RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
February 13 to February 19, 2022 Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he targeted unwitting Americans in a shady mail-order scheme involving a grandfather clock – until authorities caught up with him, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations. Sperry reports: - That episode from the 1980's and others in Joffe’s checkered past raise questions about how the South African-born computer expert managed to pass an FBI personal background check and go on to become a key player in the Russiagate scandal.
- He has not been charged with any crime, but in legal filings, Special Counsel John Durham has suggested that Joffe (identified as “Tech Executive 1”) was at the center of an effort to monitor President Trump’s communications and then share the information with Hillary Clinton associates.
- In the grandfather clock affair, lucky "winners" were scammed into sending $69.19 in shipping fees to redeem their supposedly five-foot mahogany prize.
- But the clock was really just a table-top version made of particle board and plastic and worth less than $10 – some assembly required.
- Joffe settled several state lawsuits by agreeing to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars, mainly to elderly victims.
- Part of the answer as to why Joffe’s past remained buried may lie in the way he appears to have reinvented himself during the 1990s as a cyber-security expert and, ironically, champion of consumers battling abusive direct-marketers and spammers.
Encouraged by a Mark Zuckerberg-linked funding initiative viewed as pivotal in the 2020 election, 14 states carried by Joe Biden have appealed to the President for billions of dollars more to secure elections for the next decade. But as Steve Miller discovers for RealClearInvestigations, most of them have spent less than half their shares of previous hundreds of millions in federal funding. Miller reports: - It’s not exactly clear why Democrats believe an exponential increase in federal funding is required for future elections when money previously allocated proved more than sufficient in the past.
- Sitting in state coffers are hundreds of millions of dollars still left from two funding rounds of $380 million (2018) and $425 million (2020) under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) – the law passed after chaotic "hanging chad" voting in Florida in 2000.
- The states’ appeal to the president is connected to the effort in the pandemic-challenged 2020 election, when Facebook founder Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, contributed $350 million of the roughly $400 million in private funds sent to election offices nationwide.
- Some conservative analysts contend that these so-called “Zuck Bucks” were strategic in their placement, allowing Biden to win.
- The 14 states, some of them swing states, now seek $20 billion in federal money over the next 10 years.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Durham's Probe Puts Top Biden Aide Sullivan in Harsh Light Just the News
Trump's Accountant Retracts Earlier Work New York Times
Hunter Biden Tax Probe: Mom of His Love Child Testifies Daily Mail
Trump's Very Profitable Post-Presidency New York Times
Judge Says Jan. 6 Plea Deals Embolden Riot Apologists Politico
Democrat 'Brand' Is Toxic in Rural America Associated Press Other Noteworthy Articles and Series This article puts its thumb on the scale as it reports that school board members across the country “have endured a rash of terroristic threats and hostile messages ignited by roiling controversies over policies” regarding covid, transgender students and racism. Reuters says it based this conclusion through contacts and interviews with 33 board members across 15 states and a review of threatening and harassing messages obtained from the officials or through public records requests. The news organization found more than 220 such messages in this sampling of districts. However, about half of those messages were sent to one person – Brenda Sheridan, former chair of the Loudoun County, Virginia, school board, whose liberal policies inspired a backlash so fierce it became national news. The messages Sheridan received are disturbing: In June, she received a threat saying: “Brenda, I am going to gut you like the fat f‑‑‑ing pig you are when I find you.” The message, like the letter to her home, also threatened her children. Reuters agreed not to publish any personal details about Sheridan’s family members, at her request, because of her continuing safety concerns. And Reuters did find other examples of threats. Ultimately, however, its heavy reliance of one white-hot county to skew its portrait of America’s schools suggests the article is more a work of political activism than reportage. Reuters gives this away when it notes: The hostility faced by school officials mirrors the campaign of fear documented by Reuters against U.S. election workers in response to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of voting fraud. That Reuters report led to a total of two arrests. Journalists used to rely on whistleblowers – often heroic figures who put themselves at risk to expose wrongdoing. News outlets, in turn, put aside their concerns about aiding and abetting lawbreaking because the information was in the public interest. Nowadays prestigious news outlets are increasingly in bed with anonymous partisan thieves who steal information in order attack their enemies. ProPublica’s series based on private tax returns stolen from the FBI is one recent example. So too is this Washington Post article, which uses information stolen from a charity website to describe Americans who have donated money in support of Canadian truckers protesting vaccine mandates. The Post’s willingness to work with thieves is especially questionable because the article reveals nothing surprising, much less in the public interest: The richer an American community was, the more likely residents there were to donate, and the biggest number of contributions often came from communities where registered Republicans made up solid majorities, according to the review of more than 55,000 U.S.