RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
August 14 to August 20, 2022 The FBI division probing former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s probe into the Hillary Clinton campaign-driven Russia "collusion" canard, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations. Sperry reports: The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington – not Miami, as has been widely reported. Although the former head of Russiagate’s “Crossfire Hurricane,” Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm. In addition, a linchpin of Crossfire's spy-warrant deceptions – Brian Auten – is still involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the probe of presidential son Hunter Biden’s laptop. FBI whistleblowers have alleged Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden by labeling it Russian “disinformation.” Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has asked the FBI whether Auten is involved in the probe of Trump records seized at Mar-a-Lago. An examination of the top bureau officials involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid reveals other connections between them and FBI officials who played key roles in advancing the Russiagate hoax. News consumers expecting just the facts from the media are unlikely to hear about the conflicts of interest posed by journalists nationwide belonging to the powerful leftwing Communications Workers of America, James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations. That's because their employers – at the New York Times, the AP and the Washington Post as well as many TV and online outlets – keep mum about their journalists’ union conflicts, despite the profession’s values of transparency. Varney reports: The CWA – with some 16,000 editors and reporters in its NewsGuild component – is not only one of the nation’s largest unions, with about 700,000 members, but one of the most politically active and partisan. Nearly 99% of the $14.9 million the CWA has funneled to politicians since 2020 has supported Democrats, says OpenSecrets.com. Union leadership recently urged its journalist members to support abortion rights while denouncing the “radical” Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade. But connections between journalists and the interests of their union are rarely if ever disclosed in relevant news stories, including ones about union organizing at Amazon or Starbucks. In such stories, the Washington Post duly notes that its owner, Jeff Bezos, is also the owner of Amazon. But it makes no mention of Post journalists’ vested interest in organized labor, supported by their union dues. The issue of transparency has special resonance with upcoming midterm elections expected to reveal a sharply divided America – with the Communications Workers of America firmly planted on one side of the divide. Biden, Trump and the Beltway Sources: FBI Sought to Recover Trump-Russia Files Newsweek
FBI Trump Warrant an Open-Ended License National Review
Much Inexplicable in Mystery of the Jan. 6 Pipe Bombs Revolver
How Hunter Biden Aided Communist Chinese Influencers in U.S. Free Beacon
White House Climate Official Sanctioned in Research Scandal Axios Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Some doctors are accusing the American Academy of Pediatrics of pushing "harmful" drugs on transgender-identifying youngsters. Documents leaked by a whistleblower expose how rank-and-file AAP members across the U.S. are slamming the academy's "shoddy" drugs-and-hormones-first approach to trans-identifying teens while trying to silence internal criticism by blocking moves for a crucial policy review. In the comments, AAP members said the academy was “endorsing great harm,” that its approach was based on “scant and shoddy” evidence and that doling out drugs and hormones was “unsafe and unsustainable”: Before promulgating gender-affirming care, with all of its ethical implications (irreversible bodily changes, sterility, etc.) … don't we want to be sure this is the best path?' wrote one anxious pediatrician. Another member said there was 'no good long-term outcome data' for those who undergo the arduous physical process of transitioning, and pointed to the 37,000 members of an online forum for regretful 'de-transitioners', as they are known. 'What is most needed right now is better research to make sure we do the right thing for our patients,' wrote the pediatrician, who, like others, we are not identifying, as such views have led to online harassment in the past. The Daily Mail reports that other commentors criticized the AAP for allegedly stonewalling Resolution 27, in which five members called for a "rigorous systematic review" of the academy's 2018 gender-affirming policy, saying growing numbers of transitioners regret their treatment and seek reversals. Hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, mainly men, have gone missing during the five months of war in Ukraine. It is believed that they have been detained by Russian troops or their proxies, held in basements, police stations and camps in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine, and often end up incarcerated in Russia. This article tells the story of some of the few who have made it back out, including a 36-year-old mechanic named Vasiliy who said he had been picked up by chance while walking down the street: … His hands were bound with tape and he was shoved into a bus as men in balaclavas burst into a nearby house firing weapons, forcing four men to the ground. … Detainees were hauled off individually for interrogation, which involved heavy beatings, including some to the head, and electrical shocks. “It is as if your whole body is pricked with needles,” Vasiliy said. Human rights officials have recorded similar accounts of electrical shocks being used. “We were given food