RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 5 to March 11, 2023 In February 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his boss at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, were told by respected researchers that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in China. Emails uncovered by House Republicans suggest Fauci quickly sprang into action, prompting and approving just four days later a scientific paper that aimed to discredit the lab leak theory. A few weeks later, this article by Miranda Devine reports: Fauci stood at a White House press conference alongside President Donald Trump and cited that paper as evidence that the lab leak theory was implausible while pretending it had nothing to do with him and he did not know the authors. “There was a study recently,” he told reporters on April 17, 2020, when asked if the virus could have come from a Chinese lab, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences … in bats as they evolve and the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human. “So, the paper will be available. I don’t have the authors right now, but we can make it available to you.” Fauci’s effort, which some have ascribed to a desire to blunt the fallout from U.S. government support for work at the Wuhan lab tied to COVID, has been undermined recently as the U.S. Department of Energy endorsed the lab leak theory. In a separate article, Fox News documents how the New York Times used its influence to delegitimize the lab leak theory in 2020 by casting it as an “unsubstantiated theory” ginned up by the Trump administration. It reports: “The Times’ reporter even compared Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo supporting the lab leak theory to former President George W. Bush claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” In a separate article, the London Telegraph reports emails and texts among British leaders suggesting that they sought to ramp up fear of the virus to coerce citizens to submit to lockdowns: [Health Secretary] Matt Hancock wanted to "deploy" a new Covid variant to ‘frighten the pants off’ the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed. … In another message Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that "the fear guilt factor" was "vital" in "ramping up the messaging" during the third national lockdown in Jan 2021. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Biden, Trump and the Beltway Many Democrats and Republicans attacked Tucker Carlson last week for airing what they described as misleading footage regarding the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol – including the claim that the FBI might have had undercover agents in the crowd. But, this article reports, the FBI has suggested that they not only had confidential sources on the ground that day but that some of them might have entered the Capitol. This article reports that FBI’s Washington Field Office requested that the Boston Field Office open investigations into 140 individuals who took buses from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan. 6., but denied Boston’s request to see video proving those individuals were inside the Capitol, according to FBI whistleblower George Hill. When a Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) in Boston ... ... asked to see where they were inside the Capitol, the WFO declined to show the footage unless they knew “the exact time and place those individuals were inside the Capitol.”
“Why can’t you [give us access] to the 11,000 hours of video that’s available?” the SSA asked. The WFO responded that there “may be” undercover officers or confidential human sources “on those videos whose identity we need to protect,” according to Hill, who said he heard the conversation firsthand. In its chaotic retreat from Afghanistan, the Biden administration left behind at least $7.2 billion worth of vehicles and weapons that have now fallen into the hands of its Taliban rulers, according to a report from the government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). "At least 78 aircraft worth $923.3 million, 9,524 air-to-ground munitions valued at $6.54 million, over 40,000 vehicles, more than 300,000 weapons, and nearly all night vision, surveillance, communications, and biometric equipment provided to the [Afghan defense forces] were left behind," according to information disclosed in SIGAR’s report. … The Pentagon told SIGAR investigators that there "currently is no realistic way to retrieve the materiel that remains in Afghanistan, given that the United States does not recognize the Taliban as a government," according to the report. Taliban units now "patrol in pickup trucks and armored vehicles likely procured by the U.S.," according to the report. Taliban-run special operations forces also "wear helmets with night vision mounts likely provided by the United States, and carry U.S.-provided M4 rifles equipped with advanced gunsights." The terrorist group also is using "more advanced U.S.-provided equipment," such as armored vehicles and Mi-17 helicopters. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The FBI is defining broad swaths of people – including parents, Catholics who attend Latin Mass and pro-life activists – as potential domestic terrorists, according to bureau whistleblowers. This article reports the effort is part of a “growing trend of using intelligence threat tags to enforce cancel culture”: In testimony released [by House Republicans] this weekend, FBI whistleblower Garret O'Boyle told congressional investigators the bureau issued guidance following the Dobbs abortion decision that overturned Roe v. Wade so agents could "look into ... pregnancy centers" using the tag "THREATTOSCOTUS2022." O'Boyle found this strange, he testified, because it was pro-choice activists who were "protesting or otherwise threatening violence in front of Supreme Court Justices' houses." … The revelation came months after confirmation that similar threat tags were reserved for parents raising concerns about curriculum at school board meetings and the disclosure of an FBI memo suggesting Catholics who prefer the legacy Latin Mass posed a risk of extremist violence. Employees of the Department of Homeland Security have long feared that they were breaking the law as they gathered intelligence on American soil, according to documents reviewed by Politico. Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails, and federal prison. DHS’s intelligence professionals have to say they’re conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they’re allowed to go directly to incarcerated people ‒ circumventing their lawyers ‒ raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts. … One unnamed employee ‒ quoted in an April 2021 document ‒ said leadership of I&A’s Office of Regional Intelligence “is ‘shady’ and ‘runs like a corrupt government.’” Another document said some employees worried so much about the legality of their activities that they wanted their employer to cover legal liability insurance. In an effort to identify priests who are breaking their vows of celibacy, a Colorado Catholic group spent at least $4 million buying tracking data from gay dating and hookup apps and sharing its findings with bishops around the nation. This article reports that Catholic Laity and Clergy for Renewal ... ... obtained data that spans 2018 through 2021 for multiple dating and hookup apps including Grindr, Scruff, Growlr and Jack’d, all used by gay men, as well as OkCupid, a major site for people of various sexualities. … Some of the men who are part of the Renewal project were also involved in the July 2021 outing of a prominent priest, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, according to the two people with firsthand knowledge of the project and comments by the group’s president on the audio recording. Burrill, who declined to comment for this story, resigned from his post as the top administrator at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) after a Catholic news site, the Pillar, said it had mobile app data showing he was a regular on Grindr and had gone to a gay bar and a gay bathhouse and spa. The Pillar did not say where its data came from. The article also reports that “the use of data is emblematic of a new surveillance frontier in which private individuals can potentially track other Americans’ locations and activities using commercially available information. No U.S. data privacy laws prohibit the sale of this data.” Gang culture pervades the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department as officers of the law divide themselves into distinct cliques that can require acts of violence against the public as demonstrations of loyalty. This article reports on a recent internal report that found members of numerous active gangs and cliques within the sheriff’s department ‒ including the Executioners, the Banditos, the Regulators, the Spartans, the Gladiators, the Cowboys, and the Reapers: These groups pose a threat to the general public ‒ deputies hoping to prove themselves worthy of gang membership routinely seek out violent encounters with the public, the investigation reports ‒ as well as to the internal command-and-control structure of LASD. The gangs “undermine supervision, destroy public trust, are discriminatory, disruptive, and act contrary to … professional policing,” the report concludes. Perhaps most alarming, the investigation reveals that in recent years “tattooed deputy gang members” have risen to “the highest levels” of department leadership. It calls out recent former Sheriff Alex Villanueva (who lost his 2022 reelection bid) for betraying promises of reform by installing gang members as his right-hand men. Villanueva, the report says, “at minimum tolerated, if not rewarded deputy gangs.” The article reports that these cliques, which do not appear to be connected to criminal gangs outside the department, have been a problem at least since the early 1970s: A landmark report by the Kolts Commission, issued in the wake of the Rodney King beating, denounced the problem of deputy cliques publicly in 1992. A 2021 report commissioned by L.A. County underscored that deputy-gangs had cost taxpayers at least $55 million in court judgments and settlements, and it excoriated leadership that "can’t or won’t" implement gang reforms. |
