Free Republic

In addition to those Republican lawmakers who have announced – motivated, it seems, by disrespect — that they will decline to attend President Obama’s Thursday night jobs address to a joint session of Congress, Republicans are also taking the additional step of inviting a man whose company the Obama administration is investigating for possibly breaking the law. Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitar Corp., will either sit in the House Gallery as the guest of his member of Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. (members of Congress each get to invite one guest to sit in that balcony), or he...

Sources tell National Review Online that Gibson’s chairman and chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz, will attend President Obama’s joint address to Congress on Thursday. Federal agents recently raided Gibson’s manufacturing facilities, suspecting that the company was using illegally-imported wood. Juszkiewicz has vocally defended Gibson’s practices and denied the allegations. “There’s no doubt we’re being persecuted,” he said in an interview with the Tennessean. “But while I was sitting in my conference room, while agents blocked the door to my office, I decided two things. One, we were going to try and fight this in court. Secondly, we were going to give...

Gibson Guitar Corp. is claiming the Obama administration wants more of its woodwork done overseas, as a bizarre battle heats up between the government and one of the country's most renowned guitar makers. The dispute started in 2009, when federal agents raided the company over suspect wood shipments from Madagascar. Gibson took that case to court but has denounced the administration with a vengeance after agents returned late last month to raid several Gibson factories -- this time out of concern that Indian export laws had been violated. In an interview earlier this week, CEO Henry Juszkiewicz claimed that the...

The Gibson Guitar saga has taken a sinister turn. It seems that the Department of Justice wasn’t satisfied with merely raiding the law abiding factories of Gibson Guitar with armed agents, shutting down their operation costing them millions, and leaving the American company in the dark as to how to proceed without going out of business. Now, according to CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, agents of the United States government are bluntly informing them that they’d be better off shipping their manufacturing labor overseas. In an interview with KMJ AM’s “The Chris Daniel Show,” Juszkiewicz revealed some startling information. CHRIS DANIEL: Mr....

KMJ's own Chris Daniel is stirring the national pot today. On his show last night, Chris interviewed Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of the iconic Gibson Guitar Company. The federal government seized wood, guitars and electronic records from Gibson's Nashville warehouses in 2009, and, according to Juszkiewicz, made an unusual request from the American manufacturer. On KMJ airwaves, Juszkiewicz revealed that representatives of the US government told Gibson that their legal issues would disappear if they used Madagascar labor instead of American labor.

Last week, Gibson Guitar made the news as armed agents of the Division of Fish and Wildlife raided its factories in Tennessee. The gist of the federal complaint is that Gibson may have violated the laws of Madagascar and India by importing only partially finished guitar components and then further processing the materials with US labor. The 'may' qualifier refers to the fact that the multi-year investigation has yielded no charges whatsoever against Gibson. Whatever the specious merits of the government's investigation, the broader lesson is that federal regulatory authority is so expansive and vague, it enables corrupt bureaucrats to...

Already we have watched the Obama regime drop a criminal conviction of Black Panthers violating the voting rights act, rescue and repair vessels being detained by the Coast Guard en-route to the Gulf oil spill and the Obama appointed NLRB preventing Boeing from opening its new production facility in South Carolina. Last Wednesday, DOJ enforcers, under command of capo Eric Holder, raider[sic] the Gibson Guitar company facilities in Nashville and Memphis.

Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson Guitars, Inc. was on The Dana Loesch Show on Friday. Gibson is under attack by the the Obama Justice Department for accusations that the company broke American Indian laws. Juszkiewiz said the government suggested that the company's use of unfinished wood from India is illegal, not because of U.S. law, but because of the Justice Department's interpretation of a law in India. The Holder Justice Department raided at least two Gibson manufacturing plants this week forcing hundreds of workers off their jobs. Juszkiewiz says the company lost a million dollars this week. Finally, Henry...

Federal agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service shut down the Gibson Guitar factory in Downtown Memphis today to serve search warrants in an ongoing investigation, officials said. Nicholas Chavez, special agent in charge for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Region 2 in Albuquerque, N.M., said agents also served a search warrant on Gibson Guitar in Nashville. In November 2009, agents for the service searched the guitar maker's manufacturing plant in Nashville, reportedly during an investigation of use of woods banned from commercial use for environmental reasons.