Tag: MAINSTREAM MEDIA

‘Fake news’ filter NewsGuard grilled for having links to PR firm that peddled Saudi propaganda

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A new app claiming to serve as a bulwark against “disinformation” by adding “trust rankings” to news websites has links to a PR firm that received nearly $15 million to push pro-Saudi spin in US media, Breitbart reports.

NewsGuard and its shady advisory board – consisting of truth-lovers such as Tom Ridge, the first-ever homeland security chief, and former CIA director Michael Hayden – came under scrutiny after Microsoft announced that the app would be built into its mobile browsers. A closer examination of the company’s publicly listed investors, however, has revealed new reasons to be suspicious of this self-declared crusader against propaganda. As Breitbart discovered, NewsGuard’s third-largest investor, Publicis Groupe, owns a PR firm that has repeatedly airbrushed Saudi Arabia.

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Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Riyadh enlisted Qorvis Group, a Publicis subsidiary, in the hope of countering accusations that the kingdom turned a blind eye to – or even promoted – terrorism. Between March and September 2002, the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia reportedly paid Qorvis $14.7 million to run a PR blitz targeting American media consumers. As part of the campaign, Qorvis employed a litany of dubious tactics, including running pro-Saudi ads under the name of an activist group, Alliance for Peace and Justice. Tellingly, the FBI raided the company’s offices in 2004, after Qorvis was suspected of running afoul of foreign lobbying laws.

Between 2010 and 2015, Qorvis is believed to have received millions of dollars to continue to whitewash the kingdom’s image in the United States. The accelerated airbrushing came just as the Saudis launched its devastating war against Yemen. In fact, Qorvis created an entire website – operationrenewalofhope.com – to promote the Saudi-led war in Yemen, according to the Intercept.

The firm has also successfully planted Riyadh-friendly stories in major US publications, including a 2016 op-ed by Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, which was published by Newsweek. The headline bravely bellowed: “The Saudis are fighting terrorism, don’t believe otherwise.”

All of this is rather extraordinary, considering that NewsGuard bills itself as an app that helps news consumers determine “if a website is trying to get it right or instead has a hidden agenda or knowingly publishes falsehoods or propaganda.”

Social media users quickly seized on the story, pointing out the multiple levels of irony and humor.

“I wondered why their slogan was ‘behead those who we say peddle fake news,'” one Twitter user joked.

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Still, NewsGuard’s co-founder Steven Brill has insisted that Qorvis and its parent company have no control over the app.

“Publicis has nothing to do with the content or operations of NewsGuard and has a small stake in the company,” Brill told Breitbart.

If guiding the app is a responsibility reserved solely for the advisory board, NewsGuard likely won’t fare much better: One of its board members, Richard Stengel, is a former managing editor of Time magazine and an ex-State Department official who was dubbed the “chief propagandist” of the US government.

True to form, Stengel openly admitted during a panel discussion last year that “I’m not against propaganda,” and “Every country does it and they have to do it to their own population and I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI STUDENTS CALL FOR VIOLENCE AGAINST CONSERVATIVES

University of Cincinnati Students Call for Violence Against Conservatives

Young Americans increasingly supportive of physical attacks over politics

Kaitlin Bennett | Infowars.com – JANUARY 28, 2019

When Kaitlin Bennett visited the University of Cincinnati she was promptly met with threats of violence from leftists on campus.

One student admits his peers urged him to kill her, while others chanted “hit her” as a bus drove by Bennett.

As a group of conservatives wrote “MAGA” on a window, liberals shouted, “somebody please beat these people up.”

UC student Preston Brown openly condoned school shooting threats against Covington Catholic students, saying “Life happens. You get what’s coming.”

Infowars version with live comments:

Brighteon Version:

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THE FBI IS PART OF THE DEEP STATE. – INTEL SOURCES: Roger Stone Indictment Shows Evidence of FBI Hack of Trump Campaign

By Patrick Howley

A former member of the U.S. Foreign Counter Intelligence community explains how the Roger Stone indictment demonstrates evidence of FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign, which could prove illegal evidence-gathering procedures in the Stone case.

