RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 4 to June 10, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that a trusted aide to Joe and Hunter Biden and a key witness in the former vice president’s classified documents probe was also caught up in a documents scandal during Bill Clinton’s presidency -- in the infamous Chinagate affair. Biden gatekeeper Kathy S. Chung was part of a team sanctioned for withholding and even destroying key documents in the federal case that sought sensitive records from a central figure in the Chinagate fundraising investigation of the late 1990s. Chung has been interviewed by federal prosecutors and congressional investigators in the current inquiry into whether Vice President Biden unlawfully handled top secret materials in early 2017, when he tasked Chung with removing boxes containing classified documents. Noting that Chung came into Biden’s orbit through working with the president’s son, Hunter, during the 1990s, congressional investigators want to know if the Biden family dealings in China have anything to do with the stockpiling of classified documents. They note that the retention of White House papers took place during the 14-month period in 2017-2018 when the Chinese were wiring almost $6 million in payments to Hunter and his uncle Jimmy without providing any known legitimate services. House GOP probers see a distinction between the Biden case and the document-handling probes of Donald Trump and Mike Pence. They suspect the Biden probe could mushroom into a counterespionage case involving China and national security. In RealClearInvestigations, Aaron Maté points out a major omission of John Durham’s final Russiagate report: It fails to address the Hillary Clinton campaign's role in the foundational allegation of Russian interference in the 2016 election by hacking Democratic party servers and releasing the material through WikiLeaks to help elect Donald Trump. Durham’s report primarily faults the FBI for opening the Trump-Russia collusion investigation on baseless grounds and relying on Clinton-funded material, the Steele dossier, to pursue it. But Durham ignored the Clinton team’s role in generating an equally important allegation: that the Russians hacked the Democratic Party. Durham punted despite unearthing new evidence that the Clinton campaign stonewalled a compliant FBI’s requests for critical data, and that two key Clinton associates who were integral to the Russian hacking claim appear to have perjured themselves before Congress. Maté has pieced together these overlooked revelations through court documents connected to Durham’s probe. When they appeared before a House panel in 2017, Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann (later acquitted of perjury on an unrelated charge) and Shawn Henry of Clinton-hired cyber-contractor CrowdStrike claimed that the FBI did not try to conduct its own independent, onsite investigation of the DNC servers. But the pair’s claims conflicted with those of FBI officials, including James Comey, who have said that they requested access but were denied. Henry and Sussmann’s accounts are not only at direct odds with the FBI, but with their own emails, which Durham obtained. Maté writes that just as the FBI used the Clinton-funded Steele dossier in their hunt for collusion, the FBI relied on Clinton-paid CrowdStrike for forensics and redacted reports as it kept the bureau from looking at the DNC servers firsthand. Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books 37 'High Risk' Areas Risking $37 Billion, RCI
50 States' $1.2 Trillion in Debt, RCI
NYC Turnstile Jumping Costs $690M, RCI
Forest Service Lumbers Into Terrible Deal, RCI
$7M Oopsie in Navy Retiree Payments, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Trump Indictment Hints Spy Act Distinction Favoring Biden, National Review
Joe Biden Allegedly Was Paid $5M by Burisma Exec: FBI Doc, Fox
How the Bidens Got Rich, National Review
Democrat-Led Jan. 6 Panel May Have Doctored Evidence, Just The News
Biden Administration: Suspending Minority Truants Is Racist, Free Beacon Other Noteworthy Articles Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by the Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found. Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as “little slut for you.” A Meta spokesman told the Journal that the company actively seeks to remove such users, taking down 490,000 accounts for violating its child safety policies in January alone. With household debt at an estimated $17 trillion, it is no surprise that millions of Americans have bad credit – making it hard and expensive for them to get loans. In response, this article reports, an estimated 60,000 credit-repair businesses are now operating independently in the United States, promising to help Americans drowning in their own debt. The size of the industry, this article reports, has also meant opportunity for scams and bad actors. They include: The pastor who, with family and friends, solicited credit-repair clients online, only to rack up charges on credit cards in their names and run up millions in debts. The credit-repair network that functioned as a pyramid scheme by recruiting nearly half a million agents, mostly on social media, with come-ons like, “Who needs negative items removed from their credit report permanently???” The “credit