RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week April 28 to May 4, 2024 In an in-depth report for RealClearInvestigations, Aaron Maté reframes Washington's powerful role in Ukraine as less a mission to protect democracy than an epic case of meddling by the Obama and Biden administrations – one that has caused political upheaval in both countries. Maté reports: In backing a decade-long proxy war that continues to ravage Ukraine, Washington has shaped successive Ukrainian governments, all while expanding its presence via the CIA and NATO. Pivotal were the roles of CIA Director John Brennan and State Department official Victoria Nuland in guiding Ukraine's 2014 Maidan protest movement, which ousted a government favoring closer ties to Russia. Nuland sided with Ukraine's ascendant ultra-nationalist forces, some of whom openly sported Nazi insignia. Presented with the option of a moderate closer to Europe, Nuland infamously said: “Fuck the EU.” Later, Brennan slipped into Kyiv for secret meetings with top officials. In a reflection of American influence, at least five post-coup cabinet posts in national security, defense, and law enforcement went to members of far-right Ukrainian factions -- or "fascists," as Foreign Policy magazine described them. The transformation of Ukraine into an American client state soon infected U.S. domestic politics -- notably when Joe Biden forced the ouster of the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating corruption at an energy giant paying Biden’s son Hunter $1 million a year for a no-show post. Maté plumbs overlooked aspects of the public record while drawing on the testimony of Andrii Telizhenko, an ex-Ukrainian diplomat who worked with U.S. officials to promote regime change in Ukraine and now regrets it. In RealClearInvestigations, Julie Kelly reports that top Biden officials worked with the National Archives at an early stage to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material: The revelation, from documents unsealed by Judge Aileen Cannon with earlier redactions removed, challenges President Biden's public statements about what he knew and when he knew it regarding the case against his political rival. The active participation of a top White House lawyer and other high-ranking White House officials throws into doubt whether Biden was forthright when he told “60 Minutes” he wasn’t involved in the investigation. The new disclosures indicate the Department of Justice was in touch with the National Archives and Records Administration during much of 2021, undermining the department’s claims that it became involved in the matter only after the Archives sent a criminal referral on February 9, 2022. Within weeks after Trump left office, employees with Biden’s Office of Records Management and the Archives coordinated to demand the return of records of Trump’s transition team, which included former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The Trump case sparked revelations that Biden had also retained classified documents – in Biden’s case for decades. Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that Biden should not be prosecuted for these violations. Waste of the Day by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Frisco Nonprofit Charity Began at Home, RCI Lady Liberty's Costly, Shoddy Bodyguard, RCI Things to Do in Denver When Profligate, RCI Drug Intel Agency Gorged Before Dying, RCI Up to $521 Billion Lost to Fraud Annually, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Jim Biden Tied to Business With Qatari Officials, Politico White House Admits 148 Biden Flubs in Remarks This Year, Daily Caller Feds Warn Employers to Use Preferred Pronouns, Just the News Biden Admin Justifies Tax Hike Based on Race, Daily Caller Dem Fundraising Takes Cut of Anti-Israel Donations, Free Beacon IRS Plans to Increase Audits of Wealthy by 50%, CNN CIA Contractor: Top Intel Staff Kept Trump in Dark, James O'Keefe, X Other Noteworthy Articles and Series There have been at least 194 allegations that law enforcement personnel, mostly policemen, have groomed, sexually abused or engaged in inappropriate behavior with minors through the Explorers, a youth program created by the Boy Scouts of America. The vast majority of those affected since 1974 were teenage girls – some as young as 13, this article reports: The officers accused of abusing teenagers spanned the ranks, from patrolmen to police chiefs. Some were department veterans cited in news articles for their community work. A handful had served their agencies for barely a year. And some were married men with families of their own. Many cases led to criminal charges. Some officers went to prison, while others received probation or weren’t required to register as sex offenders. A few departments allowed officers to keep their jobs after a reprimand or short suspension. The Marshall Project’s analysis found at least 14 departments, among 111 agencies, that had a history of repeated allegations. In a separate article, NPR reports that one surprising group of Americans does not enjoy legal workplace protections for harassment on the job: the some 30,000 people who work for the federal judiciary. That branch of government, this article reports, is largely exempt from the civil rights law that protects workers and job applicants from discrimination. There has been a rapid uptick in attacks against GPS signals and wider satellite navigation systems. This article reports that the attacks can jam signals, essentially