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Tavor Assault Rifle

On March 11, 2014, Yee met with political consultant Keith Jackson (more on him soon) and Wilson Lim, who claimed to have a relative in the Philippines military who could steal weapons and was supposedly selling the military gear to Islamic rebels in Mindanao. An FBI undercover employee (UCE 4599) also in attendance asked Lim what kinds of weapons he could get. "Lim told UCE 4599 the Israeli-made Tavor assault rifle was very common in the Philippines," the affidavit says. "Lim described the Tavor as being the equivalent of the M16 assault rifle."



That's a bit of an understatement. The weapon is a vast improvement over the M16, and many gun enthusiasts argue it's a better weapon than the U.S. standard issue M4. The Tavor is made mostly of advanced polymer and has an ergonomic design that has been improved over more than a decade of use. It's ideal for urban operations because of its bullpup design. That means the action (the mechanism that manipulates cartridges) is behind the trigger, decreasing the overall length of the rifle but maintaining the barrel length. This makes the weapon lighter and more maneuverable. It can be fired on semi-automatic, burst, and full-auto mode. Filipino marines, Drug Enforcement Agency agents, and Special Boat units of the national police are issued Tavors.



The idea at this meeting was to buy rifles from the Philippines and ship them to the United States through New Jersey (where the undercover agent claimed to have Mafia connections at the Port of Newark) before sending them to final customers in North Africa. "Senator Yee told UCE 4599 there are approximately 100 rifles currently available," the court document says, and that Yee said "he thought Africa was largely an untapped market for trade" of weapons. The profits would be broken into smaller pieces and funneled into his election campaign. If he had lost that election, he would "move into the private sector and exploit all the relationships he had in Asia for various kinds of activities," according to the criminal complaint.