Explained:

“The indictment of Roger Stone may help explain the insurance policy that Peter Strzok was talking to Lisa Page about in August of 2016.  In the indictment, on page 17 section 35 titled “STONE’s False and Misleading Testimony About Communications with the Trump Campaign“, there is a very curious admission.  It talks about insider knowledge of numerous communications in the Trump Campaign.

“In truth and in fact, and as described above, STONE spoke to multiple individuals involved in the Trump Campaign….“ and “a. On multiple occasions, STONE told senior Trump Campaign officials…“.

This is important because it highlights the question, did the FBI or CIA use Stefan Halper or Joseph Mifsud to hack the Trump Campaign’s emails?  Stefan Halper, who is widely reported by most news organizations as a spy/source for the CIA/FBI, emailed Carter Page, George Papadopoulus and Sam Clovis of the Trump Campaign. Sam Clovis even reported to Tucker Carlson in May of 2018 that he received emails from Stefan Halper with attachments in 2016.  The indictment of Papadopoulus references numerous communications with the professor.  Joseph Mifsud has been reported as the professor and as a possible British spy.  Did these email communications have spy software attached and did Peter strzok’s August 1st 2016 trip to London involve him passing anything to Halper?”

REFERENCES:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-carter-page-met-stefan-halper-1527029988

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/who-is-stefan-halper-fbi-trump-campaign-russia-mueller-investigation-a8362846.html

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/390228-london-bridges-falling-down-curious-origins-of-fbis-trump-russia-probe

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/strzok-page-and-the-fbi-texting-scandal-explained

BLP reported:

Longtime President Trump political adviser Roger Stone reveals that he was the victim of a set-up meeting by a Russian using a fake Western name — but he did not fall for it.

More details are coming out about the Crossfire Hurricane plot to target members of President Trump’s team with fake Russian meetings in order to trigger surveillance measures. The FBI is facing massive criticism after the New York Times reported that the FBI launched a quiet investigation into the Trump-Russia hoax after James Comey’s firing.

“By way of example, as you know, back in June I sent this Committee a letter regarding a longtime FBI informant named Gennadiy Vasilievich Vostretsov who, under the alias “Henry Greenberg”, was sent to approach my client in May 2016 with claims of having access to information that could impact the election,” writes Stone’s attorney Grant Smith in a letter to Rep. Devin Nunes.

“Mr. Stone not only immediately and forcefully declined to participate in anything this FBI informant was proposing, but never saw or spoke to the informant again. Mr. Stone believes it highly likely that Mr. Vostretsov/Greenberg’s status as an FBI informant was not “former”, and that Vostretsov/Greenberg was, in fact, actively working on behalf of the FBI at the time of their meeting, acting upon a calculated effort to entrap Mr. Stone and, further, to infiltrate and compromise the Trump effort. Notably, Vostretsov was admitted to the country nine separate times on an FBI Informant’s visa,” Smith writes on Stone’s behalf.

Stone is demanding that the full transcript of his interview with the House Intelligence Committee be released to the public to prove once and for all that Stone did not collude with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election.

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The Republican strategist also accuses Democrat California congressman and presidential aspirant Eric Swalwell of lying to create the narrative that Stone changed his testimony.

“Congressman Eric Swalwell told MSNBC that I lied to the House Intelligence Committee and that I ‘amended’ my testimony three times. This is categorically false,” Stone said in a statement provided to Big League Politics.

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NYT Reporter Fishing for Christian School Horror Stories to #ExposeChristianSchools

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By Megan Fox

Hot on the heels of demonizing fourteen-year-old Catholic school students at the March for Life, the rabid press is hungry for more. New York Times reporter Dan Levin put out a call for survivors of Christian schooling to contact him with their tales of woe. “I’m a New York Times reporter writing about . Are you in your 20s or younger who went to a Christian school? I’d like to hear about your experience and its impact on your life. Please DM me.”

