RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 27 to April 2, 2022 In seeking confirmation to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson has struggled to fend off charges she is soft on crime – and small wonder, Paul Sperry’s reporting shows. Unpacking her record in-depth for RealClearInvestigations, Sperry finds much evidence that Jackson – as a lawyer, sentencing commissioner or judge – has disregarded the warnings or recommendations of prosecutors and investigators while advocating for, or easing punishment for, not just drug dealers but also pedophiles and even terrorists: Drug Dealers: With race-based compassion, Jackson was vastly influential in slashing federal sentences for the full array of drug offenses – not just crack. All told, more than 31,000 traffickers were freed in a historic prisoner release. And cops and communities are dealing with a surge of repeat crime. Child Porn Offenders: Jackson has stated that she did not “necessarily" view them as pedophiles; and has found federal sentencing guidelines “severe” and "outdated," reasoning that there’s easier access to porn on the Internet nowadays. As a D.C. judge, she has under-sentenced defendants in every case she could. Accused Terrorists: Jackson has gone beyond her assigned work as a public defender to advocate for Guantanamo detainees, whom she calls victims of U.S. “war crimes.” Strikingly, Jackson omitted the full extent of her defense of Gitmo detainees from her Senate questionnaire: She represented not just one, as she claimed, but four, according to documents reviewed by RCI. Senate Republicans say Democrats are withholding tens of thousands of documents to insure Jackson’s confirmation in the coming days. The Biden administration has allowed an eleven-fold increase in illegal immigrant offenders let out of Texas prisons and into the general U.S. population, despite federal law requiring ICE to take convicts into custody after serving their time, usually in advance of deportation. Reporting for RealClearInvestigations, James Varney gleaned that news from state-initiated litigation that is beginning to shed light on what alarmed critics call the administration's secretive and lenient handling of immigrant criminals. Varney reports: Soon after President Biden assumed office, ICE agents began dropping automatic requests to take custody from Texas of illegal alien convicts set to be released from the state's prisons, so they could be deported. From January 2021 to February of this year, Texas officials testified in a lawsuit last month, ICE declined to take custody of 141, an exponential increase over the Trump years. Released offenders are free in the U.S. “We don't know where they're at," a Texas lawman said. Arizona, Ohio and Montana are pursuing a similar lawsuit in Ohio. Last week the judge issued a preliminary injunction favoring the three states: "Can the Executive displace clear congressional command in the name of resource allocation and enforcement goals? Here, the answer is no." Attorney General Jeff Landry of Louisiana, which has joined Texas in its suit: “I’m appalled the Biden administration has adopted a policy of releasing alien drug cartel members, human traffickers and child sex abusers onto American streets." In the wake of New York Times and Washington Post admissions that Hunter Biden’s laptop is legitimate and that the Justice Department is continuing to investigate his financial dealings, other questionable aspects of the first son’s business arrangements are coming to light. This article reports that Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin released receipts showing that the energy company CEFC, which they described as “an arm of the Chinese Government,” paid Wells Fargo Clearing Services $100,000 and designated “further credit” to one of Hunter’s firms. “There’s no middle man in this transaction. This is $100,000 from what is effectively an arm of the communist Chinese government direct to Hunter Biden,” Grassley said on the Senate floor on Monday. “To the liberal media and my Democratic colleagues: Is this official bank document Russian disinformation?” The Federalist also reports that Grassley and Johnson had previously established that Hunter was financially involved with Chinese Communist Party oligarchs such as Gongwen Dong, Mervyn Yan and “spy chief” Patrick Ho (the Washington Post provides more details about this in its piece). In a separate article, the Daily Mail reports that emails on Hunter’s laptop reveal that he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor that did work in Ukraine and which specializes in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons. Hunter also introduced Metabiota officials to Burisma, an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm on whose board he served,for a 'science project' involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Although lead poisoning has decreased substantially since the late 1970s as a result of regulatory actions and public health initiatives, about 500,000 children under 6 have elevated blood lead levels in the United States and are at risk of harm. This article reports that a decades-long campaign by the real estate and insurance industries to shield themselves from