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Is the US intelligence apparatus preparing the public for future election interference?

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as ‘pre-bunking’ — for future election interference sanctioned by the Washington political machine?

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint statement ostensibly intended to assure U.S. voters in advance that the 2024 election that, despite anticipated attacks on the country’s voting systems that might make getting election information hard for citizens to obtain, election results would nonetheless be unaffected and election integrity would be maintained.

The FBI is responsible for investigating and prosecuting election crimes and malicious cyber activity targeting election infrastructure. The CISA plays a role in securing election infrastructure from physical and cyber threats.

The joint statement, however, has been met with skepticism based on the earlier roles of both agencies in past elections and their participation in massive suppression of conservative voices in social media.

As such, is the warning perhaps not what it seems? Is it an attempt to provide camouflage — a strategy known as “pre-bunking” — for future election interference sanctioned by the Democrat-powered Washington political machine — a.k.a., the Deep State — that wants to maintain control of the White House and Congress at any cost?

“CISA & FBI issue bulletin that upcoming cyberattacks may ‘prevent the public from receiving timely information’ about the 2024 election,” conservative commentator Emerald Robinson wrote on X.

“These same agencies told you: America’s voting machines were never connected to the Internet,” Robinson noted.

Jeanette Manfra, Acting Under Secretary for Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, told Congress in 2017 that America’s voting machines “are not connected to the internet.”

Manfra was responsible for the security of the nation’s voting system. Yet according to a 2020 report by NBC News, a team of 10 cybersecurity experts who specialize in voting systems and elections found nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to the internet.

“We found over 35 (voting systems) had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical adviser at the election security advocacy group National Election Defense Coalition, told NBC News at the time.

“We kept hearing from election officials that voting machines were never on the internet,” Skoglund said. “And we knew that wasn’t true. And so we set out to try and find the voting machines to see if we could find them on the internet, and especially the back-end systems that voting machines in the precinct were connecting to report their results.”

Can CISA be trusted?

“CISA has worked with Big Tech corporations to silence Americans since 2020,” noted Logan Washburn, writing at The Federalist last month. “A congressional report from last fall found it had become a “domestic intelligence and speech-police agency” whose behavior was ‘unconstitutional.’”

Last year, the Biden administration blocked the release of documents “revealing the extent to which deep state actors and their third-party allies interfered in the 2020 presidential election by pushing social media censorship,” according to a Breitbart report.

“The government seems particularly eager to stop the release of documents pertaining to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the closely linked Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), both of which are under intense scrutiny for their 2020 interference efforts,” Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote.

Bokhari reported in May 2023 on the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on the government’s “laundering” of censorship through NGOs and private entities:

In the runup to the 2020 election, the consortium created a system whereby state actors including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department could file “tickets” alongside news stories, flagging them so that Big Tech platforms could subsequently suppress or attach warning labels to them.

Beyond this blatant case of a private-public censorship coalition, the EIP also engaged in partisan politics, allowing the Democratic National Committee to file tickets through the system, as well as the Democrat-aligned groups Common Cause and the NAACP.

News outlets targeted by the EIP included Breitbart News, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Epoch Times, as well as the social media accounts of prominent conservatives Charlie Kirk, Tom Fitton, Jack Posobiec, Mark Levin, James O’Keefe, and Sean Hannity, amongst others.

President Donald Trump was also frequently flagged by the consortium, as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

In April, The Washington Examiner noted the connection of CISA and the suppression of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before the election, which no doubt had a big impact on the election’s outcome, in favor of leftist Joe Biden and against incumbent Republican Donald Trump:

On Oct. 14, 2020, hours after the New York Post published a story based on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop that Twitter blocked from being shared online, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center reached out to “misinformation” researchers behind the Election Integrity Partnership, a collaboration between universities, left-wing think tanks, social media companies, and the U.S. government to thwart alleged falsehoods online in the lead-up to the presidential election. That outreach from the GEC, a foreign-focused office Republican lawmakers are investigating for its ties to anti-speech projects in the United States, was apparently thanks to guidance from the DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to internal documents.

