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Fakes and the faking fakers….

The painting Donald Trump once claimed was an original is a fake. The real Two Sisters (On The Terrace) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir has hung in the Chicago Institute of Art since 1933.

Just going to drop this here about the FBI’s Brett Kavanaugh investigation in which neither Christine Blasey Ford nor Kavanaugh himself were interviewed about her assault allegations:

The FBI is facing new scrutiny for its 2018 background check of Brett Kavanaugh, the supreme court justice, after a lawmaker suggested that the investigation may have been “fake”.

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator and former prosecutor who serves on the judiciary committee, is calling on the newly-confirmed attorney general, Merrick Garland, to help facilitate “proper oversight” by the Senate into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing.

[…]

Among the concerns listed in Whitehouse’s letter to Garland are allegations that some witnesses who wanted to share their accounts with the FBI could not find anyone at the bureau who would accept their testimony and that it had not assigned any individual to accept or gather evidence.

“This was unique behavior in my experience, as the Bureau is usually amenable to information and evidence; but in this matter the shutters were closed, the drawbridge drawn up, and there was no point of entry by which members of the public or Congress could provide information to the FBI,” Whitehouse said.

Not even a “round up the usual suspects” from the Trump administration’s FBI. Neither did the FBI nor the DOJ respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

More poseury (via The Trace):

Federal lobbying disclosures reveal that Palmetto State Armory, a burgeoning South Carolina firearms manufacturer with a record of using rhetoric and imagery popular in anti-government circles, retained Washington, D.C., lobbyist Craig Metz of the firm Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough last December. The move came only months after the company began selling products emblazoned with imagery associated with the “boogaloo” — which is slang for a war to topple the federal government, something adherents prepare for, and in some cases seek to accelerate. 

Palmetto State Armory was one of three dozen dealers of firearms, ammunition, and tactical supplies that an investigation by The Trace identified as using boogaloo-related rhetoric and imagery in their marketing and products. In February 2020, Palmetto produced and sold a limited edition AK-47-style pistol with a custom, “Big Igloo Aloha” Hawaiian-print paint job. The cheery floral pattern of the Hawaiian shirt is the unofficial uniform of pro-boogaloo accelerationists, and it frequently adorns irony-laden memes shared by supporters online. A month later, the company began offering T-shirts featuring a cartoon caricature of an armed, Hawaiian shirt-clad man guarding a pile of toilet paper rolls. The shirts are still available on its website, though the pistol is not.

Metz declined an interview request. Palmetto Armory once sold a run of AR-15 lower receivers “inscribed with ‘You Lie,’ the words shouted by U.S. Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina at President Barack Obama during a 2009 congressional address.”

Talk out of both sides of your barrels much?

(h/t JH)

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