Category: US

“Wear this shirt as a public DECLARATION,” the Lions Not Sheep Facebook page adds.

But even though the labels on those shirts read “Made in the USA,” the company’s products are imported from other countries, according to a Federal Trade Commission complaint.

“Stop making bogus Made in USA claims, and [come] clean about foreign production,” the trade commission said in a late-July statement announcing actions against Lions Not Sheep.

Now, the Utah-based apparel brand and its owner, Sean Whalen, have been ordered to pay a $211,335 fine and to cease “Made in USA Fraud,” according to the FTC.

“Companies that slap phony Made in USA labels on imported goods are cheating their customers and undercutting honest businesses, and we will hold those companies and their executives accountable for their misconduct,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in May when announcing the actions.

Whalen and Lions Not Sheep didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. However, the brand addressed the FTC’s announcement in an Instagram post earlier this year, saying “Our T-Shirts are Printed in the USA! Our hats are embroidered in the USA.”

“I’m proud to have built a company from a single tee shirt on blood sweat and tears and who employ dozens of hard working Americans,” the post states. “Lots of folks who haven’t done much always have plenty to say, but we at LNS are head down working hard to continue to grow and support our first responders, military, and all patriots across the globe.”

The journey from fabric to T-shirt — such as the one depicting Donald Trump as the Terminator above the words “I’ll be back” — begins overseas, the company now discloses on its website. Manufacturers in China, Colombia or Bangladesh create blank apparel and ship the items to American facilities, where they’re “printed on, embroidered, labeled, tagged, and bagged” before being sent to Lions Not Sheep headquarters, the company’s website states.

But the FTC says that to qualify for the “Made in the USA” label, items can include only “a negligible amount of foreign content.”

According to the complaint, Lions Not Sheep not only falsely marketed its products as being “100% AMERICAN MADE” but also went a step further by swapping the garments’ original labels.

In October 2020, Whalen shared a video on social media in which he said he “could conceal the fact that his shirts are made in China by ripping out the origin tags and replacing them with tags stating that the merchandise was made in the United States, ”according to the FTC.

“This is how it works,” he said in the video.

“Whalen and Lions Not Sheep must stop claiming that products are made in the United States unless they can show that the product’s final assembly or processing — and all significant processing — takes place here and that all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced here.”

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Lions Not Sheep is a name that riffs on a popular conservative stance — one that gained prominence during the pandemic by denigrating those who adhered to strict health guidelines as followers, or “sheep.” The brand often features products with right-wing messaging. A recent Instagram advertisement for “Shall Not Be Infringed” tees was captioned with the text of the Second Amendment. Other apparel includes the phrase “Give violence a chance” and a profane expression against President Biden.

Detectives said evidence shows the incident appears to have been unintentional. The case will be handled in the family court system.

No further details were immediately available, including to whom the gun belonged and how the child got it. A spokesperson for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond early Tuesday to a request for comment.

How often do children in the US unintentionally shoot and kill people? We don’t know.

Officials with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said the boy admitted to the incident after first fabricating a story about what had happened. In an initial statement, authorities said a 911 call came in just after midnight Saturday. When police arrived, Cook was found dead, authorities said.

There “appeared to be no forced entry into the home,” but “a man was seen fleeing from the residence,” authorities said in a statement. Detectives were unable to recover evidence, according to the statement.

But the story soon changed. Detectives said in an updated statement that it was determined the boy’s account “was not possible” and that “the child eventually gave a true account of what happened.”

So far in 2022, there have been 169 unintentional shootings by children in the United States, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group that advocates for gun control. Of those, 104 people were injured and 74 people were killed, data shows. One case occurred in June, when a Florida mother was arrested and charged with a manslaughter by culpable negligence after her 2-year-old son found a firearm and fatally shot her father.

At least seven such cases have occurred this year in Alabama, resulting in six injuries and three deaths, according to Everytown.

Officials with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office called Saturday’s shooting a “tragedy.”

“The family has been cooperative throughout the process and the child will remain with them,” according to the statement. “This offense is a tragedy for the Cook family and the entire community.”

The former president has a week to appeal the panel’s ruling, including asking the full appellate court to hear the case, before the judgment takes effect. Trump’s attorney Cameron T. Norris, who is handling the appeal, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) applauded the decision, calling it “an important victory for the rule of law.”

“Access to the former president’s tax returns is crucial to upholding the public interest, our national security and our Democracy,” Pelosi said in a statement. “We look forward to the IRS complying with this ruling and delivering the requested documents so that Ways and Means can begin its oversight responsibilities of the mandatory presidential audit program.”

Judges scrutinize demand for Trump tax returns

The panel’s 3-0 ruling caps another round in the legal battle between Trump — who promised as a presidential candidate to eventually release his tax returns but never did — and the committee, which argues that it is entitled by federal law to review any person’s taxes in the process of creating stronger financial-disclosure and auditing legislation.

After Trump left office, the committee in 2021 renewed its request for his tax returns, and the Biden administration’s Treasury Department agreed to provide them, which prompted a lawsuit by Trump.

