RealClearInvestigations'
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April 6 to April 12, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Nancy Rommelmann speaks with IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler in their first in-depth interviews about their years-long pursuit of Hunter Biden's tax cheating, a case that upended their lives and careers before their ultimate vindication: Ziegler, a self-identified Democrat, had no grudge against the former vice president’s son in 2018 when he came upon Hunter’s name researching a different case involving an overseas online porn site. That led to the discovery that Hunter was writing off hookers and a sex club as business expenses and had accepted a large diamond from a Chinese executive. What should have been a slam dunk million-dollar tax prosecution was anything but. Ziegler and his superior, Shapley, were shunned, threatened, and lied to by colleagues and superiors. Shapley was told to accept a demotion or resign. Convinced the IRS and Department of Justice were stonewalling to protect a sitting president’s son, the pair went public as whistleblowers in 2023. The two were accused of partisanship, lambasted by Democratic members of Congress and the press, and had their reputations impugned by high-powered lawyers. Their fortunes have now finally turned. In mid-March, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Ziegler and Shapley would start work as senior advisers, helping to guide tax reform. In RealClearInvestigations, John Murawski reports on a struggle among academics and administrators over the University of North Carolina's new School of Civic Life and Leadership, one of the nation’s most ambitious efforts to revive free speech and traditional scholarship in academia: Though there are plenty of progressive critics of SCiLL, as the school is known, this internecine fight is among classical liberals, free speech advocates and others, and focuses on some very concrete free-market concerns: coveted civics professorships that pay up to twice as much as some humanities teaching positions at UNC. The conflict touches on a key question for similar civics initiatives at other public universities: Do you break from academe’s progressive orthodoxy by hiring like-minded professors already at the school, or do you recruit outside faculty not beholden to the status quo? The tension between these two visions came to the fore last week with the resignation of J. Christopher Clemens as university provost, amid acrimonious infighting. Longtime UNC professors are allied with him. These dissenters are at odds with SCiLL’s Dean, Jed Atkins, who has focused on recruiting outside professors. The mutual recriminations roiling SCiLL threaten to turn off students, sour donors, and scare off professors from accepting faculty positions at the prestigious project, whose fundraising potential in the conservative funding network is said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books The $4.3B to Cover Medicaid Patients Twice, RCI
Lifestyles of the Enriched and Bureaucratic , RCI
Outlays Skyrocket at USDA, VA and More, RCI
The Nearly Immortal Temporary War Tax, RCI
Entitlement Spending's Doomsday Clock, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Social Security's Dead Beneficiary Problem, Substack
Hackers Spied On U.S. Bank Regulators’ Emails, Bloomberg
Treasury: Fentanyl Traffickers Exploit Financial System, Daily Signal
Musk Appears to Break With Trump on Tariffs, New York Post
How Atlantic's Editor Got Added to White House Signal Chat, Guardian
Biden Admin Hid Report on Earliest Suspected COVID Cases, Free Beacon
In Burisma Letter, Hunter Biden Sought State Dept. Support, NYT
FBI Promotes Organizer of 'J6 Roundup', Blaze Media
Trump to Fine Illegal Aliens Who Don't Self-Deport, Just The News
AOC Flies 1st-Class to Sanders’ ‘Fight Oligarchy’ Rally, New York Post Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Between 200,000 and 350,000 migrants successfully crossed the southern border into the United States each and every month of Joe Biden’s presidency. But now, with shocking speed, this article reports, the Trump Administration has cut off that flood tide of illegal immigration. By the second full month of Donald Trump’s new term, just 8,300 had attempted a crossing, and every one of them was detained and deported – a record-breaking nadir. Todd Bensman, who has spent years writing about immigration, reports on a recent trip to Texas: The first thing I saw was a vast, trackless emptiness for miles along the Juárez side of the Rio Grande. In the same places where I had so often swum in a sea of immigrants facing Texas troops and their cutting fences and pepper-ball guns, it felt as though a peace treaty had ended a war. All that was left was the detritus of trash and clothes still on the ground and hung up in the concertina wire. Gone were the thousands of immigrants pouring off the “La Bestia death trains” in Juárez. The huge, soft-sided processing centers up Highway 54 northwest of El Paso stood mostly empty and were slated to come down. Given the historically low January and February crossing numbers, none of this came as much of a surprise. But it was a big surprise that I could not spot a single Texas trooper on the Texas side – just a few Border Patrol and army vehicles. When I asked the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) why, officials admitted that so few immigrants were crossing now that they’d quietly pulled everyone off the line in this sector for the first time in four long, expensive years, and many from the river in other sectors. A kind of “peace dividend” for Texas. Bensman reports that the Juárez-El Paso border has become such a gauntlet that ... ... wannabe immigrants who got stuck in Juárez told me the cartels have dramatically raised smuggling prices to unaffordable price points. And with the threat of deportation very real now, they dare not spend the money only to end up back at square one, broke or in debt. Or prosecuted by the Americans for illegal entry and put in prison. The cartel’s customer base has dried up. The bodies of 14 Palestinian emergency workers last seen responding to an Israeli bombardment in Gaza were