forcing them offline, or spoof the signals, making aircraft and ships appear at false locations on maps: Tens of thousands of planes flying in the [Baltic] region have reported problems with their navigation systems in recent months amid widespread jamming attacks, which can make GPS inoperable. As the attacks have grown, Russia has increasingly been blamed, with open-source researchers tracking the source to Russian regions such as Kaliningrad. In one instance, signals were disrupted for 47 hours continuously. On Monday, marking one of the most serious incidents yet, airline Finnair canceled its flights to Tartu, Estonia, for a month, after GPS interference forced two of its planes to abort landings at the airport and turn around. This article reports that the jamming in the Baltic region is just the tip of the iceberg. In recent years, there has been a rapid uptick in attacks against GPS signals and wider satellite navigation systems, known as GNSS, including those of Europe, China, and Russia. War-zone areas around Ukraine and the Middle East have also seen sharp rises in GPS disruptions, including signal blocking meant to disrupt airborne attacks. “It cannot be ruled out that this jamming is a form of hybrid warfare with the aim of creating uncertainty and unrest,” Jimmie Adamsson, the chief of public affairs for the Swedish Navy, tells Wired. The city of Gretna, Louisiana, helps pay its bills by hitting car owners with multiple violations, hefty fines and extra fees, this article reports. Many of those charges in Gretna are for nonmoving violations such as an expired license plate or vehicle inspection sticker: And if a defendant misses a payment and doesn’t come to court to explain why, the court often adds a contempt charge, with an additional $150 fine. About half of Gretna’s cases over a three-year period included contempt charges. To investigate this issue, reporters obtained data for seven other municipalities in southeastern Louisiana: We calculated the average fines and fees for all cases in each town. Gretna had the highest average amount levied: $457 per case. We found this was 67% higher than the average of all the other municipalities’ average per case, which was $273. We also calculated the number of violations per case, not including contempt charges; again, Gretna was the highest, with 2.4 violations per case, compared with an average of 1.4 across the other municipalities. Hunger and starvation are spreading across Sudan, as the war that erupted 13 months ago between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) shows no sign of abating. There is so little food in some areas that some people are eating dirt, Reuters reports:. Agriculture has been ravaged as farmers have had their harvested crops stolen by the RSF and fled their lands due to the violence. Hunger, not just fighting, is now driving displacement as people leave home in search of food. Malaria and other diseases are spreading among the displaced. Key aid hubs have been looted by the RSF and its allied militias. And international aid arriving in Sudan is being blocked by the military from reaching people in areas where starvation has set in. “Sudan’s war has created the world’s largest hunger crisis,” said Anette Hoffmann, author of a report on the food emergency in Sudan by the Netherlands-based Clingendael think tank. “We will likely see a famine that we haven’t seen in decades.” More than 100 nonconsensual videos of Navy personnel stationed in Guam were uploaded to the Pornhub website. Many of the videos – which included audio – appeared to depict various U.S. military members masturbating in bathroom stalls to pornographic materials viewed on electronic devices, recently unsealed court documents reveal: The court documents say that the videos were secretly shot from either above, below or through holes in bathroom stalls, and several of the videos "were titled with the rank and last name of the depicted victim, such as '[U.S. NAVY RANK] [LAST NAME].'" … Investigators say that the videos also appeared to have been shot in the men's restroom of the Liberty Center aboard Naval Base Guam and "aboard United States Navy vessels." The court document says that Pornhub took down the videos shortly after being contacted by the Navy. Dennis Falaschi, a gregarious 77-year-old local irrigation official in the San Joaquin Valley, is accused of masterminding the theft of more than $25 million worth of water out of a federal canal over the course of two decades and selling it to farmers and other local water districts. Although he seems prepared to accept a plea deal, this article reports, his indictment has sparked angry divisions among farmers in a state where prolonged bouts of drought have made stolen water an indelible part of California lore: Some farmers who relied on Falaschi and his irrigation district were outraged – at the government. They see him as the Robin Hood of irrigation: Any alleged sins would have been committed with the noble intention of making sure desperate farmers got the water they needed to grow the food that feeds the nation. Others were furious. San Joaquin Valley farmers are already fighting stricter irrigation limits as the state looks to ensure healthy water flows for wildlife and curb groundwater pumping that is causing portions of the valley to sink. The idea that a water official may have been stealing supplies would only make it more difficult for farmers to secure the water they needed in the years ahead. |