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Gun dealers from around the country who found themselves caught in the cross-hairs of the Obama administrations Operation Choke Point program are hailing its demise after years of controversy.

The program, started in 2013 and declared dead by the Justice Department last week, pressured banks to stop handling payments for businesses deemed high risk for fraud, including ammo and firearms sellers -- even without evidence of wrongdoing.

I have no doubt in my mind that many of our members, particularly retailers, but also manufacturers and importers, were victims of Operation Choke Point, said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearms industry trade association.

Were very pleased to see the end of the program, Keane told Fox News. It was very nefarious and it took a lot of work to shine a light on it and get it stopped.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, in a letter dated August 16 to Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, called the program a misguided initiative conducted during the previous administration.

Mike Schuetz, 43, of Hawkins Guns in northern Wisconsin became an Operation Choke Point victim when his credit union notified him that his account was being closed in November 2014.

TRUMP DOJ ENDS HOLDER-ERA 'OPERATION CHOKE POINT'

Seeking answers,he went to the credit unionand secretly taped a meeting with the manager.

Were really not anti-gun as a company, but our hands are tied, and I feel horrible about this, the manager told him on the tape. I didnt sleep last night.

Schuetz told Fox News his business suffered until he could find another bank, located 40 miles away. He said he lost customers and today is still dealing with the fallout.

He also became an outspoken Operation Choke Point critic, and landed in the national spotlight including an appearance onFox News.

Im very pleased and very happy that the current administration and the DOJ have chosen to terminate it, he said. However, it doesnt fix my situation. But it does prevent someone else from having to deal with things I had to deal with.

Russ Farnsworth, 29, a licensed online gun auctioneer in Montville Township, Ohio, told Fox News his bank stopped doing business with him last year.

I didnt know about Operation Choke Point, but when I got the letter from the bank and found out about it, it kind of made sense, he said.

He said he switched to another bank.

It was just an unnecessary hassle, I guess, Farnsworth said.

Bill Edwards, 66, said more than a dozen banks rejected his application for a loan to build a shooting range in Raleigh, N.C.

We had a great business plan and we would get turned down and not get any answers, he told Fox News. "We were dumbfounded. Its kind of an unwritten rule: Dont lend to firearms business.

DOJ ACCUSED OF BLOCKING LEGAL GUN SHOPS, OTHER BUSINESSES FROM BANKING

He finally obtained a loan from a Tennessee bank. Edwards opened the Triangle Shooting Academy last year and is building another shooting range in Greensboro.

He said Operation Choke Point made it more difficult to find a loan.

I think there are two factors chiefly in play one is that a lot of folks in the banking industry dont understand the firearms industry, but I also think that it was the regulatory environment that identified the industry as riskier than others, said Camden Webb, a Raleigh lawyer who has helped Edwards and other clients navigate Operation Choke Point.

But now, as Im talking to banker friends about the industry, they are much more willing to learn about the industry and address that knowledge gap and I think thats a great thing, Webb told Fox News.

The goal of Operation Choke Point was to choke off a fraudster's access to banking networks to scam consumers. Banking regulators working with the Justice Department designated 30 businesses "high risk." But the list made no distinction in lumping ammo and gun dealers in with payday lenders, owners of porn shops, operators of escort services and peddlers of Ponzi schemes.

Ryan Cleckner, a firearms attorney with Rocket FFL in Nashville, thinks Operation Choke Point was a backhanded way for the Obama administration to put the clamp on the firearms industry without legislation.

Hes happy to see the program end, but wonders if that will change anything anytime soon.

Im glad the federal government is not targeting and burdening an entire industry anymore, but there is no guarantee all banks are going to start doing business with firearms dealers, he told Fox News.

Karl Frisch of Allied Progress, a consumer watchdog, bemoaned the end of Operation Choke Point in a statement last week.

Operation Choke Point has been incredibly effective at cracking down on the flow of money to fraudulent merchants that violate the law and target vulnerable consumers, he said.

Brooke Singman contributed to this story.

