RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
March 12 to March 18, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that at the same time the feds were trying to throw the book at Trump allies based on rumor and innuendo, they declined to use those same spying and corruption laws to investigate actual evidence of wrongdoing involving Hunter and James Biden and one of their corrupt Chinese business partners. Sperry puts this double standard in sharp relief, drawing on Department of Justice documents and federal court records:
They show the FBI busted Chi Ping “Patrick” Ho in a separate corruption case involving U.N. officials ‒ even as this influential Chinese figure "who flies around the world paying bribes” was cutting lucrative deals for then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son and brother. -
Hunter and his Uncle Jimmy got millions from Ho and a Chinese intelligence front. -
As Sperry elaborates in a sidebar, prosecutors at Ho's 2018 trial hid Hunter’s connection to the Chinese operative, redacting the wayward scion’s name from court exhibits.
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Sperry also reports the DOJ appears to be trying to silence another partner from coming forward to tell what he knows about the Bidens' Chinese connection. -
The feds' behavior stands in stark contrast to the DOJ's aggressive pursuit of alleged Foreign Agents Registration Act violations involving Trump associates in the Russiagate affair, which was cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign. -
“It’s 100% a double standard, and it’s absolutely corrupt to the core,” says a former top FBI official.
Democrats and their progressive allies are vastly expanding their unprecedented efforts begun in 2020 to use private money to influence and run public elections, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations. -
Supported by more than $1 billion, partisan groups are working with state and local boards to influence functions that have long been the domain of government -- including training election workers and designing official websites and mail-in ballots. -
The Republican Party does not have a comparable, boots-on-the-ground effort.
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The GOP has enacted numerous private-funding bans since 2020, but those haven’t proved absolute in some states. -
There's been a major shift by left-leaning nonprofits: “Increasingly they are about elections, election administration, election technology, ballot design, and all with big funding. These groups seem innocuous, but they aren’t innocuous because they are funded by one political side.” -
Many of the progressive groups are connected to Arabella Advisors, which in 2020 gave out $529 million to “defend democracy.” -
That coincided with the rise of private-public election partnerships as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated an estimated $350 million to the cause.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Biden, Trump and the Beltway Why did the Biden Administration bail out the Silicon Valley Bank just hours after it pledged it would not? This article suggests one answer: Almost all the members of the bank’s board of directors were major Democratic Party donors – and just one of them had had a career in investment banking. Tom King, 63, was appointed to the board in September after previously serving as the CEO of investment banking at Barclay's. He has had 35 years of experience in investment banking. But he is the only one on the board with a career in the financial industry, while others are a former Obama administration employee, a prolific contributor to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and even a Hillary Clinton mega-donor who prayed at a Shinto shrine when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. … When the bank fell on Friday, it touted that its board included '1 black,' '1 LGBTQ+' member and '2 veterans.' It also noted that its board is 45 percent women. But only one board member is under the age of 60 — while the oldest is 78. In a separate article, CNBC reports: [SVB] employees received their annual bonuses Friday just hours before regulators seized the failing bank, according to people with knowledge of the payments. … The size of the payouts couldn’t be determined, but SVB bonuses range from about $12,000 for associates to $140,000 for managing directors, according to Glassdoor.com. SVB was the highest-paying publicly traded bank in 2018, with employees getting an average of $250,683 for that year, according to Bloomberg. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series From the Annals of This Stinks, the company testing the air in homes near the site of the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio – CTEH - was hired by Norfolk Southern, the operator of the freight train that derailed. It was CTEH, not the Environmental Protection Agency, that designed the testing protocol for the indoor air tests. And it is CTEH, not the government, that runs the hotline residents are directed to call with concerns about odors, fumes or health problems. Local and federal officials, including the EPA, funnel the scared and sick to company representatives. Although most have reportedly been told no harmful chemicals had been found in their homes ... ... [S]everal independent experts consulted by ProPublica in collaboration with the Guardian, the air testing results did not prove their homes were truly safe. Erin Haynes, a professor of environmental health at the University of Kentucky, said the air tests were inadequate in two ways: They were not designed to detect the full range of