The newly unearthed coordination underscores the major role that CISA, an agency under scrutiny from the House GOP for allegedly colluding “with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans” in 2020, played in the Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP. Both CISA and Alex Stamos, who directed the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Stanford University office behind the EIP, have appeared to downplay CISA’s role in the partnership despite some since-released records indicating a closer relationship than previously known, the Washington Examiner reported.

CISA and the FBI: paving the way for domestic election interference?

“With Election Day less than 100 days away, it is important to help put into context some of the incidents the American public may see during the election cycle that, while potentially causing some minor disruptions, will not fundamentally impact the security or integrity of the democratic process,” CISA senior advisor Cait Conley said.

“DDoS attacks are one example of a tactic that we have seen used against election infrastructure in the past and will likely see again in the future, but they will NOT affect the security or integrity of the actual election. They may cause some minor disruptions or prevent the public from receiving timely information,” Conley suggested.

“It is important to talk about these potential issues now, because nefarious actors, like our foreign adversaries or cybercriminals, could use DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) incidents to cast doubt on the election systems or processes,” Conley said.

“Congress is still exposing the extent of the detailed coordination platform between Big Tech platforms and the Censorship Industrial Complex,” noted Republican Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee, in April. “Rather than promote free speech and free expression, this partnership was dedicated to denying it to those it did not favor.”

Questions remain: Did government agencies facilitate cheating and lie to the American people in 2020 in order to drag Biden across the finish line? Are they preparing to unconstitutionally install Kamala Harris in 2024?

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Doug Mainwaring is a journalist for LifeSiteNews, an author, and a marriage, family and children’s rights activist.  He has testified before the United States Congress and state legislative bodies, originated and co-authored amicus briefs for the United States Supreme Court, and has been a guest on numerous TV and radio programs.  Doug and his family live in the Washington, DC suburbs.

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illegal immigration

Without A Reckoning, The First U.S. Terror Attack Caused By Open Borders Won’t Be The Last

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From Todd Bensman from the Center for Immigration Studies as posted in The Federalist

Americans deserve a full-scale investigation into what happened in Chicago and how to prevent the next open-borders-enabled attack on U.S. soil.

Surprisingly little news coverage followed America’s first terror attack by an illegal border-crossing immigrant on U.S. soil. On Saturday, 22-year-old Mauritanian Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi was found dead of an apparent hanging suicide in his Cook County, Illinois jail cell. America must learn from this to prevent the next attacks on U.S. soil by border-infiltrating jihadists.

Abdallahi illegally jumped the border from Tijuana to San Diego in March 2023 and was freed by U.S. Border Patrol. Under orders from the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol has released millions of illegal entrants into the United States in the last four years.

On October 26, Abdallahi allegedly hunted down and shot in the back an identifiably Orthodox Jewish man walking to synagogue, then tried to up the body count by attacking responding police while shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Abdallahi still didn’t quit shooting even after police wounded him. Somehow he, the police, and the victim all survived.

This benchmarking story of America’s first terror attack by a border-crossing jihadist was largely ignored by national news media even though it came just before the brewing political war between pro-illegal immigrant Democrats and an incoming Trump administration promising an illegal immigration crackdown largely on national security grounds.

Now there will not even be a trial. Abdallahi’s sudden exit is no doubt privately regarded as a gift to pro-open borders advocates, their media sympathizers, and Democrat elected officials. But independent media and elected government must press for further details to prevent the next border-crossing terrorist attack.

What We Know So Far

At a late November arraignment reported on by a Chicago Fox News affiliate and the Chicago Sun-Times, prosecutors revealed that, while working at an Amazon warehouse, Abdallahi carefully planned his attack on Jewish targets due to jihadist ideology.

“This was not anything but a planned attack…an attempted assassination of these people,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anne McCord Rodgers told the court. “This was a calculated plan, on a public street…and attempted slaughter of that person and law enforcement officers.”

Abdallahi had mapped out the locations of two Chicago synagogues and a Jewish community, the conservative Chicago Sun-Times reported November 21. The search history also included “Jewish Community Center” and a gun store in suburban Lyons.