More here:
Gun dealers bid adieu to Obama 'Operation Choke Point' program - Fox News

The U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has killed more civilians during President Donald Trump's first seven months in office than in the three years it existed under his predecessor, according to the latest estimate by a U.K.-based monitor.

Airwars, which describes itself as a "journalist-led transparency project," released Tuesday its latest data on airstrikes reportedly conducted by the U.S. and its allies battling ISIS and other jihadists in Iraq and Syria. According to data gathered since the coalition's inception in October 2014, the U.S.-dominated multinational force has been responsible for a minimum of 5,117 civilian deaths, with about 55 percent of them occurring during Trump's administration. While the stage of the conflict inherited by the Republican leader has largely involved targeting ISIS's urban strongholdsafter allied gains elsewhere under former President Barack Obama, Trumphas faced backlash at home and abroad over reports of mounting collateral damage.

Related: Syria: Arab tribes who once supported ISIS turn to U.S. as endgame begins in Raqqa

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"During @BarackObama's 29 months at helm of ISIS war we tracked 855 alleged civilian casualty events which likely killed 2298-3398 civilians," Airwars tweeted to the group's official account.

"In @realDonaldTrump's first 7 months as President, we tracked 1,196 alleged incidents in which we assess at least 2,819-4,529 civilians died," it added.

Heavy smoke billows following an airstrike on the western frontline of Raqqa on July 17, 2017, during an offensive by the U.S.-backed, majority-Kurd Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Arabs and ethnic minorities, to retake the city from Islamic State militant group (ISIS). AFP's correspondent said at the time it was the heaviest day of airstrikes to date. BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

The U.S.began conducting airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria in October 2014 as part of what came to be known as the Joint Combined Task ForceOperation Inherent Resolve. The campaign was created in response to lightning gains made across Iraq and Syria by ISIS, a notoriously brutal and powerful offshoot of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The ultraconservative Sunni Muslim group managed to overpower local forces and expanded its self-proclaimed caliphate across nearly half of the two countries.

The group's lines of defense began to collapse in Iraq as it was targeted by the country's armed forces, Kurdish militias, majority-Shiite Muslim militias backed by Iran and U.S.-led airstrikes. In Syria, U.S. airstrikes assisted the local Kurdish forces and some Arab insurgent groups in taking on the jihadists, while a 2015 Russian intervention allowed Syria's embattled military and its allies, including Iran-backed militias, to retake large parts of the country lost to ISIS and other anti-government groups in the wake of a 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Assad have also been criticized for reports of high civilian casualties incurred by their joint air campaigns.

When Trump came into office in January, U.S. forces had already begunmajor offensives to help local allies dislodge ISIS from two of its most important cities. Since then, the Iraqi government has declared ISIS defeated in Mosul, by far the largest city to fall into the jihadists' hands, and the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mostly Kurdish alliance of Arabs and ethnic minorities, has beaten ISIS in about half of its de facto capital of Raqqa. As the two campaigns became increasingly urban, civilian casualties increased substantially. In last month's report, Airwars said that about 80 civilians were killed per month under Obama and that that figure had risen to 360 under Trump by July.

A map shows areas of control in Syria on April 3, 2017 and August 8, 2017. In recent months, the Syrian military and its allies have defeated the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) across large parts of central and eastern Syria, while the U.S.-backed, Kurd-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has concentrated largely on defeating ISIS in its de facto capital of Raqqa. Institute for the Study of War/Reuters

Other monitoring groups have also criticized the increasingly deadly consequences of the U.S.-led intervention against ISIS. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based group with ties to the exiled Syrian opposition, said Monday that coalition airstrikes had escalated in the past week, killing 167 people, with at least 42 dead reported from a single airstrike that day.

"Such massacres only add to the deteriorating humanitarian situation of civilians in ISIS-controlled areas in Raqqa city, where death became inevitable awaiting even those who try to flee along with their families to areas far from the doomed city," the group wrote.