dangerous chemicals the derailment may have unleashed, and they did not sample the air long enough to accurately capture the levels of chemicals they were testing for. As his crypto firm, FTX, was going under, Sam Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a suddenly penniless naïf whose business failed because he was in over his head. This article suggest that he was not just aware but cunning. Sam Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $2.2 billion from FTX to his personal account and $1 billion to five members of his inner circle before the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed, according to bankruptcy court filings. Bankman-Fried and five of his friends transferred $3.2 billion in total to their personal accounts as 'payments and loans' using funds primarily coming from Alameda Research, a crypto trading hedge fund affiliated with FTX, according to financial statements filed with the bankruptcy court in Delaware on Wednesday night, according to the Financial Times. … Not included in the $3.2 billion he is accused of taking are a $240 million 'luxury property in the Bahamas', 'political and charitable donations' and 'substantial transfers' to subsidiaries, according FTX's management. In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports that executives of First Republic Bank sold millions of dollars of stock before the stock plummeted amid rising concerns about the stability of such mid-sized banks: “The bank’s chief risk officer sold on March 6, according to government documents. Two days later, Silicon Valley Bank shocked the market and sent other banks into freefall. First Republic was among the worst hit.” In an effort to ensure that taxpayers are not carrying the load for elderly Americans with means, Medicare has strict wealth and income limits regarding its payments for nursing home care. As a result, this article reports, many elderly Americans have a place to live but little else because Congress has not raised their personal needs allowance in decades: Nearly two-thirds of American nursing home residents have their care paid for by Medicaid and, in exchange, all Social Security, pension and other income they would receive is instead rerouted to go toward their bill. The personal needs allowance is meant to pay for anything not provided by the home, from a phone to clothes and shoes to a birthday present for a grandchild. … Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of nursing home residents are locked in a wretched bind: Driven into poverty, forced to hand over all income and left to live on a stipend as low as $30 a month. Young nurses usually require on-the-job training and, this article reports, hospitals are increasingly trying to stick them with the cost if they try to leave their employment. Jacqui Rum said she was handed a bill for $2,000 when she quit her job at a Thousand Oaks, California, hospital: “We’re being preyed on by someone in power. We’re desperate for a job, we just got out of school, we don’t know any better,” said Rum, 38, who lives in Westlake Village, California. “I didn’t even have time to take a lunch break, my hair was falling out, the level of stress just wasn’t sustainable.” This issue is surfacing now that many nurses are seeking to leave their employers and even their profession because of stress and burnout related to COVID: The practice of requiring repayment for training programs aimed at recent nursing school graduates has become increasingly common in recent years, with some hospitals requiring nurses to pay back as much as $15,000 if they quit or are fired before their contract is up, according to more than a dozen nursing contracts reviewed by NBC News and interviews with nurses, educators, hospital administrators and labor organizers. From the Annals of Yes, Virginia, the Mainstream Really Is Leftwing, this article provides a deeply sympathetic portrait of the violent activists who have descended on the Atlanta area because they hate the police. About a year and a half ago, it reports, activists began pitching tents and building treehouses to set up shop next to the planned site of Atlanta’s new police training center. Since then, the area has become an epicenter of leftwing activism, drawing hundreds of activists from America and the Europe. Their effort to stop what they call “Cop City,” which they cast as a dystopian hub for law enforcement to practice urban warfare against poor Black residents, gained wide attention when one protester was killed by police during a gunfire exchange in January and on March 5 when more than 100 activists led a violent assault on the center’s grounds. Using language that conjures New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews’ romantic portrait of Fidel Castro during the 1950s, the article reports: In the base camp, which activists call the “living room,” a “Stop Cop City” banner depicting a pig in a blue uniform hung from two pine trees. People sat on a soft floor of pine needles, chatting, sharing cigarettes, reading books. Some gathered in circles to learn how to tie figure-eight knots or to strategize about code words and hide-outs in the event of police raid. A few steps away, volunteers worked in a makeshift kitchen stocked with propane burners, huge canisters of hot water and coffee and rows of basins for washing dishes. Vegan dinners, like jackfruit and lentil barbecue with potato salad, were hauled in on metal trays from an off-site kitchen. The movement is proudly leaderless, pulling together a broad coalition including environmentalists, anarcho-communists, socialists and Afro-pessimists in something of an activist supervillage. |
