Gianforte Wins Anyway: Today's News for May 26th

Fox News: 

Gianforte wins: Montana House candidate facing assault charge wins special election

Republican Greg Gianforte won Montana’s special election Thursday despite being charged with assaulting a reporter just hours before polls opened across the state.

What was funny about this story was how the media was already chalking up a Democratic Party victory in this after Gianforte beat up a reporter. They forget that Republican voters tend to dislike the media. It takes more than a bodyslammed reporter to get Republicans to consider voting for a progressive socialist with a "D" after his name.

On another point, how does the Left-leaning media compare in their coverage of this story?

CNN:

Republican Greg Gianforte wins Montana special election, CNN projects

Republican Greg Gianforte has won the special election for Montana's open US House seat, CNN projects, defeating Democrat Rob Quist and capping off a whirlwind final 36 hours of the campaign that saw Gianforte being charged for allegedly assaulting a reporter.

There isn't any significant difference between the two stories, Right or Left, in the headlines or the first paragraphs. But the second and third paragraphs start to show the bias.

Fox's second and third paragraphs:

With 84 percent of precincts reporting, Greg Gianforte led Democrat Rob Quist by more than 24,000 votes out of nearly 270,000 ballots cast.

Gianforte said in his victory speech late Thursday that his victory is a victory for all Montana. He also used the platform to apologize to the reporter he allegedly assaulted on election eve and a Fox News team that witnessed the encounter.

CNN:

In his acceptance speech, Gianforte apologized by name to Ben Jacobs, the Guardian reporter who accused the Republican of "body-slamming" him and breaking his glasses.

"When you make a mistake, you have to own up to it," Gianforte told his supporters at his Election Night rally in Bozeman. "That's the Montana way."

Notice how CNN is pushing the violence of the story as early as possible, whereas Fox is avoiding describing the violence of what happened. In fact, nowhere in the Fox story is the incident described, even though their reporters actually witnessed it.

In other news...

Circa:

Declassified memos show FBI illegally shared spy data on Americans with private parties

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances about how carefully it handles warrantless spy data to avoid abuses or leaks.

...Once-top secret U.S. intelligence community memos reviewed by Circa tell a different story, citing instances of “disregard” for rules, inadequate training and “deficient” oversight and even one case of deliberately sharing spy data with a forbidden party.

For instance, a ruling declassified this month by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) chronicles nearly 10 pages listing hundreds of violations of the FBI’s privacy-protecting minimization rules that occurred...

The behavior the FBI admitted to a FISA judge just last month ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight the bureau promised was in place years ago.

The court also opined aloud that it fears the violations are more extensive than already disclosed.

“The Court is nonetheless concerned about the FBI’s apparent disregard of minimization rules and whether the FBI is engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that have not been reported,” the April 2017 ruling declared.

The FBI normally is forbidden from surveilling an American without a warrant. But Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Act, last updated by Congress in 2008,  allowed the NSA to share with the FBI spy data collected without a warrant that includes the communications of Americans with “foreign targets.”

The problem with the FSA is it violates the Constitution's 4th Amendment, which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

"Good intentions" by law enforcement are not valid reasons to allow Constitutional violations. The worst part about FSA is that violations can occur without Americans ever knowing.

Continuing:

...by early 2017, the court became more concerned after the Obama administration disclosed significant violations of privacy protections at two separate intelligence agencies involved in the Section 702 program.

The most serious involved the NSA searching for American data it was forbidden to search. But the FBI also was forced to admit its agents and analysts shared espionage data with prohibited third parties, ranging from a federal contractor to a private entity that did not have the legal right to see the intelligence.

Laws like FSA remove the essence of American freedom, which does the terrorists' work for them.