and drink once a day,” Vasiliy said. “Sometimes we could go without food for two or three days. There was no toilet; they gave us bottles to use. We slept together on car tires. No sanitary standards to speak of.” Vasiliy said his Russian interrogators had been obsessed with rooting out members of Nazi groups – the main reason given by Moscow for its military operation against Ukraine. When he told his interrogators that he’d never seen such people, he said they became enraged: “‘You’re lying,’” they would insist. “‘You have Nazis here. Whole groups have been created. All your people have tattoos.’” Since the 1980s, as Somalia has slogged through phases of civil war, inter-clan violence, Islamist terror, famine and political strife, many residents escaped to America or Europe. But some of them believe they endured another tragedy as they watched their Westernized offspring stray from their religion and a culture in which parents traditionally have the last word until their children marry. In response, this article reports, hundreds of parents whose children broke the law, became involved with drugs or alcohol, or who might be gay, have sent their kids to ... ... so-called cultural-rehabilitation centers in East Africa [which] are little better than private prisons where hundreds of young people raised in the U.S. and Europe are stripped of their passports and beaten into mending their ways. In some centers, residents spend their days and nights in chains. … In Minnesota, home to 79,000 Somali immigrants, the threat is so pervasive that young Somalis warn each other darkly to run for it if their parents announce a family vacation to Dubai or a visit to a dying grandmother in the old country. This article reports that the American government has been involved in raids of these “rehab” centers and secured the release of many Somali-American children. Before becoming the C.I.A. chief, William Burns led an influential D.C. think tank while it employed undisclosed Chinese Communist Party members as well as individuals with Chinese government ties, giving them access to top-level American thinking and leaders. This article reports: During Burns’ tenure as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from February 2015 to November 2021, the think tank employed at least 20 policy experts whom the DCNF has identified as CCP members. These CCP members worked at both Carnegie’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and Carnegie-Tsinghua — the Beijing center Burns’ predecessor, Jessica Mathews, launched in 2010 in cooperation with Tsinghua University. Yet, expert profiles on Carnegie’s website don’t disclose these individuals’ ties to the CCP. In July 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that the CCP seeks to “influence our policymakers” and “manipulate our public opinion” by exploiting the “openness” of our society. Less than 7 percent of China’s population are members of their party, which demands absolute loyalty. Burns has said that the majority of Carnegie-employed CCP members were brought onboard before his tenure, though this article reports that at least were four added while he was at the helm. In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that in 2015 Hunter Biden’s business partners worked for a group his father’s administration identified last month as Chinese Communist Party front group that seeks to "co-opt" state leaders as part of Beijing’s sprawling foreign influence operation. Emails from Hunter’s laptop show his colleagues ... ... lobbied the State Department to publicly approve a partnership between the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and State Legislative Leaders Foundation, a nonprofit group that hosts forums for state legislators and corporate leaders. Hunter’s team portrayed the initiative as a boon for U.S.-Chinese relations. Coronavirus Investigations As state and local governments lock-downed large parts of the economy, forcing millions out of work, the federal government printed about $5 trillion in relief money which it rushed out the door. This article is just the latest evidence that fraudsters were prime beneficiaries of this sloppy largesse. In the midst of the pandemic the government gave unemployment benefits to the incarcerated, the imaginary and the dead. It sent money to “farms” that turned out to be front yards. It paid people who were on the government’s “Do Not Pay List.” It gave loans to 342 people who said their name was “N/A.” Now, prosecutors are trying to catch up. This article reports that there are currently 500 people working on pandemic-fraud cases across the offices of 21 inspectors general, plus investigators from the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Postal Inspection Service and the Internal Revenue Service. Agents in the Labor Department’s inspector general’s office have 39,000 investigations going. While it is likely that many swindlers will never be caught it is all but certain that elected officials will never be held responsible for allowing so much taxpayer money to be stolen. In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that Nancy Bass Wyden, the multimillionaire owner of New York's Strand bookstore and wife of Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, received $2.7 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans between 2020 and 2021 and nonetheless went on to lay off 180 employees. Small businesses were eligible for the federally forgiven loans on the condition that they used a majority of the funds to keep employees on the payroll. In October 2020, Bass Wyden told CBS News that the Strand would not rehire many of those employees and that the store would "have to give back part of the loan due to the forgiveness rules." But as of September of last year, the federal government had forgiven both loans. |