See original here:
Trump Has Already Killed More Civilians Than Obama in US Fight Against ISIS - Newsweek

Plans for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park are being firmed up largely out of public view, and one watchdog group is sounding the alarm about the lack of transparency.

Decisions on the design of the center, the parks golf course and even whether to eliminate some roads in the park are being worked out by the Obama Foundation, City Hall and the Chicago Park District.

Jackson Park Watch has sent a letter to City Hall outlining their concerns.

What groups have the Park District, the Chicago Department of Transportation, and the Obama Foundation been meeting with? How were they selected? How representative are they? And what data have they been given to review? Where is the open, public process that is appropriate for consideration of changes to public parks? Brenda Nelms and Margaret Schmid, coordinators for Jackson Park Watch, wrote in an Aug. 8 letter to Deputy Mayor Andrea Zopp, who is overseeing the massive developments.

There have been four community meetings in June and July with more to come but thats not the whole story on whats going behind the scenes. The public will learn some details about proposed street changes Wednesday and Thursday when the Chicago Department of Transportation hosts open houses at the South Shore Cultural Center, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. both days.

The Park District also will have meetings at the cultural center, on Sept. 21 and Sept. 25, to gather input.

The Chicago Park District wants to merge the Jackson Park (shown) and South Shore golf courses. | Sun-Times file photo

At an invitation-only Aug. 15 briefing at its Hyde Park headquarters, foundation officials left the impression the foundation will now pay for an underground parking garage, a change from the presentation by former President Barack Obama in May.

Some questions Jackson Park Watch is raising involve basic information the group believes should have been made public by now.

Among the questions the Sun-Times asked the Foundation last week and that the Foundation declined to answer:

For months, the Chicago Sun-Times has been asking the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Department of Transportation to put a price tag on the roadway and infrastructure changes tied to the Obama Center and the proposal to merge the Jackson Park and South Shore golf courses into a single championship-caliber course. The Sun-Times also wants to know where the taxpayer money to pay that bill would come from. Both agencies have refused to provide details.

Those changes include closing Cornell Drive and Marquette Drive, building a pair of new underpasses at 67th Street and South Shore Drive and at Jeffery Boulevard and 66th Street and possibly building an underground garage and improving the shoreline to allow spectacular lakefront holes at the new course.

Now that the course layout calls for displacing tennis courts and the South Shore Nature Sanctuary, Jackson Park residents are demanding to know where the treasured bird and butterfly preserve will be relocated and how that work will be paid for.

The laundry list of possible projects also includes: a new Metra station; a new Jackson Park fieldhouse; a rebuilt Clarence Darrow Bridge; a new headquarters for the Chicago Police Departments mounted unit now located at the park adjacent to the South Shore Country Club; and a host of recreational amenities, including sledding hills, biking paths and the possibility of an outdoor concert venue.

On Monday, CDOT spokesman Mike Claffey issued a statement that continued to talk only vaguely about the taxpayer contribution.

The Chicago Department of Transportation is developing proposed roadway improvements that will be needed to mitigate the impacts of proposed road closures within Jackson Park, Claffey wrote.

This weeks meetings are intended to share details and solicit public feedback from community residents and stakeholders about these proposed roadway improvements. Cost estimates will be developed once we have determined the scope of the investments that are needed.

City Hall sources privately acknowledge that transportation, park and infrastructure improvements tied to the Obama library and golf course merger could easily top $100 million.

The golf course merger is estimated to cost $30 million, and 20 percent of that will be paid for by taxpayers. Its unclear if that includes a new clubhouse.

But sources maintain those projects would be built over a six-year period and the massive costs could be incorporated into the annual capital budgets for CDOT and the Chicago Park District. Implied but not stated is the fact that other projects would have to be shelved to make way for the Obama Foundations wish list.

Theyre planning to spend tens of millions anyway, said a source familiar with the project, who asked to remain anonymous. Theyll just spend it in a different way.

See the article here:
Jackson Park advocates voice worries about Obama center planning - Chicago Sun-Times

The nation's deportation chief warned Tuesday that illegals who knew they were "home free" under former President Obama's open border policies are no longer safe from getting the boot.