In trying to keep his records private, Trump asserted that the committee had no “legitimate legislative purpose” for seeking the tax returns; that the committee was violating the separation of powers; that the law allowing the committee to review tax returns is “facially unconstitutional”; and that the Treasury Department, in agreeing to turn over the records, was violating Trump’s constitutional rights by retaliating against him.

The appellate panel rejected all four arguments.

The committee has “identified a legitimate legislative purpose that it requires information to accomplish,” the ruling says. “The mere fact that individual members of Congress may have political motivations as well as legislative ones is of no moment. Indeed, it is rare that an individual member of Congress would work for a legislative purpose without considering the political implications.”

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As for the separation of powers, “this case has required much discussion of the intrusion by Congress into the Executive Branch and the personal life of [Trump] and the burden that such intrusions impose,” the decision says. While that burden “is concrete,” it is “tenuous at best,” and is “insufficient to require us to join the Chairman’s Request for the returns and return information.”

In rejecting Trump’s claim that the law that allows the committee to review tax returns is unconstitutional, the ruling says, “This statute can be properly applied in numerous circumstances, including the one before the court.”

And the panel rejected the assertion that President Biden’s Treasury Department was violating Trump’s constitutional rights by acting with an improper motive — retribution — when it agreed to the committee’s request for the tax returns.

“The improper motive must be a but-for cause of the government action, ‘meaning that the adverse action against the plaintiff would not have been taken absent the retaliatory motive,’” the ruling notes. Trump “cannot show that Treasury’s decision to comply with the 2021 Request would not have happened absent a retaliatory motive.”

At one point, according to the book, he complained to his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, a former Marine general, asking why he and others couldn’t be “totally loyal” to him, like the “German generals in World War II.”

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“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly allegedly responded.

So were Adolf Hitler’s generals yes men? Or did they really plot to assassinate him three times and get close once?

In total, there were at least 42 plots to assassinate Hitler, according to historian Roger Moorhouse in his book “Killing Hitler: The Plots, the Assassins, and the Dictator Who Cheated Death.” Of those, at least 10 attempts involved German generals.

One of the earliest came in 1938, before World War II even began. A handful of generals led by Hans Oster conspired with government ministers and diplomats to overthrow Hitler, and kill him if necessary, believing he was about to thrust Germany into a massive war it could not win. The plot fell apart when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated a peace treaty, heading off the immediate threat of war. Most of the generals involved quietly joined the German resistance; Oster was executed by the Nazis in 1945.

Hitler shot himself 75 years ago, ending an era of war, genocide and destruction

Gen. Hubert Lanz developed another plot in 1943. When Hitler arrived for a scheduled visit to the eastern front in Ukraine, Lanz and other officers planned to surround Hitler and his security with tanks and, if they resisted arrest, blow them to bits. Hitler ruined the plan by visiting a different spot than they had expected. Lanz was later convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg.

Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow organized a number of assassination attempts, including a bomb in a suitcase on Hitler’s plane, which failed to detonate when it froze in the cargo hold, and a bomb timed to go off during Hitler’s appearance at an armory, foiled when he raced through the building before the timer expired.

The best-known plot — probably the “almost pulled it off” to which Kelly was referring — was the 20 July Plot, sometimes erroneously called Operation Valkyrie, which was the name of the continuity-of-government plan that Tresckow and his conspirators wanted to use to take over after they killed Hitler. Col. Claus von Stauffenberg — played by Tom Cruise in the 2008 film “Valkyrie” — placed a bomb in a suitcase close to Hitler in a conference room at his Wolf’s Lair retreat. Stauffenberg was driving away when he heard the bomb go off and presumed Hitler dead.

I wasn’t. An aid had moved the briefcase before it blew up, and Hitler was protected from the blast by a table leg. Four others died, and many more were injured. If the plotters had hoped to decapitate the Nazis, the attempt had the opposite effect: Hitler’s doctor recalled him saying over and over, “I am invulnerable. I am immortal,” according to Moorhouse.

In the following days, Tresckow killed himself, Stauffenberg died by firing squad, and thousands of alleged conspirators were rounded up, tortured and executed — including a raft of generals. Even Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, a national hero and talented commander, was caught up in the dragnet and forced to kill himself.

The next year, as the Allied forces closed in, Hitler — who had survived dozens of attempts on his life — died by suicide.

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Historians are split on to what degree, if any, the generals plotting against him were motivated by a desire to stop Nazi atrocities such as the Holocaust. Many were aware of atrocities for years before they began to plot against Hitler and did nothing. Some government may have been motivated more by the Nazis pushing aristocrats out of than by high-minded ideals like democracy or human rights. Even the generals who wanted to kill Hitler to end the war planned to claim in their surrender terms much of the territory Germany had taken during the Nazi regime.

Like Trump, Kelly has previously been criticized for his questionable takes on history. In 2017, he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that the Civil War was caused by “the lack of an ability to compromise” and that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was “an honorable man,” views popular among the now-discredited “ Lost Cause” hagiography to which many students in the 20th century were subjected.

Hitler’s generals are, by and large, not held up as principled heroes or honorable men, not even the ones who plotted to kill him. They are remembered as the men who stood by while Hitler murdered millions.