A person familiar with Zatko's tenure at Twitter told CNN the company investigated several claims he brought forward around the time he was fired, and ultimately found them unpersuasive; the person added that Zatko at times lacked understanding of Twitter's FTC obligations.

There are few, if any, financial disclosures available to review since the group is newly incorporated. But there is ample evidence, via donor lists posted from events and political action committee finances, to suggest that the group is supported by far more than just T-shirt sales and membership fees.

For example, Moms for Liberty Inc. (the group’s official name) is the recipient of funds from Conservatives for Good Government, a right-wing Florida political action committee. The group also hosts a number of high-dollar fundraisers, such as an event on June 15 featuring former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. An archived version of the event page and a list of top sponsors show that the named sponsors alone gave $57,000 — and that doesn’t include general admission tickets ($50), bonus promotional packs ($30), and any anonymous donors. The event also boasted several GOP-affiliated donors, including Florida state Sen. Debbie Mayfield and Florida House of Representative members Randy Fine and Tyler Sirois. [snip]

The group’s most notable GOP affiliation comes from Christian Ziegler, vice chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Ziegler spoke to The Washington Post and praised Moms for Liberty, saying, “I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.” [snip]

Moms for Liberty also appears to be affiliated with -- or at least a frequent promoter of -- the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Koch-funded think tank with a history of attempting to influence public education.

Who is really running the operation? The two “founders” are former school committee member Tina Descovich, a communications and marketing professional and Tiffany Justice, also a former school committee member. But there was a third founder, Bridget Ziegler. She is still a school committee member and her husband, Christian Ziegler, is vice chairman of the Florida Republican Party and the owner of a political marketing firm. He boasts that Moms for Liberty will provide crucial ground support for DeSantis’ re-election.

Then there’s the odd coincidence of so many grassroots parents organizations arising at the same time with similar missions. Parents Defending Education is Koch-connected. The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council claims credit for the havoc wreaked by anti-Critical Race Theory legislation. The Council for National Policy’s Leadership Institute commenced its own program to take over school boards. The Council for National Policy-connected Turning Point USA initiated a School Board Watch List for reporting “woke” school boards.

Senate Democrats sponsored a bill last year that would allow the agency to keep a gun tracing database to aid law enforcement, but it went nowhere.

The 1968 Gun Control Act gave the ATF authority to regulate federally licensed gun dealers. In 1978, the ATF tried to make dealers report most sales each quarter. The National Rifle Association and other groups denounced the plan, and lobbied to kill the reporting requirement. Congress did as the gun lobby requested, blocking the quarterly report proposal and reducing the ATF’s budget by $5 million: the amount the agency had sought to update its computer capacity. [snip]

The war on searchable technology continued. In 1986, Congress enacted the Firearms Protection Act, which bans the ATF from creating a registry of guns, gun owners or gun sales.

Congress also put a rider barring the agency from “consolidation or centralization” of gun dealers’ records in every spending bill affecting the agency from 1979 through 2011, then made the prohibition permanent, under law.

First comes keyword searches, and the next thing you know, you have national gun registries.

That, at least, is the rationale for the law that prevents the ATF from creating a searchable system. Gun rights groups argue that once the government has a list of firearms, it could use that list to confiscate weapons from private citizens.

Former ATF Director Stephen E. Higgins and others intimately familiar with the agency’s history say the root of the problem is that ATF has no political constituency, no one invested in seeing it succeed and willing to stand up against those determined to see it fail.* The success of ATF’s critics in reining in its authority is nowhere more evident than in the bureau’s appropriation statute, which is two pages long, devotes 11 lines to describing the agency’s budget and the remaining 76 lines to proscriptions on its powers. Many of these “riders,” as they’re known, go to the agency’s most basic investigative functions. Two of the riders effectively ban consolidation and computerization of records. One limits access and use of crime gun trace data, while another undermines the credibility of whatever trace data are released. One rider overturns ATF efforts to ban the import of large-capacity shotguns, which the agency found had no “sporting purposes.” Another overturned an ATF regulation to limit the import of dangerous weapons under a law originally designed to protect collectors of “curios and relics.” [snip]

According to Cox, the most important of the ATF riders “is a prohibition on creating or maintaining a database of gun owners or guns,” which the NRA and other gun-rights advocates say could be used by a tyrannical government to confiscate firearms. The rider, which dates back to 1978, was a response to President Carter’s attempt to create a national registry of handguns. A related rider, dating to 1997, bars the government from creating an electronic database of the names of gun purchasers contained in 597 million gun sale records from 700,000 out-of-business dealers. (Those dealers are required by law to turn their records over to the ATF.) In addition, a 1986 law, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, explicitly forbids the government from creating a database of gun owners. [snip]