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This was met with much skepticism and blowback from multiple sources.

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Levin, sensing he had given away his punchline, pinned the following codicil to his timeline, insisting he intends to include positive stories too.

Forgive us if we don’t believe you, Dan. It’s just that the recent smear job of the students at Covington Catholic High School preceded by the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh’s Catholic high school have left us all a little edgy.

Levin also included a strange age limit, only wishing to hear from twenty-somethings. This, of course, skews the results quite dramatically since twenty-year-olds are notoriously left-wing and anti-religious. The Atlantic reported that beyond being left-wing, most people under thirty are downright socialists!

And if there’s one thing people are learning about this young generation, it’s that they are liberal. Even leftist. Flirting with socialist. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, more than 80 percent of voters under 30 years old voted for Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist so outside the mainstream of his party that he’s not even a member.

Levin’s desire to only speak to people under thirty couldn’t possibly have anything to do with getting the negative results he wants to print, could it? If he spoke with Generation X, I have a strong feeling he would get very different responses. But while we are on the subject of exposing Christian schools, why not go all the way? Let’s expose exactly what Christian schools have done to this country.

According to the last national study of public schools versus private schools in 2006, private Christian students outperformed public school students — by a lot. Perhaps that’s why the comparison survey hasn’t been repeated. According to the National Assessment of Educational Process:

In grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools. The average difference in school means ranged from almost 8 points for grade 4 mathematics, to about 18 points for grade 8 reading.

The only private Christian schools that scored the same or lower than public schools were non-Catholic conservative Christian schools. Catholic and Lutheran schools outperformed public schools consistently and bigly.

This is not news to anyone. It’s why parents take second jobs to afford the high tuition. They want their kids to learn how to read and think — unlike public schools that consistently turn out illiterate children like in Chicago, where 79 percent of 8th graders can’t read and 80 percent are below grade level in math. If they can’t read, how do they pass any other class? When public school students get into colleges that take them based on “diversity quotas,” their professors genuinely can’t teach them anything but basic grammar, but even that is “racist.”

American University is hosting a  seminar next month to teach faculty how to assess writing without judging its quality. In the seminar’s own words: “grading ain’t just grading.” They will learn how to engage students “with how judgements [sic] are formed and how those judgements [sic] use a set of White racial habits of language, no matter who the reader is.”

Sentence structure and grammatical rules are now a symbol of white supremacy. This is what parents who pay thousands of extra dollars to send their kids to Christian schools are paying to avoid. We are also paying to avoid the social programming, including teaching kindergarteners about anal sex and junior high-schoolers how to properly masturbate. Public schools waste so much time training children to learn an infinite number of pronouns to call the gender-confused that there is no time for learning basics like math and science. In Christian schools, learning about the 57 genders is not on the docket at all. It is a constant, non-stop drilling of reading, writing, and arithmetic (with PE, science, history, foreign language, technology, art, music, and religion squeezed in).

A 2002 congressional study of child sex abuse in public schools found that children were abused at a rate one hundred times higher than the Catholic Church scandal. CBS News reported

Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft looked into the problem, and the first thing that came to her mind when Education Week reported on the study were the daily headlines about the Catholic Church. “[T]hink the Catholic Church has a problem?” she said. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”…[T]he federal report said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.

Perhaps an effort to #ExposePublicSchools should be made.

I am a graduate of Christian schooling. I started in kindergarten and went all the way through the beginning of my junior year, when I transferred to a public school. When I got to public school, I was shocked to learn I needed to be placed in honors classes. I was an average student in the private school, but in public school, I was at the head of the class because I had already learned what my fellow juniors were studying.