Once he shot the man in the back, Abdallahi displayed a relentless desire to increase his body count and seemed tactically aware of how to take out hard human targets like police officers. For example, his gun apparently jammed after shooting the Jewish victim, prosecutors said. He reportedly had the presence of mind to retreat to cover, fix the jam, then return to finish off the victim, but then retreated to cover again as first responders approached.

Abdallahi drove a few blocks around them, then returned on foot from a new direction and opened fire on four police officers and two paramedics tending the wounded man, prosecutors alleged. He then allegedly fired on the ambulance, hitting it twice as a fifth police officer returned fire.

Wounded, finally, Abdallahi fell. But he rose repeatedly to allegedly fire on the police even more before finally collapsing. Miraculously, none of his intended victims were hit.

This Case Has National Implications

The untold full story of Abdallahi’s illegal border crossing and attack in Chicago the next year, of course, goes beyond the evidence so far showing Abdallahi followed a violent ideology. Americans can no longer regard the possibility of Islamic terrorist infiltration from the southern border as merely a hypothetical bogeyman. Because of Chicago, no longer can the warnings of homeland security professionals like those quoted in my America’s Covert Border War book be dismissed as anti-immigrant fearmongering.

This terror attack and police gunbattle with an alleged border-crossing jihadist instead firmly justifies bipartisan public inquiry, public and private investigation, and analysis about border security policy that can stop future Abdallahis. After September 11, 2001, America justifiably worried about fixing the broken U.S. visa systems that 9/11 hijackers easily defrauded to enter the United States for that larger attack.

So far, the institutional media and government powers-that-be have managed to box up the Chicago incident as a mere local affair. It’s not even charged as a federal terrorism case.

Under pressure from Chicago’s Jewish community for Chicago officials to publicly acknowledge that a local Jewish man was violently attacked based on his religion, Cook County’s far-left, George Soros-backed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx (who leaves office next year) eventually charged Abdallahi with terrorism, under Illinois’ circa-9/11 terrorism statute.

This case demands intense national attention. Chicago’s attack is an uncontestable confirmation of the terrorism threat inherent in open borders policies. President Donald Trump promised throughout his campaign to reverse Democrats’ open border, catch-and-release policies. Yet open-borders advocates are organizing to wage political, information, and legal warfare to defeat Trump’s enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. Front-and-center attention on the Chicago terrorist attack would provide Americans the context they deserve during the melee over Trump’s planned illegal immigration fixes.

If the Chicago terror attack is allowed to fade away after Abdallahi’s burial, Americans will have been robbed of their ability to loudly petition for protection from the next such terror attack. The next attack could easily target the towns now vowing to “Trump-proof” themselves against policies that would deport other Abdallahis before they also can attack.

Questions Americans Deserve Answered

Failing to investigate this incident will likely leave the doors open to more such attacks. So far, there’s been no public sign of FBI or Department of Justice involvement in the Chicago case, as would be ordinary when Islamic terrorism is indicated in any attack on U.S. soil.

Ceding this case entirely to state and local authorities with less counterterrorism training and intelligence resources leaves too much on the table. For example: are co-conspirators or sympathizers who urged Abdallahi on still out there? Did foreign terrorism masters direct Abdallahi? Chicago police may be well-meaning and reasonably resourced, but counterterrorism is the FBI’s unique province.

If the bureau is not involved, why not? If it is, good, but to what extent did the FBI follow leads and intelligence and provide the results to Chicago PD (which may not hold the security clearances to ingest such information)? Might Chicago, a sanctuary city, even have refused to collaborate with the FBI for partisan reasons during a hotly contested presidential campaign?

Abdallahi reportedly did not flag on any terrorism or criminal databases when Border Patrol detained him in San Diego Sector. Was he ever detained and referred to the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team or Immigration and Customs Enforcement intelligence officers for extended terrorism-related interviews? That is supposed to happen with “special interest aliens,” who get assigned that tag if they hail from designated countries of terrorism concern like Mauritania.

