RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 6 to March 12, 2022 Working with both the Obama-Biden administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign, Ukrainian officials intervened in the 2016 race to smear Donald Trump as a Russian stooge in a failed bet that a Democratic administration would provide better protection from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Drawing on a trove of previously unreported material, Paul Sperry in RealClearInvestigations unpacks that sweeping and systematic foreign influence operation – an episode now freighted with irony as the Russians lay bloody siege to Kiev. - The operation was run chiefly out of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, where officials worked hand-in-glove with Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American activist employed by the Clinton campaign.
- The Obama White House was deeply involved – including Eric Ciaramella, “whistleblower” in the first Trump impeachment who worked closely with Vice President Joe Biden.
- Ex-National Security Council official: “Obama’s NSC hosted Ukrainian officials and told them to stop investigating Hunter Biden and start investigating Paul Manafort.”
- Ukrainian and American operatives huddled with American journalists to spread damaging information on Trump and his advisers – including allegations of illicit Russian-tied payments that, though later proved false, forced the resignation of campaign manager Manafort.
- Sperry has pieced together the first comprehensive account, but Special Counsel John Durham may reveal more: Sources tell Sperry several Ukrainians have been interviewed in his Russiagate origins inquiry.
- Sidebar: Irregularities in Election Overseer's Handling of Chalupa and the DNC
For an example of the largely unaccountable “deep state” that many see as a central problem in Washington, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more fitting embodiment than Stefan Halper, Mark Hemingway reports in an investigative look into the FBI Trump-Russia informant. But there’s much more to Halper than Russiagate, Hemingway finds: He’s a veritable Zelig of modern American political mischief – and a bipartisan one at that. And he’s been misrepresenting his biography along the way: - As a favored son-in-law of a top CIA official, Ray Cline, Halper got a leg up in high-level machinations starting with the Nixon White House during Watergate.
- He was identified as the Reagan campaign’s point man in “Debategate,” an alleged effort to spy on President Jimmy Carter before the second 1980 presidential debate (which featured Ronald Reagan’s line, “There you go again”).
- Halper was a key GOP banker during the effort to surreptitiously fund Nicaragua’s pro-American contra rebels in the 1980s.
- In the run-up to his subterfuge in the Trump-Russia caper, Halper was paid more than $1 million for dubious research by a Pentagon office suspected of really being an intelligence cutout to pay informants.
- Halper appears to have consistently inflated his biography. There is no evidence he was class president at Stanford University in 1967, nor a Fulbright scholar, as he claimed.
- Halper would not comment when RCI went to his northern Virginia home to seek him out in person –after which his lawyer threatened legal action.
With the "defund the police" movement reeling amid a surge of violent crime – and President Biden’s vow just last week to “fund the police” instead – surely cops are heading back to school duty too? Guess again, writes Vince Bielski in RealClearInvestigations: Bringing back “school resource officers” isn’t a slam dunk in places where students of color had been arrested at higher rates than whites. And that has some parents fuming. Focusing on Des Moines, Bielski reports: - Iowa’s capital city, half of whose students are black or Latino, has not followed schools from Maryland to California heeding pleas to restore SROs.
- Instead, Des Moines is rolling out a new community-engagement safety plan in lieu of cops.
- After George Floyd’s murder, two students advised by a Black Liberation Movement activist won the district’s ouster of the cops using arrest data and student testimonials about being traumatized by SROs.
- That was despite parents (66%) and students (53%) supporting the cops’ presence in schools.
- But even a successful and well-liked school officer notes the challenge in assessing the effectiveness of SROs: There’s no way to count the incidents that did not happen because of her presence.
- “We really couldn’t answer … with confidence that SROs were or weren’t making schools safer,” said one official.
- Some parents are certain of one thing now: Kids are in peril. Black mom: “The fighting is on a whole different level. I’m scared to send my kids to school every single day.”