My experience in private school can only be described as idyllic. It was a Dutch Christian Reformed school filled with sincere, underpaid, but loving faculty in the suburbs of Chicago. My fifth-grade teacher was one of the most influential people I ever encountered. I had troubles with mean girls for a few years, and Mrs. W was always there to let me stay inside at recess with her and work on writing or drawing. She is the one who told me I had a talent for writing. I kept my folder with all of my fifth-grade writing, decorated with her hopeful words, that I still look at from time to time. It is because of her encouragement that I believed I could write. I’ve been doing it professionally now for over a decade, including writing books. 

Christian schooling gave me an appreciation for life, freedom, charity, and volunteerism. I don’t remember what history we studied and I don’t remember much of the minutiae of the work (except one extremely detailed and extensive leaf identification project for science that took up an entire summer of riding all over town with my friends on our bikes to collect weird and different leaves). But I do remember the overwhelming lesson that we were taught every day. Do unto others as you would have done unto you. It’s why I don’t respond in kind when people rudely insult my beliefs to my face by assuming I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, just like they do. It’s why I don’t scream at strangers wearing Bernie shirts. I was taught to smile and say nothing, just like Nick Sandmann.

That’s what Christian schooling is all about. The academics are excellent, but they are secondary. The highest goal of Christian education is to know God and make Him known. To value children with character, kindness, and tolerance over test scores. And oddly enough, when you put God first and care for one another’s souls as the highest priority, the grades go up.

But the most important thing about Christian schools is the freedom they give parents to choose what kind of education their children are given. Our Constitution gives us the right to religious freedom and that includes having our children taught by Christians and not godless, secular government agents. We have the right to association, which by definition means the right to not associate with the kind of programming happening in the public school system. We have the right to pursue happiness, too, which does not come in a one-size-fits-all sardine can of educational standards that are seriously flawed and failing everywhere you look.

For my family, I chose homeschooling and then Catholic school, where they get to hear the beauty of God’s word every day and meditate on whatever is pure, lovely, praiseworthy, and excellent. If your happiness lies in public school, then by all means, pursue it. But let’s agree to leave each other alone to be free to choose what’s right for our individual families. Because if you start messing with our religious freedom, it’s going to get ugly.

By all means, let’s #ExposeChristianSchools. The public schools might learn something.

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GRETA VAN SUSTEREN SUGGESTS FBI TIPPED OFF CNN BEFORE RAIDING ROGER STONE

Greta Van Susteren Suggests FBI Tipped Off CNN Before Raiding Roger Stone

Former Fox News host questions how news network obtained audio of FBI banging on Stone’s door

 | Infowars.com – JANUARY 25, 2019

RELATED: CNN Producer Admits He Was “Waiting” Outside Roger Stone’s House an Hour Before Arrest

Former Fox News host Greta Van Susteren suggested that the FBI could have tipped off CNN before the arrest of Roger Stone, after a dramatic video emerged which featured audio of FBI agents banging on Stone’s door.

Stone was arrested at 6am at his home in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla on a seven-count indictment which includes one count of obstruction, five counts of making false statements and one count of witness tampering.

Video of the raid was released by CNN as soon of news of the arrest emerged. It contains audio of an FBI agent shouting, “FBI open the door” while banging on the door.

Van Susteren immediately took to Twitter to claim that the FBI “obviously tipped off CNN”.

“CNN cameras were at the raid of Roger Stone…so FBI obviously tipped off CNN…even if you don’t like Stone, it is curious why Mueller’s office tipped off CNN instead of trying to quietly arrest Stone;quiet arrests are more likely to be safe to the FBI and the person arrested,” she tweeted.

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“Tipping CNN off so that it was there w/ its cameras is an issue worth exploring,” she added.

She later acknowledged that others could have tipped off the FBI, including Stone himself.

“Upon reflection, there are others who could have tipped off CNN …others knew, maybe even Stone suspected it and tipped them off…as an aside, if I worked for a news org and had the tip, I would have sent cameras,” tweeted Van Susteren.

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Stone will make an initial appearance later Friday at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. He has vowed not to testify against President Trump.