"For those who get by the Border Patrol, they need to understand there's no safe haven in the United States," said Thomas Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "They got to understand, if you get by the Border Patrol, ICE is looking for you," added Homan.

He spoke to reporters on Air Force One as it carried Trump and other officials to Arizona for a rally and focus on illegal immigration.

Homan has taken Trump's immigration orders and run with them, enforcing laws Obama overlooked. The result has been a dramatic decrease in illegals crossing the border and a spike in arrests of illegals, especially those with additional criminal records, in interior United States.

Homan, who has worked in federal immigration since the Reagan years, was a top ICE official under Obama, giving him an unusual perspective in the war on illegal immigrants and how it's changed under Trump.

"Look, immigration enforcement is more meaningful when you have a true interior enforcement strategy, which we have under this president," he said.

Homan, whose name is among those many believe Trump is considering to be secretary of Homeland Security, told reporters, "I think the message being sent on interior enforcement -- which wasn't part of the last administration, not to the extent it is now -- interior enforcement is sending that clear message that if you are lucky enough to get by the Border Patrol, in the last administration you're home free unless you commit yet another crime and get arrested and get put in jail, and get convicted of that crime. Now the message is clear: If you're in the United States illegally, if you happen to get by the Border Patrol, someone is looking for you. And that message is clear and I think it has a direct impact on the decrease in apprehensions."

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com

See the rest here:
ICE Chief: Illegals 'home free' under Obama have 'no safe haven' under Trump - Washington Examiner

The crisis that erupted last week in Charlottesville is simply an extension of the one that began last summer, when the Republican Party , instead of opposing Donald Trump , decided to go all in on his side. Its absurd now, for instance, to witness hand-wringing over what Charlottesville reveals about the extent or even the existence of Trumps racism . Birtherism, Trumps brutal cause, was the most overtly racist movement in contemporary American political lifean attempt to discredit the legitimacy of a black President by insisting not merely that he is not an American but that he is an African, as part of a script written often and deeply in every racist tract of our nation, in which Africans are the eternal Evil Other. It was an effort to symbolically stop and frisk a black man by suggesting that he was vulnerable as an alien.

With a patience wholly admirable and, in some ways, almost saintly, Barack Obama chose to ignore Trumps attempt to delegitimize him by treating Trump, during the post-election transition, as if he might be a normal politician engaged in a normal exchange of power, apparently in the hope that acting as though it might be so would make it so. Since then, despite all attempts to pretend otherwise, Trumps assault on the premises and the principles of democratic government has been ongoing, and Obamas silence has been increasingly puzzling to many of his admirers, and not made better by his occasional appearance looking carefree on holiday. The appetite for Obamas leadership is as real as ever, not merely among liberals but among Americans of many political stripes and sides; he left office, after all, with nearly record-high approval, and would almost certainly have been relected had the law allowed it. The extraordinary, historic retweeting if one can now use the word historic about retweetsof Obamas apropos quote from Nelson Mandela after Charlottesville, officially the most-liked tweet ever, is typical.

This truth raises a question that cant be avoided: Will Obama step forward to help lead the opposition to Trump? His reluctance to act too hastily has honorable reasons. His hatred of drama leads him at times to underestimate moments when dramatic crises demand dramatic acts, and his love of and natural instinct for reason make it hard for him to fully credit the depth of unreason in others. This incapacity, as likable as it is at times almost pathological, led him to such errors of misplaced good faith as his nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, in what was clearly the sincere belief that a Justice pre-vetted by Republican worthies would actually have a chance of being treated seriously. (In retrospect, Obama missed an opportunity to nominate a candidate whose contemptuous rejection by the Republican Senate might have provided a more advantageous political lever.) And historians may speak critically, and perhaps worse than that, of his caution last year surrounding possible Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election, and the role that members of the Trump campaign may have played in them.