liability in lead-poisoning cases has helped allow what is often considered a problem of the past to remain a silent epidemic today. With little public attention and the approval of state officials, insurance companies across the country excluded lead from their policies, declining to pay out when children were poisoned on properties they covered, according to interviews with health and housing officials, regulators and lawyers who represented children and their families. The move also eased pressure on landlords to fix up their rentals. Without insurance, there is little chance of recovering money for a child when a landlord has few resources. Property owners who do have substantial holdings have found ways to legally distance themselves from problem rentals, increasingly using L.L.C.s to hide assets and identities. While this article is a well-deserved victory lap, it also displays bizarre and divisive bias. It reports that an inspector general probe into the U.S. Postal Service surveillance program prompted by earlier Yahoo News reporting concluded that the agency did not have the legal authority to conduct the sweeping intelligence collection and surveillance of American protesters and others between 2018 and 2021. Under the iCOP surveillance program, analysts trawled the web looking for “inflammatory” posts about protests. Yahoo’s original reporting made clear that his effort swept up a board series of actors – including those contesting the 2020 election and mask mandates. But the article only mentions one target, Black Lives Matters protesters. The 26-page report concluded that the post office did not have the legal authority to compile reports on Americans involved in Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the nation. The report also found across-the-board violations of statutory and legal authority ranging from lack of legal authority to noncompliance with federal records retention to use of facial recognition software. It also said there was no record-keeping policy or procedures in place to make sure the work was legal. The clear implication is that the program was racist when Yahoo’s own reporting makes clear that it was not. As he has emerged as a key stumbling block to President Biden’s agenda on climate and other matters, Sen. Joe Manchin has come under the microscope. This article states up front that voters and ethicists have long known that Manchin owns a coal business in the coal state he represents, West Virginia – and that he has taken steps that have benefitted his company. At key moments over the years, Mr. Manchin used his political influence to benefit the plant. He urged a state official to approve its air pollution permit, pushed fellow lawmakers to support a tax credit that helped the plant, and worked behind the scenes to facilitate a rate increase that drove up revenue for the plant — and electricity costs for West Virginians. The article is a good reminder of how politicians can profit from their office. But as the adage suggests, the problem is not what’s illegal but what’s legal. The Times offers no evidence of criminality. And because it largely repeats previously reported material this seems less like a piece of journalism that seeks to break ground than a hit job meant to kneecap an inconvenient politician. Last fall, when Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a measure that could require every California public high school student to take an “ethnic studies” course to graduate, he alluded to two studies commonly cited by advocates to justify the measure, claiming the research shows that ethnic studies courses “boost student achievement over the long run—especially among students of color.” The studies’ stunning findings included the claim that ethnic studies course causes an average increase of 1.4 GPA points, miraculously turning C students into B+ students. This detailed article challenges that. The experiment on which these conclusions are based is so muddled, and the data reported is so ambiguous, that in fact they support no conclusion, either positive or negative, about the effects of this particular ethnic studies course in these particular schools and times. Indeed, not even the lead author claims that the studies provide a basis for establishing ethnic studies mandates for all students. Read RCI’s earlier reporting on the ethnic studies debate in California. Coronavirus Investigations As much as $80 billion of taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic through the Paycheck Protection Program was siphoned off by criminals. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion COVID unemployment relief program – at least half taken by international fraudsters. This article reports: The prevalence of Covid relief fraud has been known for some time, but the enormous scope and its disturbing implications are only now becoming clear. Even if the highest estimates are inflated, the total fraud in all Covid relief funds amounts to a mind-boggling sum of taxpayer money that could rival the $579 billion in federal funds included in President Joe Biden’s massive 10-year infrastructure spending plan. This article also reports that “most of the losses are considered unrecoverable.” Other Coronavirus Investigations |