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WATCH AS OVER 100 ILLEGALS JUMP BORDER BEFORE GETTING ARRESTED

Watch As Over 100 Illegals Jump Border Before Getting Arrested

Customs and Border Patrol also apprehended around 375 migrants last week

Infowars.com – JANUARY 24, 2019

More than 100 illegal aliens were recorded jumping a border fence before being apprehended by federal authorities:

During the crossing, which happened near Yuma, Arizona, on Monday, the migrants climbed over a 18-foot, bollard-style border fence using a ladder you can see a smuggler running away with at the end of the video.

“It shows how brazen these smugglers are and the fact that they’re unafraid,” said Jose Garibay, the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector spokesman. “They know that we’re not gonna go into Mexico to apprehend them.”

“So once he puts up that ladder, gets his commodity — in which he looks at these humans — in the United States, then he takes down his ladder, and as you saw in the video, just walks back to wherever he hid the ladder and continues on with his day.”

“It’s presumable that this individual has done it more than once,” he added.

Last week, Customs and Border Patrol also apprehended around 375 migrants who dug short, shallow holes under barriers that were not concrete reinforced at several spots east of San Luis, Ariz., which is near Yuma.

“The area became a major corridor for illegal crossings in the mid-2000s, prompting the federal government to weld steel plates to a barrier made of steel bollards that had been designed to stop people in vehicles, not on foot, Border Patrol spokesman Jose Garibay III said,” reported KTLA. “In those spots, there is no concrete footing to prevent digging.”

The Democrats are pushing the narrative that securing the border should not be a priority. Alex Jones has a message for the president about using his authority to do the right thing.

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NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and Nathan Phillips Spread Fake News About His Vietnam Claims

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By John Nolte

NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and Nathan Phillips were both caught misleading Today Show viewers about how he has portrayed his service record Thursday morning.

Phillips is the left-wing American Indian activist who accosted a group of boys from Covington High School, a bunch of 16 year-olds in MAGA hats minding their own business waiting for a bus in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Using Phillips’s proven lies and selectively edited video, the establishment media have now spent six days smearing the boys as racist aggressors.

These lies continue, even after the full video proves they did nothing wrong. For the better part of an hour, the boys were taunted by a group of black nationalists hurling racist and homophobic slurs. The boys reacted with good humor and even sought a dialogue.

Phillips then made his way into the crowd of boys beating a drum. Again, the boys said and did nothing disrespectful. Still, the lies persist — and did so right up until Thursday morning when Savannah Guthrie said something provably false while interviewing Phillips.

“There has also been some question about the nature of your military service and this is a good chance to clear it up,” Guthrie said. “Some have said you were a Vietnam veteran, I don’t believe you have said that, what exactly is the nature of your service?” [emphasis mine]

“I don’t believe you have ever said that.”

Please.

Sorry, but there is no way on God’s green earth the mighty powers at NBC are not aware of video from January 3, 2018, where Phillips says exactly what Guthrie claims he never said — to wit: “I’m a Vietnam Vet.”

In fact, as you will see below, Phillips has falsely identified himself as a “Vietnam vet” — on video.

Not only does NBC have the resources to dig the videos up from the original Facebook page, but the videos are currently flying all over the Internet.

Let’s go to the videotape…

And last fall, he shared a photo of a medal inscribed with the words “Vietnam War Veteran.”

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In that video, Phillips appears to forget to use his customary phrasing: “Vietnam-times veteran,” a talking point so slippery that CNN and a Native American reporter — apparently hearing what they wanted to hear — errantly transcribed it as “Vietnam veteran.” In one 2015 interview, Phillips actually mixes up the word order, saying “As a Vietnam veteran times…”

Further, as Breitbart’s Kristina Wong reports, Phillips described himself as a “recon ranger” — a position that does not exist but sounds enough like a combat role. However, a service record document presented by retired Navy SEAL Don Shipley (a perennial investigator of stolen valor claims) indicates he was instead a refrigerator mechanic.