Obamas logic of self-restraint is sympathetic. He first of all clearly believes that one President should grant another a period of grace, as Presidents almost always doGeorge W. Bush, to his credit, lent a long one to himand that is, in anything resembling a normal oscillation of political power, appropriate and correct. But this is not a normal time; it is a national emergency. Trump long ago disposed of the notion of normal constitutional courtesy when, without a shred of evidence or truth, he accused Obama of wiretapping him i.e., committing a grave crime. To pretend, as Obama was almost visibly willing himself to do throughout the grim months of last November, December, and January, that Trump in any way resembles a normal, democratic-minded leader is folly.

Obama also doubtless thinks, with some wisdom, that his reappearance as a beacon to some would serve to make him once again a target to many. Much of Trumps and the Republican Partys program is no more than crude Obama-trolling, as in the departure from the Paris climate accord, or in the health-care fiasco , where the sole logic in putting forward a program that even Republicans hated was to placate the base by undoing what the black President had done. For Obama to make himself more visible would only supply a convenient enemy at a time when Trump and his followers seem to be self-destructing on their own. Obama may also believe that the crisis has not come yetthe real, full-blown constitutional crisis that may arrive when the special counsel, Robert Mueller, acts, or if Trump attempts to act against him, or if another terrorist incident happens, and a voice of reason is not only useful but existentially essential. Obamas only hope of leading then is to depoliticize himself now. And both Barack and Michelle Obama would surely like a break from the relentless presence of politics in their lives; it has always been a sign of Obamas essential sanity that the appetite for power seems to blow hot and cold in his life, rather thanas it must be said it seems to do for Bill and Hillary Clintonas a perpetual propelling wind.

Against all thisas admirable and, in some ways, impeccably logical as it may beis that national emergency, and the need for leadership among the coalition of leftists, liberals, independents, and conservatives of integrity who oppose Trump, especially as we move ever closer to the frightening possibility of continuing violent confrontations, a possibility that the catastrophic open-carry state laws have only made more likely. That the instigation of the violence in Charlottesville was exclusively at the hands of the neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates does not alter the truth that, historically, one sides violence produces anothers. Leftists, infatuated as they are sometimes tempted to be with a renewed rhetoric of street action, need to be reminded that such violence in American history has always worked to the advantage of the wrong side. As the political scientist Omar Wasow, of Princeton University, reminded us not long ago, it was, above all, the fear of street violence in the nineteen-sixties that got Richard Nixon electedand then relected. In liberal democracies, non-violent mass protest can be an astonishingly efficient engine of reform; the threat or fact of violence empowers only its enemies.

What the dissenting, or resisting, side needs is exactly what Obama can help supply: principled leadership from as close to a universally respected figure as one could hope to find. At a moment when the leadership of the congressional Democrats is desperately uninspired, and the next generation of liberal voices has yet to emerge or remains uncertain of purpose, the opposition is in need of real leadership, meaning what real leadership always is: a voice of reason lit by passion.

No one wants, or expects, deliverance. The purpose of leadership is neither to be messianic or to encourage blind obedience. Good leaders dont make followers; they make participants. Much needs to be done, but even more needs to be said. The window of meaning needs to be widened. One imagines Obama, with his usual rhetorical deftness, making the point that the neo-secessionists and the neo-Nazis are not merely extraneous, obnoxious fringe groupsthey represent exactly the enemies whom Americans united to defeat in their two most consequential wars. We are not merely combatting the enemy within; we are reaffirming what unifies us in history by carrying the fight forward.

One can hear in ones headand even directly in ones ear from impatient othersthe objection that Obamas is already a voice of the past. But history does not work with such relentless linear direction. Figures long dismissed arise to lead when necessaryChurchill being the most obvious exampleand lights gone dark often reappear to illuminate a new time. Obviously, we need new generations of leaders and the ascent of newer voices. Yet coalitions of the kind that this emergency demands need voices capable of speaking to the many, not the few, articulating values held in common, not in contest. It could be that Barack Obamas true historical moment will arrive, with an irony of a kind that American history specializes in, not during his Presidency but after it.

Link:
Why Obama Should Lead the Opposition to Trump - The New Yorker