washing” frauds in which credit-repair influencers lodge false claims of identity theft with the police and, often without the knowledge of their clients, submit those police reports as documentation with dispute letters to produce deletions. One large operation that drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission had built a network of more than 400,000 credit-repair sales agents across the country: The agents recruited new agents and clients through social media and telemarketing. “If you have 400-675 credit score and want a 700-800 credit score, David can LEGALLY erase negative items ... repos, foreclosures, late payments,” one post declared in typical fashion. Another: “My credit score went up 140 points, from a 530 to a 670, in my first 30 days, allowing me to purchase a new home!” Few agents made much of a living, according to an F.T.C. analysis — the average weekly income was just over $2.25, or $117.36 per year. While maintaining that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, commit suicide in his Manhattan jail cell, this article reports that “fundamental failings at the Bureau of Prisons ‒ including severe staffing shortages and employees cutting corners ‒ contributed to Epstein’s death.” Based on more than 4,000 pages of documents obtained from the federal Bureau of Prisons under the Freedom of Information Act, the AP reports that Epstein had been agitated and unable to sleep in the weeks before his death, and had been put on suicide watch for a time. The night before his death, he reportedly excused himself from a meeting with his lawyers to make a telephone call to his family. According to a memo from a unit manager, Epstein told a jail employee that he was calling his mother, who’d been dead for 15 years at that point. An internal memo, undated but sent after Epstein’s death, attributed problems at the jail to “seriously reduced staffing levels, improper or lack of training, and follow up and oversight.” The memo also detailed steps the Bureau of Prisons has taken to remedy lapses Epstein’s suicide exposed, including requiring supervisors to review surveillance video to ensure officers made required cell checks. … The workers tasked with guarding Epstein the night he killed himself, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, were charged with lying on prison records to make it seem as though they had made their required checks before Epstein was found lifeless. Epstein’s cellmate did not return after a court hearing the day before, and prison officials failed to pair another prisoner with him, leaving him alone. Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, this article reports, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces. The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year Western allies had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage. That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombing that bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning. … The European intelligence made clear that the would-be attackers were not rogue operatives. All those involved reported directly to Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s highest-ranking military officer, who was put in charge so that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, wouldn’t know about the operation, the intelligence report said. The Post reports that classified intelligence reporting was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The Washington Post obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends. Across the U.S., violence against teachers has ratcheted up since the widespread return to in-person learning in 2021, and in some areas the problem is worse than it was pre-pandemic. The data are limited, because many states don’t specifically track teacher assaults, or use the same methodology to make the data comparable. From September through May of the current school year, the number of assault-related workers’ compensation claims filed at some 2,000 schools in different regions of the U.S. topped 1,350, a five-year high, according to claims and risk-management services firm Gallagher Bassett. The average cost of those claims has increased 26% to around $6,700 compared with the same period in 2018-19. “We are witnessing the highest levels of frequency, severity and complexity for these kinds of assault claims when compared to the last four complete school calendar years,” said Greg McKenna, public-sector practice leader at Gallagher Bassett. In a separate article on education, Jonathan Haidt writes in the Atlantic that many educators see “clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance. [They told him] “keeping students off of their devices during class was a constant struggle. Getting students’ attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible. Drama, conflict, bullying, and scandal played out continually during the school day on platforms to which the staff had no access.” In a separate article on signs of mayhem, the Daily Mail reports that shoplifting cost American retailers almost $100 billion in 2022, according to the National Retail Federation. Scot Glenn, Vice President of Asset Protection at Home Depot, said, “About 90% of our organized retail crime cases involve some type of online platform. Opioids and fentanyl continue to drive the need for fast cash.” | 