To recap:

Guthrie: “Some have said you were a Vietnam veteran, I don’t believe you have said that[.]”

Phillips last year: “I’m a Vietnam vet,” a “recon ranger.”

So what we have here is yet another example of NBC News deliberately misleading its viewers. This is all about protecting Phillips, all about not confronting him with his lies, which would have destroyed his credibility the moment Guthrie brought it up. After all, you can’t lynch the future of white, Christian boys who support Trump unless you protect the narrative.

Needless to say, while answering Guthrie, Phillips spread a falsehood… again.

“What I’ve always said is that I’ve never stepped foot in South Vietnam,” he told Guthrie with a straight face. “How much clearer can that be?” he added, with butter refusing to melt in his mouth.

Then Phillips said, “When I was discharged May 5th, 1976, I was told, ‘Don’t wear your uniform, don’t say you’re a veteran.’” [emphasis mine]

Phillips is also still standing by his false claim the boys chanted “Build the wall,” even though countless hours of videotape show no such thing.

This is NBC’s second round of shameless fake news in only two days. On Wednesday, NBC published a story that deliberately made it look as though Covington High School banned an openly gay student from giving a speech. Other than the fact the student did not, you know, attend Covington High School, the story was right on the money.

And all of these lies are coming off of NBC’s Chuck Todd dousing himself in rocket fuel and lighting up a road flare in tribute to BuzzFeed’s fake news fiasco from last week.

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NY TIMES RUNS DEFENSE FOR BLACK ANTI-SEMITIC HATE GROUP

NY Times Runs Defense For Black Anti-Semitic Hate Group

Allows members to justify their vile, racist abuse as “tough love”

Paul Joseph Watson | Infowars.com – JANUARY 24, 2019

The New York Times is running defense for the Black Israelites, the anti-Semitic hate group that abused the Covington High School students.

In an article entitled Hebrew Israelites See Divine Intervention in Lincoln Memorial Confrontation, the paper completely ignores the fact that the group called the Covington kids “white crackers,” “faggots,” incest kids” while also labeling them future school shooters and telling an African-American student that they would harvest his organs.

Instead, the piece, written by John Eligon, presents a sympathetic picture of the group, allowing one of its members to characterize what they do as “tough love”.

In reality, in addition to the racist and homophobic slurs the group was caught on camera hurling at children, members are known to hold overtly disgusting views.

Even the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center lists the organization as a hate group, warning that members “believe that Jews are devilish impostors and … openly condemn whites as evil personified, deserving only death or slavery.”

Despite the odious nature of the group, the NY Times piece gives them a cultural cache by noting that they were “name-checked by Kendrick Lamar in a rap called “Yah”.

The article also serves as a platform for the group to justify their actions, with several members quoted at length without being challenged.

One wonders whether a white supremacist group would have been treated with such kid gloves.

National Journal editor Josh Kraushaar denounced the article in a series of tweets, arguing that “the Black Israelites get a more sympathetic hearing than the Covington High students.”

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“*Some say* they’re a hate group, but they’re also name-checked by a rapper. let’s call the whole thing off,” joked Kraushaar.

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Kenton County Prosecutor: We’ve Already Issued Subpoenas and Search Warrants against Online Abusers of Covington School Children (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft

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Rob Sanders, the Kenton County, Kentucky prosecutor told Laura Ingrahamthe investigations against the terroristic threats against the Covington High School children is ALREADY UNDER WAY!

On Tuesday Sanders said multiple investigations were already underway.

Sanders said he has had investigators inside of his office all day.

Rob Sanders: When it comes to the offenses that rise to the felony level we can extradite. Now it’s not as easy as arresting a Twitter handle we can’t just reach out and arrest someone, half the time they’re using a fake name, fake profile picture, that sort of thing. We have to go through the process of issuing subpoenas, search warrants… It’s already underway. I’ve had detectives in and out of my office all day today.

Via The Ingraham Angle:

 

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