Today, gun sale records are kept at 60,000 separate locations by the nation’s 60,000 federal firearms licensees (FFLs). With a centralized database, an ATF agent in possession of a gun found at a crime scene could simply plug the gun’s serial number into a computer and identify the name of the dealer who sold the weapon, along with the name of the first purchaser. Without a database, agents must often embark on a Rube Goldberg-style odyssey, contacting the gun’s manufacturer or a gun’s importer who will direct the agent either to a middleman who sold the weapon to a dealer or to the dealer himself, who can identify the first buyer. Dealers are required to keep records of each firearm transaction. Frequently, however, the records are on paper, and dealers can’t locate particular ones quickly. At the same time, there is no law requiring consolidation of wholesale weapon transfers—those sales by the manufacturer or middleman—which means ATF inspectors have no way of knowing whether a dealer’s ledgers accurately represent all of the guns he has bought or if he is illegally selling guns off the books.

One gun database that works

Joseph Vince, a former ATF special agent and now a partner at Crime Gun Solutions, a consulting firm, says solving gun crimes is all about gathering information and having the tools to make sense out of it. He says US gun laws often make that work far more difficult. “People talk about 9/11 and not connecting the dots; but when we talk about gun laws, we’re taking the dots off the paper.” Vince says concerns that a centralized database of guns and gun owners will lead to gun confiscation have been disproved by 80 years of history with the National Firearms Act, a 1934 law that requires citizens who own machine guns, short-barrel shotguns and certain other highly dangerous weapons to register them with the federal government. Owners of NFA firearms, as they are known, are fingerprinted, photographed and subjected to an FBI background check, and the serial numbers of their guns are kept in a federal database, whose contents, Vince says, have never been divulged outside of a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. Most important, these weapons are rarely used to commit crimes. The NFA has effectively removed these guns from the criminal marketplace.

“It’s a paradox of the Ukrainian state,” the official said. “It was believed, including by Ukrainians themselves, that there was a high level of corruption, inefficiency and infiltration of Russian agents in the Ukrainian government structures.” But after Feb. 24, he said, “they not only worked but also worked more efficiently than ever.”

He and others attributed much of that resilience to the example Zelensky set with his decision to remain in the capital. His ability to do so was due in part to the existence of a massive bunker complex under Kyiv’s government quarter that was designed by Soviet engineers and built to survive nuclear conflict.

This coward would piss his pants if FBI came knocking.

Mr. Price’s internet fame has enabled a pattern of abuse in his personal life and hostile behavior at his company, interviews with more than 50 people, documents and police reports show. He has used his celebrity to pursue women online who say he hurt them, both physically and emotionally. Ms. Margis is one of more than a dozen women who spoke to The New York Times about predatory encounters with Mr. Price. (snip)

“Social allows him to control the narrative,” said Ryan Pirkle, who spent almost seven years running marketing for Mr. Price’s company. (snip)

Dan Price, the good boss, went viral. But more than two dozen former employees say the image fueling his clout, and that attracted his female followers, was a mirage.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday blocked an attempt by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) to pass three election security-related bills via "unanimous consent," calling them a "federal power grab."

Why it matters: Just last week, the third volume of a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the U.S. government was "not well-postured" to counter Russian interference in 2016. The Democratic-controlled House passed several election security bills last year, but none have been taken up by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The big picture: Intelligence officials have continued to sound the alarm about the threat of foreign interference in future elections, with FBI director Christopher Wray warning last week that Russia continues to be engaged in "information warfare" ahead of the 2020 elections. [snip]

What they're saying: "[Democrats] are attempting to bypass this body’s Rules Committee on behalf of various bills that will seize control over elections from the states and take it from the states and where do they want to put it?" Blackburn said. "They want it to rest in the hands of Washington, D.C., bureaucrats." [more]

Most state and local election offices don't have the staff or resources available to protect against international hackers or foreign spies.

Two top House Democrats asked the US Director of National Intelligence to provide a “damage assessment” after the FBI said it seized highly classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s estate in Florida.

A classified briefing on the assessment’s progress is also sought “as soon as possible,” House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney and Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff said in a letter to DNI Avril Haines on Saturday.

They cited an unsealed court-authorized search warrant and the inventory of property recovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club that describe numerous classified documents he held, including “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” among the most highly protected information in the US government.

“Even as the Justice Department’s investigation proceeds, ensuring that we take all necessary steps to protect classified information and mitigate the damage to national security done by its compromise is critically important,” the lawmakers said in the letter.

Akiva Cohen @AkivaMCohen
Wait... did Christina Bobb just say she reviewed the potentially classified material trump turned over earlier in the year before he gave it back to DOJ?

What's her security clearance? How does this keep getting worse???

Acyn @Acyn · Aug 11
Ingraham: Is it your understanding that there were not documents related to our nuclear capabilities in the President’s possession..
Bobb: I don’t believe they were
Ingraham: But do you know for a fact?
[video]

11:57 PM · Aug 11, 2022