According to material obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request, Border Patrol apprehended 18,260 Mauritanians illegally crossing the U.S. southern border from 2021 through December 2023. ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Mourabitoun, and other violent Islamist groups operate throughout the Sahel region of northwest Africa, which includes Mauritania, according to many credible sources about international terrorism.

Face-to-face interviews with Mauritanians and all other special interest aliens can be the difference between deporting a dangerous terrorist or letting one into the country. Have those happened with those 18,260 Mauritanians admitted to the U.S. in just three years? Will they?

Abdallahi is dead. But his case presents a rare opportunity for the traditional bastions of government accountability to get interested and get to work with this last question in mind: Is a Jewish Chicagoan the first American to be shot by a border-crossing jihadi, or the last?


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Business

From Smug to Subservient, Justin Trudeau Bows to MAGA Realities at Mar-a-Lago

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The Opposition with Dan Knight

After years of mocking Trump and betting on a woke Washington, Trudeau now finds himself groveling to save Canada’s economy from MAGA’s hardball tactics.

Justin Trudeau has spent years mocking and deriding the MAGA movement, banking on a continuation of woke, progressive leadership in Washington. He bet everything on a Kamala Harris presidency, believing the days of Donald Trump’s America-first agenda were a distant memory. Now, with Trump back in office, Trudeau finds himself groveling at Mar-a-Lago, trying to salvage what’s left of Canada’s crumbling economic future.

This is the same Justin Trudeau who painted MAGA as a dangerous fringe movement, aligning himself with global elites and lecturing Americans on their supposed moral failings. He openly scoffed at Trump’s tariffs, his immigration policies, and his tough-on-China stance. Trudeau’s bet? That a Democrat-controlled America would reward his sycophantic pandering with favorable trade deals and continued subsidies for his progressive fantasies.

But Trudeau’s gamble failed. Trump is back, and Trudeau’s entire house of cards is collapsing. Canada’s economy, propped up by unfair trade advantages and U.S. energy consumption, is suddenly exposed. The 25% tariff threat on Canadian imports has Trudeau scrambling, not with bold leadership, but with empty promises and nervous laughter at Mar-a-Lago.

In a moment of pure irony, Trudeau, who once lectured Trump about values, now finds himself kneeling to kiss the ring. MAGA, what? Gone is the smug defiance, replaced by desperate platitudes about border security and economic cooperation. But let’s be clear: Trudeau isn’t there to protect Canadian interests; he’s there to save face. His government is woefully unprepared for Trump’s hardball tactics, and the Prime Minister’s office knows it.

During a recent dinner at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump reportedly suggested that Canada could become the 51st U.S. state if it couldn’t handle the economic impact of proposed tariffs. This remark came after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed concerns that a 25% tariff on Canadian imports would “kill” Canada’s economy.

Trump’s comment underscores the significant economic interdependence between the two nations. In 2022, trade between the U.S. and Canada exceeded $900 billion, with the U.S. accounting for 63.4% of Canada’s global trade. This deep economic integration means that shifts in U.S. trade policy can have profound effects on Canada’s economy.

Trump’s quip about Canada becoming the “51st state” wasn’t just a joke; it was a power move, a reminder of who holds the cards in this relationship. While Trudeau nervously laughed, the message was clear: Canada needs the U.S. far more than the U.S. needs Canada. Trudeau’s weakness has brought us here. Instead of securing energy independence, he’s strangled Alberta’s oil industry with crippling regulations. Instead of standing up to China, he’s kowtowed to Beijing while relying on U.S. trade to keep his agenda afloat.

And now, Trudeau is at the mercy of a man he spent years mocking. Trump’s tariffs are a direct consequence of Trudeau’s inability to lead. His failure to address illegal immigration and the fentanyl crisis has made Canada not just a bad neighbor, but a liability.

Trudeau’s Liberals have always been more concerned with appearances than action, more focused on virtue signaling than real governance. But now, the bill has come due. And the man holding the ledger is none other than Donald J. Trump.

So here we are: Justin Trudeau, the woke globalist, reduced to pleading for mercy at Mar-a-Lago. His smugness replaced by desperation, his rhetoric exposed as hollow. MAGA what, indeed.

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