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Information has become so politicized – with almost every fact now interpreted through a partisan lens – that it can be hard to know what to believe. This article draws on an Inspector General report from the Department of Homeland Security to paint DHS in a harsh light regarding the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. In the days before, it reports, analysts had watched as maps of the Capitol were circulated online amid talk of hanging Democrats, murdering protesters, and dying in a blaze of glory. Homeland Security officials warned each other to be vigilant going to and from work as the “Stop the Steal” rally to protest the results of the 2020 election approached. Expecting violence, some planned to stay home when the day finally came. Despite the measures they planned to take for their own safety, however, and the abundant evidence that January 6 was a powder keg waiting to blow, the federal office responsible for warning the rest of the government about dangerous events decided to keep its concerns to itself. Another interpretation: DHS officials didn’t communicate its concerns because it did not feel the need to. The alarming signs it saw weren’t all that abundant. The fact that the rioters did not have lethal weapons, that they didn’t attempt to hang anybody, may in some ways vindicate their response, so that the effort to paint that day as beyond the pale is just politics. In a separate report, undercover video shot by Project Veritas shows New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg saying that the “overreaction” to Jan. 6 “was “in some places so over the top.” Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway K Street Was Fine Taking Rubles – Until it Couldn't Politico
Jan. 6 Defendant Jailed Illegally, Over 80 Days RedState
Biden Hire Oversaw Program Accused of Anti-Semitism Free Beacon
Lack of Evidence: How Manhattan DA Case vs. Trump Failed New York Times
Chinese Firms Tied to Hunter Biden Could Bail Out Putin Free Beacon
Bid to Disbar 100+ Trump Vote Lawyers Axios
Biden Pursuing Deal Despite Iranian Plot to Kill Bolton Examiner
Did Mark Meadows Commit Voter Fraud? New Yorker
Trump-Alfa Bank Researcher Fought Durham Probe Federalist Other Noteworthy Articles and Series More than 7,600 officers in big cities have engaged in repeat alleged misconduct leading to multiple payouts to resolve lawsuits and claims of wrongdoing. The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims. The Post found that more than 1,200 officers in the departments surveyed had been the subject of at least five payments. More than 200 had 10 or more. The repetition is the hidden cost of alleged misconduct: Officers whose conduct was at issue in more than one payment accounted for more than $1.5 billion, or nearly half of the money spent by the departments to resolve allegations, The Post found. In some cities, officers repeatedly named in misconduct claims accounted for an even larger share. For example, in Chicago, officers who were subject to more than one paid claim accounted for more than $380 million of the nearly $528 million in payments. Scrambling to respond to a wave of violence and escapes from other juvenile facilities, Louisiana officials quietly opened a high-security lockup last summer to regain control of the most troubled teens in their care. Instead, this article reports, they created a powder keg, according to dozens of interviews, photos, video footage, hundreds of pages of incident reports, emergency response logs, emails and education records. The article illustrates some of the issues through this opening anecdote, about lawyers and a judge who gathered in an East Baton Rouge juvenile courtroom last October for an update on a teenager detained after joyriding in a stolen car. The teen appeared on a screen, alongside a caseworker who stunned everyone by describing conditions in the lockup where he was held: The 15-year-old was being kept in round-the-clock solitary confinement. He was getting no education, in violation of state and federal law, nor was he getting court-ordered substance abuse counseling, according to two defense attorneys present. And no one in the room that day — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the defense lawyers – appeared to have heard of the facility where Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice was holding him: the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville. The debacle unfolded after an anonymous tip: A man was selling illegal fireworks out of an alley in South L.A. It ended with a massive explosion created by the police that destroyed much of the surrounding neighborhood, damaging 35 properties, injuring 17 people and displacing dozens more residents – many of whom have never returned. This detailed article provides a chronological account of the horror from getting the tip last June 30 at 7:54 a.m. to detonation of a containment vessel at 7:37 p.m. A bomb technician’s concern that the vessel was overfilled was dismissed; it held 40 pounds of homemade explosives when it was rated to hold only 33. At 7:37 p.m., the supervising detective shouted, “Fire in the hole!” three times. [Resident Jose] Becerra and his wife [Claudia Silva] heard the shout and turned toward the window. The supervisor counted down – “Three. Two. One.” – and then pressed the detonation button. The next thing Becerra saw, he said, was “the sun” – a burst of light as the containment vessel blew apart and the blast it was meant to control shot out in all directions, flipping cars and cracking foundations, smashing windows and injuring residents. Glass shards littered Silva’s face. So much journalism has become wishful thinking, descriptions of the world as reporters would like it to be. Consider the overheated predictions of a meatless future – one in which steaks, bacon, chicken nuggets, and other foods made from dead animals will be supplanted by plant-based imitations of meat dishes and lab-grown meats made from animal cells. A new report notes that fake meat manufacturers admit the sector's growth has "stalled." Sales of refrigerated plant-based meat grew 59% in 2019 and 75% in 2020, but in 2021 grew only 1%. Dunkin' Donuts has halted sales of the Beyond Sausage vegetarian breakfast sandwich at most locations. The bleary-eyed guy in the commercial has more "time to make the donuts." Coronavirus Investigations COVID-19 accelerated a dangerous years-long trend of maternity wards shuttering across the country. It could make birth even more dangerous in the U.S., which already sees far more deaths per capita among infants and pregnant women than comparably wealthy countries. This article reports that during the first year of the pandemic, the number of maternal deaths in the United States rose sharply. The losses are concentrated primarily in rural areas and communities of Black and Hispanic Americans, who are already less likely to have easy access to all kinds of health care services, including obstetrics. Before the recent closures, more than half of the rural counties in the United States already didn’t have a nearby hospital where babies could be delivered. … But the pandemic looms over each of these closures. In public hearings, hospitals have pointed to the shortage of doctors, nurses, and health care workers they experienced during Covid-19 to justify their decisions. Sometimes, they have temporarily suspended services because of pandemic-related absences, only to later make the closure permanent. Pandemic relief funding that has helped stabilize hospitals’ finances is also starting to run out. Other Coronavirus Investigations How COVID-19 Ravaged Ecuador's Largest City New Yorker
How Did 1 Million Pandemic Deaths Become Normalized? Atlantic |