found in a mass grave of sand dug by Israeli soldiers, this article reports. The investigation challenges Israel’s claim that its soldiers had believed the men were Palestinian militants and had fired on them from a distance because they seemed to be moving “suspiciously” in the direction of the troops. A Washington Post analysis of the events of that predawn morning, based on dispatcher records, witness testimony, video footage, satellite imagery and photographs of the dead, contradicts the official Israeli narrative in key regards. While the Israeli military said the soldiers shot from afar, gunfire initially came from 150 feet away or less and, later, from about 50 feet away, according to the estimates of two audio forensics experts who analyzed video of the events at The Post’s request. While the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the initial vehicle its soldiers fired on was a “Hamas police” car carrying terrorists, dispatcher records secured by The Post and interviews indicate that it was an ambulance that had been dispatched on an emergency call shortly before by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and carried a team of three paramedics who had 55 years of employment with the PRCS among them. The five other vehicles that later came under fire were clearly marked as belonging to the PRCS and Palestinian civil defense. The paramedics who fled their vehicles were mostly wearing fluorescent clothes marking them as emergency workers, video shows. While the Israeli military initially told reporters that the soldiers fired on the vehicles because they did not have their flashing-red emergency lights on, video shows that they did. The article reports that IDF has issued a statement saying it is investigating the incident. “The preliminary inquiry indicated that the troops opened fire due to a perceived threat following a previous encounter in the area,” the IDF stated. “and that six of the individuals killed in the incident were identified as Hamas terrorists.” A new report concludes that violent political rhetoric online, including calls for the murder of public figures, is being increasingly normalized, particularly on the left. A survey conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) found that 38% of respondents said it would be at least "somewhat justified" to murder Donald Trump, and 31% said the same about Elon Musk. When counting only left-leaning respondents, justification for killing Trump rose to 55% and Musk to 48%. "These are not isolated opinions," the report states. "They are part of a tightly connected belief system linked to what we call left-wing authoritarianism": The NCRI study traces the cultural shift back to the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione in December 2024. What followed, researchers say, was a viral wave of memes that turned Mangione into a folk hero. According to the study, these memes have sparked copycat behavior targeting other figures associated with wealth and conservative politics. … "What was formerly taboo culturally has become acceptable," Joel Finkelstein, the lead author of the report, told Fox News Digital. "We are seeing a clear shift – glorification, increased attempts and changing norms – all converging into what we define as ‘assassination culture.’" The NCRI study singles out BlueSky, a social media platform favored by progressive users, as a major amplifier of extremist ideation. "BlueSky was modeled as a safe alternative to Twitter for the left, but what it’s become is an extremist platform," Finkelstein said. "It functions today much like 4chan or Gab once did for far-right ideologies. These platforms are now lead indicators of violent real-world trends." Dozens of administrative law judges grant disability payments to almost everyone who appears before them, overriding Social Security staff who had determined the people were not entitled to payments, a Daily Wire analysis found: One of the Social Security Administration’s “regional chief administrative law judges, Jennifer M. Horne, who leads the San Francisco hearing office, ruled in every case she heard last year that the claimant should be granted disability payments, even though in each case, two previous examinations had found the claimant should be denied. Ronald Herman, hearing cases outside of Detroit, green lit payments in 95% of the 1,268 cases he heard. Jan Leventer, hearing cases in Queens and Detroit, approved 94% of 2,159 cases, potentially amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars. Such rulings have steered billions of dollars in payments to people who may not deserve them, adding to the impression that disability is sometimes abused as a shadow welfare program. This article reports that few judges routinely backed ineligibility determinations. Only 16 judges upheld the staff’s determination more than 80% of the time, according to 2024 data. In all, administrative law judges heard 2.2 million disability cases in 2024, and overturned the non-disabled ruling in 58% of them. In October, 26 administrative law judges, hearing 197 cases between them, ruled favorably to the disability-seeker in every single case. Most high school students recall the college application process as a grueling slog – so why would anyone go through if they have no intention of attending? That’s the question raised by a report that found that one-third of applications to California’s community colleges were fake. The answer, of course, is money: In the last 12 months, colleges reported giving more than $10 million in federal dollars to fake students and over $3 million in state money. Data from the first few months of 2025 show that colleges have already given away more than $3 million in federal aid and over $700,000 in state dollars. This article reports that many scammers are using AI to pretend they are students: Faculty say they’re exasperated from working as detectives, trying to suss out which students are real. They say scammers are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to infiltrate classes, using tools like ChatGPT to pose as students. Students say these fraudsters are taking coveted seats and preventing them from enrolling in classes they need to graduate. | 