and that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials chose to advance it rather than expose it. In Madison’s terms, the accumulation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the same hands, here, the unelected leadership of the FBI and DOJ, amounted to tyranny.
That Trump survived this onslaught is remarkable. Few presidents, faced with a hostile bureaucracy, disloyal appointees, and a media eager to amplify every leak, could have done so. That the plot failed to remove him does not make it less a coup. It makes it a failed coup, one whose near-success should alarm anyone who values electoral legitimacy.
The lesson is clear. The intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of the United States must never again be allowed to become an instrument of partisan warfare. The use of fabricated opposition research to justify surveillance, investigations, and the effective nullification of an election result is a violation not just of political norms but of the constitutional order. It took years for the facts to emerge. It will take far longer to repair the trust that was lost.
Sponsored by the John Milton Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping independent journalists overcome formidable challenges in today’s media landscape and bring crucial stories to you.
ANALYSIS – Easily bought conservatives. In the aftermath of the brutal fallout from Bud Light’s woke transgender promotion fiasco with man-pretending-to-be-a-woman, ‘transgender influencer’ Dylan Mulvaney, the beer giant tried everything to woo back angry conservatives who have been successfully boycotting it.
Bud Light sales have crashed, dropping almost over 27% in a few short months.
In a panicked response, parent company Anheuser-Busch brought back the majestic Clydesdale horses, it also highlighted its events for, and donations to, veteran’s groups. It even made a commercial with football star Travis Kelce.
But nothing. Nada.
Videos and images of empty Bud Light venues went viral, as did shelves filled with untouched Bud Light cases being almost given away free. Bud Light kept crashing and Mexico’s Modelo beer passed it up as top-selling beer in America.
Along the way, Modelo became a sponsor of the UFC.
The only thing the American beer behemoth hasn’t done is apologize for its huge mistake. And Bud Light executives, apparently fearing a minority of leftist woke activists more than they fear losing hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, stubbornly refuse to do that.
Instead, Anheuser-Busch made a more than $100 million bet (“well into nine figures”), and essentially bought a powerful, Trump-supporting conservative personality to become its shill, and affiliated itself with one of the most conservative and masculine sports entertainment venues in the country.
The big conservative personality is UFC CEO Dana White, the organization is the UFC, promoter of mixed martial arts (MMA) fights. Both are being paid handsomely via a “multi-year marketing partnership” to promote Bud Light as the much-hated beer returns as the official beer of the sports juggernaut.
As part of Dana White’s new job promoting his sellout, he is doing the rounds of conservative media. As part of that ‘we aren’t woke’ spin tour, he went on the Sean Hannity show to repeatedly claim – unconvincingly to me – that the UFC, Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light “are very aligned when it comes to our core values.”
That is the talking point. You will hear it a lot.
Well, apparently that’s all it took for Hannity to embrace Bud Light’s faux return to the conservative fold. After a little mild, mostly symbolic, pushback, Hannity quickly folded and said he could give the unrepentant woke beer brand ‘one more chance.’
White also went on the The Charlie Kirk Show on October 26 to push back at conservative critics calling him a sellout. He said he admired the beer company’s core values, adding: “It’s this unbelievable, powerful, American-built business…”
When discussing the deal, conservative radio hosts Buck Sexton and Clay Travis (who I generally agree with and like) also sympathized with White and the UFC, meekly saying, ‘that’s a lot of money,’ and they might take it from Bud Light too.
One of the two also predicted that Bud Light’s huge bet with White and the UFC might pay off, and in a year the transgender boycott will be forgotten, seemingly trying to help make it so.
I hope they are all dead wrong, and their kowtowing to Bud Light just to please Dana White and his powerful organization will be condemned by conservatives. And there is evidence that a backlash against the UFC decision is now growing.
It has ignited a firestorm of criticism on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Many fans have said they will now be boycotting the UFC and canceling their pay-per-view subscription because of the brand partnership.
“I’m canceling my subscription and never buying ANY PPV (pay-per-view) fights anymore until this sponsorship is gone. This is the worst business deal UFC has ever made EVER,” one angry fan wrote.
“How about you explain your pathetic Bud Light sponsorship!!?? What you doing rainbow uniforms next?? Canceling my UFC fight pass subscription,” said another.
“I just canceled my ESPN+ subscription. I used to buy every PPV but this is the last straw,” wrote another.
A fourth added: “Canceled my UFC fight pass subscription. Enjoy your Bud Light, hope it was worth it.”
But realize it’s not just Dana White and the UFC that are sellouts, it’s also conservative powerhouse commentators like Sean Hannity, and lesser ones like Buck and Clay who seem to be quickly and meekly surrendering to Bud Light and their new partners, the UFC.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