-based donations through the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo. Federal, state, even local, it often doesn’t matter – government officials routinely give the same response to requests for “public” information: file a form that might take weeks, months or even years to fill. In fact, the Freedom of Information Act and other “disclosure” laws have been weaponized by many government officials as a way to prevent transparency. This article reports on the Miami Herald’s effort to see department of child welfare records about a toddler named Rashid who died from multiple injuries in his parents’ home. The paper requested the records 11 days after the boy’s death. Following a cursory response, it filed a court motion for the records. But agency “insisted – then and for a year thereafter – that they were still investigating whether Rashid’s death was the result of abuse or neglect.” Luckily for the paper it had the time and resources to pursue the request and a judge finally ordered the state agency to release the documents, which show it had determined the boy had died of abuse long ago. The case is emblematic of a pattern in which Florida increasingly makes news organizations and the public go to court to secure access to documents that fall under the state’s public records law – one of the strongest in the nation. With DCF, the stakes could not be higher: the agency is charged with protecting children from abuse and neglect. Its records can show whether the decisions of investigators, case workers and judges left children in harm’s way. Coronavirus Investigations Sometimes unsurprising, "dog-bites-man" stories are big news. Consider this article, which reports that after the federal government decided to quickly shovel $6 trillion in covid relief out the door, massive fraud ensued. At the Small Business Administration, for example, ... investigators have questioned nearly every aspect of SBA’s spending, flagging billions of dollars in suspect loans and grants, overpayments to those who should not have received them and in some cases outright fraud. One effort meant to help businesses in economic distress may even be rife with identity theft: Watchdogs said they had received more than 845,000 applications for aid that are now suspected of having come from individuals using stolen identities — some of which were funded anyway. The article reports that it may be difficult to review all the spending because -- surprise! -- the feds are not very good at tracking spending. Nearly two years later, however, the stimulus data is voluminous yet vexing – for the public and the government alike. The spending portal does not offer a real-time, detailed view as to the way cities, states, schools, hospitals and others actually have deployed broad swaths of the cash they received. In education, for example, federal records show more than $81 billion set aside for school districts in response to the pandemic. Yet the information is 90 days old in some cases and offers no insight as to what those communities actually did once they obtained the grants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is at once a scientific and a political outfit: Its director is appointed by the president and the CDC’s guidance often balances public health and welfare with other priorities of the executive branch. This article reports that CDC has failed to strike the right balance, pushing a series of scientific results “plagued with classic errors and biases” in order to promote masks mandates, lockdowns and other policies favored by the political class. One example: In November 2020, a CDC study sought to prove that mask mandates slowed the spread of the coronavirus. The study found that counties in Kansas which implemented mask mandates saw COVID case rates start to fall … while counties that did not saw rates continue to climb. The data scientist Youyang Gu immediately noted that locales with more rapid rise would be more likely to implement a mandate, and thus one would expect cases to fall more in such locations independent of masking, as people’s behavior naturally changes when risk escalates. Gu zoomed out on the same data and considered a longer horizon, and the results were enlightening: It appeared as if all counties did the same whether they masked or not. The CDC had merely shown a tiny favorable section … but the subsequent pandemic waves dwarf their results. In short, the CDC’s study was not capable of proving anything and was highly misleading, but it served the policy goal of encouraging cloth mask mandates. In a separate article in City Journal, computer scientist Leif Rasmussen says his examination of National Science Foundation grants suggests it is not the excellence of a researcher’s work but “his work’s political palatability [that] determines whether he is hired, funded, promoted, or granted tenure.” Other Coronavirus Investigations How ‘Follow the Science’ Became a Political Weapon Washington Post
Covid-19's Next Crisis: The Cancers We Didn’t Catch Early Vox | 
